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Doom isn’t 3d, it’s raycasted 2.5d. It’s a completely separate type of rendering that has nothing in common with real 3d.
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First of all, DOOM isn’t raycasted. Second of all it’s 3D in the sense that all objects have xyz coordinates and can move in that space. You can miss the monsters by having a rocket go over their heads. The main limitation is that the levels couldn’t have more than one ‘room’ per vertical space.

The rendering can still be implemented as polygons (making it true 3D rendering) whilst still maintaining the same level-based limitations, as we can see with DOOM 64.

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Yes, Doom renders walls in a way that is broadly similar to to how contemporary GPUs work. Doom sorts the walls in view space via the BSP tree, transforms them to screen space, breaks them into non-overlapping spans of screen columns, and then fills each column’s pixels with the wall’s textures. The floor and the sky are not geometry.
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Quake released the day before Super Mario 64.

Those 48 hours were likely the peak of video gaming. Certainly they have yet to be equaled.

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Idk man PS2 era was insane too
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Of course this depends on your definition of "equaled", but GTA5 is the single highest grossing entertainment product of all time. I'd say it dwarfs all other games ever made to date by a long shot.
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>but GTA5 is the single highest grossing entertainment product of all time

More Money == Better Than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbU4VRs2rro

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In numbers sold alone sure, but that’s like saying FIFA is a better game than Mario 64 because they release a new one every year and… yeah… no.
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Most people would call DOOM a 3D game. Its popularity spelt the end of 2D games which is why people bring it up.

It doesn't matter that it's raycast with billboard sprites, it was first-person-perspective with pixel-perfect lit texture-mapped wall and floor rendering with lifts and stairs. 3D enough.

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As a Marathon fanatic, it killed me that the game didn’t get more love. I recall watching a Doom game and someone shot a rocket at a player above them. The path of the rocket was bizarre and being baffled that this was ‘good’.

It was a fun era to live through as the progress was so quick.

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I only really got into Marathon several years ago and played Doom/Doom 2 not too long afterwards. IMHO there is a serious case to be made that Marathon is superior on every axis (music/sound excepted) but I absolutely understand why Doom had greater mass appeal. They're both a lot of fun but for me Marathon 2 is tops (and there are a LOT of homages to the series in later Bungie games - the 343 Guilty Spark escort level in Halo: CE is basically a redux of the alien ship crawl waiting-for-doors bullet hell level from Durandal).

I still have yet to finish Duke 3D. Next time I'm in between jobs I'll hit it up.

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> the alien ship crawl waiting-for-doors bullet hell level from Durandal)

"If I Had A Rocket Launcher, I'd Make Someone Pay" [1]?

But yes - my impression was always that the Doom games mostly focused on having cool levels, with plot as an afterthought. Marathon gave more of a sense of the levels having been designed around a plot.

[1]: https://marathon.bungie.org/spoiler/m2/14.shtml

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> But yes - my impression was always that the Doom games mostly focused on having cool levels, with plot as an afterthought.

My understanding is that yes, and that was part of Tom Hall parting ways; based on the alpha versions and the 'Doom Bible' it was intended to be a more story driven experience, closer to Marathon.

That said, The engine could support such at least with some enhancements. Strife is still one of my favorite games if that era thanks to the 'living world' feel, even if it has some nasty ways to get in a hostile overall world state or dead end.

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Interesting, that is the chorus from Bruce Cockburns “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”
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Marathon having voice chat in 1994 was mind-blowing
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doom's rendering is 2.5d (but is still fully accurate to 3d rendering, if the pitch of the camera is fixed to 0), but doom's _logic_ is fully 3d (the only reason enemies were infinitely tall was to save on cpu speed (and different to enemies, projectiles always had full 3d collision), it was just a few lines of code change to make them have real height for player-enemy collisions, which was done in heretic, another game using the same engine as doom)
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Hey, Mario 64 isn't "real 3d". It is just a projection of 3d coordinates to 2d triangles on a 2d screen.
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> It is just a projection of 3d coordinates to 2d triangles on a 2d screen.

IMO It depends on how you view it. You can render the game stereoscopically and see a different view in each eye... then I would call that "real 3d".

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> You can render the game stereoscopically and see a different view in each eye... then I would call that "real 3d".

That’s exactly what the Virtual Boy does.

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If we're going that hard, I would argue anything that's not viewed stereoscopically by definition cannot be 3D.
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Yeah I meant less that 3D games were invented out of nowhere when the PS1 or N64 released. It's more that a large majority of developers, especially ones on console, were thrust from 2D to 3D development.
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The original demo they did for folks was apparently crazy clunky too and they adjusted a ton after
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