Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines
Lithtech
What started off as a joint collaboration between Monolith and Microsoft, the Lithtech engine, at one time called DirectEngine, was one part software renderer and one part DirectX renderer. This didn't last long, however, as Monolith parted ways with Microsoft and bought back the rights to its engine, renaming it Lithtech.
Early on, Lithtech could best be described as the poor man's game engine. While reviewing Atlantis: The Lost Empire in the August 2001 issue of Maximum PC, we noted that "The first clue that you're in for a slapdash experience comes from the Lithtech logo on the box. With the notable exception of No One Lives Forever, Lithtech is the engine of choice for cheap, quick games. It says to the customer, 'This game wasn't worth the effort of paying for Quake or Unreal."
We also noted that in the right hads, "Lithtech can be a competent, if not great, engine." Though development would continue on Lithtech over the years, NOLF would remain the high point of the engine's life up until it was overhauled and again renamed, this time to Jupiter Extended, or Jupiter EX. Technically the fourth version of Lithtech, Jupiter EX supports DirectX 9, a new lighting model, Havok physics, and new content creation tools, and was used in both F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2.
Fun Fact: Atlantis: The Lost Empire received a 1 verdict in our August, 2001 issue.
Date Released: 1998
Notable Games: Aliens vs Predator 2, Blood II: The Chosen, F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2, The Matrix Online, Might and Magix IX, No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0
Outcast
A popular voxel engine, Outcast eschewed hardware acceleration in favor of an all software-based model. This meant that gamers didn't need to invest in a 3D videocard to play games based on the Outcast engine, including Outcast itself, making it better suited for adventure and puzzle games. This also meant gamers would need a fast processor, which, at the time, included Pentium III CPUs chugging along at 500MHz or faster.
Because Outcast used a voxel-based engine, it was adept at rendering scenery from greater distances than a polygon-based engine. But Outcast also included a few other tricks up its sleeve, such as bloom and lens flares, bump mapping, anti-aliasing, dynamic shadowing, an advanced particle system, skeletal animation, and suport for both first and third person perspectives.
Date Released: 1999
Notable Games: Outcast
Quake III / id Tech 3
Like AMD versus Intel and Nvidia versus ATI, the game engine wars being fought a decade ago largely consisted of Quake III (now known as id Tech 3) versus Unreal.
As the name implies, Quake III took its cue from Quake II, but it was much more than just a refinement of id Software's previous game engine. The newer engine marked a departure from skeletal animation and instead made use of per-vertex animation. Without diving into the technical details of both, the switch paved the way for smoother animation.
Quake III also put a heavier emphasis on shadows, as well as introduced shaders, curved surfaces, 32-bit color, and advanced (for its time) networking capabilities. All these effects required a 3D videocard with full OpenGL support and at least 300MHz of computing power, whether it be an Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-2 or Athlon series.
Date Released: 1999
Notable Games: American McGee's Alice, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
GeoMod
These days we've come to expect a certain level of destructible environments, but for many gamers, the first memory of wreaking havoc on virtual surroundings came from playing Red Faction, well before the recent push towards realistic in-game physics. John Slagel, Red Faction's lead programmer, developed the Geodmod engine, which stands for Geometry Modification.
As the name implies, the GeoMod engine changes the geometry of the world in response to what's going on. GeoMod does this through a complete real-time subtractive boolean from the world's geometry. As Red Faction's lead designer Alan Lawrence explained to Gamespot, "When a rocket hits a wall, we take this shape and basically subtract that shape from the world. So we boolean with that 'bit' -- we call them GeoMod bits -- and that takes a chunk out of the world."
Date Released: 2001
Notable Games: Red Faction, Red Faction II