Doom engine

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Level structure of the Doom engine

The Doom Engine (or " id Tech 1" ) is a game engine from id Software , which was mainly developed by John Carmack . It was programmed for the computer game Doom , published in 1993 .

description

Like the older Wolfenstein 3D engine, also developed by id Software, the Doom engine is based on raycasting , but it offers significant technical advances. While in the Wolfenstein engine all rooms in the floor plan were limited to right angles , floor plans in the Doom engine could now also contain all kinds of oblique angles. Another major innovation was that the Doom engine could implement any room heights, while in the previous engine all rooms were the same height and were on the same horizontal plane. With these innovations, a complex and varied level design could now be implemented in the Doom engine , which, for example, could also display the change between exterior and interior spaces.

Although developed specifically for 3D shooters , the Doom engine is not yet a full 3D engine, similar to the build engine . In the first versions, the player was not able to look up and down. Opponents, weapons and other objects were still represented by two-dimensional graphics, so-called sprites . A major restriction was that no rooms could be laid on top of each other, walls could only be made vertical and floors only horizontal.

Originally developed for NeXT computers, the engine was ported a short time later for the release of Doom to DOS and later also for other game consoles and operating systems .

The Doom source code was released for non-commercial use in 1997 and republished under the GNU General Public License in 1999. This resulted in a large number of new source ports with which Doom can be used on originally unsupported operating systems or which in some cases significantly expand the functionality of the engine.

Games based on the Doom engine