I have been doing a little research lately on game engines. Game engines are those things that make all those great looking video games work. It’s the core, like a car engine (crazy, right?!?). I won’t go down that particular rabbit hole any further, but it got me thinking about old games and how you could theoretically upgrade those engines. These upgraded engines could really modernize gameplay and graphical fidelity. I started with a game series/engine that defined the FPS genre, Doom (Doom II to put a finer point on it). Here are my findings.
Here is a list of all the resources I used:
The game can be bought on the cheap on Steam and works on any modern Windows install.
High resolution texture packs really make a huge difference.
Two of the most popular Doom engines.
I was surprised at what I found. Doom II has no reason being able to look this good. I mean fully realized 3D models and true polygonal environments. If it can be done on a game that came out in 1994 think about how much can be done with games now. Yeesh. I made a video comparing the differences. There are so many modifications I could of made, but these seemed to look the best to me to bring it as close to a modern shooter as possible. Doom originally didn’t allow for free-looking even though the environments had levels. The new engines do allow for that to happen, but I turned it off for the video because I wanted the comparison to reflect visual changes not gameplay changes.
I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of installing and configuring everything because that wasn’t necessarily the point of this post, but if anyone is interested and can’t get it working let me know in the comments, Facebook, or Twitter and I would be more than willing to help out.