The Engine

[TigerQuoll]

#9255

I’ve always been impressed by the Ultima Underworld engine – it came out a month before Wolfenstein 3D, yet had a number of advanced features even Doom didn’t have – angled floors, swinging doors and fully 3D objects come to mind.
Well, I was playing Tomb Raider II yesterday, and realised how similar, on a surface level, the UW engine is to the Tomb Raider engine.
They are both grid based (TR hides this very carefully, but if you pay attention all walls are at right angles), have angled floors, some 3D in-game objects and some sprite-based objects.

Not really sure what my point is, but just thought it would be fun to discuss.

[edit]Of course, I’m pretty sure that UW uses ray casting, and I highly doubt that is the technology used in TR…[/edit]

[watchful]

#9256

UW seems to hide its grid well, perhaps there are triangular/diagonal walls they drop on the grid?

Despite the small view-port it is visually impressive for the time. Though even with the fan patch that modernizes controls this game reminds me why I hated RPGs. Making maps, awkward fighting, and short draw distance (even with a torch) all make it feel too much like work. Playing with a friend would probably help, yet most of my friends had even less patience for PC gaming than I did.

All that said, Tomb Raider’s laggy and unforgiving controls also put me off from it too. In that case I now understand they meant TR’s controls to fit the grid. At least UW’s movement feels less locked-in.

[TigerQuoll]

#9257

Yeah, UW has 45 degree walls as well. I don’t think it has arbitrary angles, like in Doom. But agreed, they hide it well.
I’m a bit weird in that tedious, cumbersome and awkward controls don’t bother me – in fact, I often find I enjoy them when I master them.

[Pix]

#9259

The automap does make things a whole lot easier in this than other RPG’s back then. It wasn’t the first automap but was by far the best implemented I’ve seen at this time. I don’t think I’d want to have played this if I was mapping by hand.

I do love all the extra’s that were implemented into the UW engine, physics, flying, jumping, swimming (with screen wobble, etc. They managed to put bridges in to add slightly to the 3D illusion of the tiles. It felt streets ahead of everything else at the time. Pity my PC wasn’t really fast enough to cope. I was playing this with most of the textures turned off the first time around.

[jefklak]

#9261

Here’s some more info about how tiles/3D rendering is interleaved from one of the original devs: http://www.peroxide.dk/underworld.shtml

[TigerQuoll]

#9263

Oooh, that’s fascinating, jeflak.
I was admittedly a bit suss about the renderer being raycasting when I noticed there was some kind of perspective correction when looking up and down (although walls in peripheral vision seem to get a bit distorted)

[fastwinstondoom]

#9279

From what I’ve heard this game ran really poorly on anything except a 486 when it came out. I can’t really speak to that because I first played it on a pentium some 4-5 years later, but if Pix had to play with textures turned off that sounds like confirmation. Not really surprising honestly, even if the textures are basic this feels so much more modern than Wolf3D for instance.

[TigerQuoll]

#9289

I’m playing on a 386DX-33. I have all the textures on, and while the framerate isn’t fantastic it’s certainly playable.
I think, with all the resources of the internet these days, I’ve got the bios, config.sys and autoexec.bat tuned very nicely. Also I have a Tseng Labs graphics card and a reasonable amount of cache, so I guess that helps.
I was shocked during Heretic month when I actually got that game running on this rig and it wasn’t a complete slideshow!

Interesting to note, I remember when I was a kid seeing an ad for UW in a magazine with the art of the barbarian walking down the stairs (the same one that’s in your avatar, fastwinstondoom!). My thought at the time was the artwork must have been misleading – there’s no way that game would have proper 3D environments like that!
If only I had known…

[fastwinstondoom]

#9293

Very interesting to hear that it runs that well on period correct hardware, Tigerquoll…but also that yours is probably tuned abit beyond what many(most?) users were capable of back then.

And yes, that artwork has lived rent free in my head since the 90’s. Just glorious stuff, so evocative of the experience I think.