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First-person shooter engine

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A diagram showing the history of FPS engines

A first-person shooter engine simulates a 3D graphics environment for use in a first-person shooter computer or video game. First-person refers to the view where the players see the world from the eyes of their characters. Shooter refers to games which revolve primarily around killing other entities in the game world, usually NPC characters or other players.

Timeline

1970s and 1980s: Early FPS graphics engines

Widely varying requirements and characteristics, but with game rendering point intended to be from the first-person perspective and with the need to shoot things mostly made up using Vector graphics engines.

Early 1990s: Wireframes to 3D Worlds and Textures

At the time, regarded as Doom clones, now referred to as 2.5D, as it is not full 3D. Planar worlds (rectangular grid in Wolfenstein 3D, sector-based plane levels in Doom) with sprite objects. Average Video Hardware requirements: CPU-powered software rendering. The Build engine used sprites for many things, but had arbitrary 3D-level geometry.

Mid-1990s: The rise of 3D Models and hardware acceleration

For the first time, game engines recreated true 3D worlds with arbitrary level geometry. Instead of sprites the engines used simply textured (single-pass texturing, no lighting details) polygon objects. Quake used fewer animated sprites, following the trend to 3D rather than 2D game objects, while Quake II was one of the first games to take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics.

Average Video Hardware requirements: first 3D-accelerators (Voodoo, Voodoo 2, Riva TNT. Introduced later in this generation were more powerful DirectX 6.0 chipsets such as Voodoo3 RIVA TNT2 and Rage 128. Many games still supported software rendering, as a powerful CPU was able to somewhat compensate for an older video card.

Late-1990s: 32-bit color becomes the standard, and introduction of hardware T&L

This period saw the introduction of the GeForce 256, the first GPU with hardware T&L, which performance-wise trumped the 3dfx Voodoo3, Matrox G400, and S3 Savage4 and led to the demise or withdrawal of these companies from the 3D gaming market. One year later, only ATI with their comparable Radeon 7200 series would remain in direct competition with Nvidia.

While all games of this period supported 16-bit color, many were adopting 32-bit color as well. Soon, many benchmark sites began touting 32-bit as a standard. An especially big milestone in first person shooter engines was the Unreal Engine, which has been used in a large number of FPS games since its release.

Early 2000s: Increasing detail, outdoor environments, and rag-doll physics

New graphics hardware provided new capabilities, allowing new engines to add various new effects, such as particle effects, fog, coloured lighting, as well as increase texture and polygon detail. Many games featured large outdoor environments, vehicles, rag-doll physics.

Average Video Hardware requirements: a GPU with hardware T&L such as the DirectX 7.0 GeForce 2 or Radeon 7200 was typically required. The next-generation GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 were recommended due to their more efficient architecture, though their DirectX 8.0 vertex and pixel shaders were of little use. A handful of games still supported DirectX 6.0 chipsets such as RIVA TNT2 and Rage 128, and software rendering (with an integrated Intel GMA), though this was apparent that even a powerful CPU could not compensate for the lack of hardware T&L.

Mid 2000s: Lighting and Pixel Shaders, Physics, and DirectX 9

The maps may feature seamlessly integrated indoor/outdoor environments. Some, or all of the pixel shader-based textures, bump mapping, vertex shaders used for animations, lighting and shadowing technologies are common. Shader technologies include HLSL, Cg, and GLSL.

This resulted in the obsolescence of DirectX 7.0 graphics chips such as the widespread GeForce 2 and Radeon 7200, as well as DirectX 6.0 chipsets such as RIVA TNT2 and Rage 128, and software rendering (with an integrated Intel GMA). Until this generation of games, a powerful CPU was able to somewhat compensate for an older video card. Average Video Hardware requirements: minimum was a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500, strongly recommended was the GeForce FX, Radeon 9700 (or other cards with Pixel shader 2.x support). The Radeon 9700 demonstrated that anti-aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic filtering (AF) could be fully usable options, even in the newest and most demanding titles at the time, and resulted in the widespread acceptance of AA and AF as standard features. AA and AF had been supported by many earlier graphics chips prior to this but carried a heavy performance hit and so most gamers opted not to enable these features.

Later 2000s: DX10 and the approach to Photorealism

Developers of this era of 3D engines often tout their increasingly photorealistic quality. The first games using Unreal Engine 3 were released in November 2006, and the first games to use CryEngine 2 were released in 2007. These games will include realistic shader-based materials with predefined physics, environments with procedural and vertex shader-based objects (vegetation, debris, human-made objects such as books or tools), procedural animation, cinematographic effects (depth of field, motion blur, etc.), and unified lighting models with soft shadowing. Average Video Hardware requirements: GeForce 7 and Radeon X1xxx (for Shader Model 3 games), Geforce 8 and Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx (for Shader Model 4 games).

Another interesting prospective is the Sauerbraten FPS game and engine. Although it is still in early development (as a continuation of Cube), the simple engine framework and in-game map editing make the game stand out.

References

See also

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