Re: Did EGA Save PC Gaming?

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

On Sat, 27 Jul 2024 08:10:39 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:
>

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 06:06:08 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>
wrote:

On 7/24/2024 7:28 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Wed, 24 Jul 2024 11:33:30 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>

>

I can't seem to find what the first IBM PC game was that used FPS
though.  I'm sure you'll either know or find it though :)

>

It depends on how you define "FPS".

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>

I was thinking more very popular mainstream FPSs with true mouse aim*.
I'm not really sure what was big first on the ibm after Doom (no mouse
aim at the time at least.)

>
Well, as said, both "Doom" and (I checked) "Wolfenstein 3D" let you
play with the keyboard and mouse, although it wasn't quite the same as
modern WASD+mouselook (you used the mouse to turn/aim, but no up/down
because, well, there really wasn't any need).

>
I think you mean, because there wasn't actually any 3d, just the
illusion, so there was no up and dawn even possible.

>
Looking up and down was possible, and a number of games of that era
used it (amongst them, "Heretic" and "Dark Forces"). You'd end up with
unrealistic warping when you did it. "Doom", however, used a variety
of tricks that made looking up and down unnecessary.

I was referring to DOOM specifically, there was no 3d at all, just the
illusion.

I still remember moving the mouse one pixel at a time until the shotgun
would shoot "up" at the imp instead of straight forward at the wall.

BLAM wall, BLAM wall, BLAM wall, BLAM Imp, <imp moves>  BLAM wall, BLAM
wall, BLAM Imp, repeat.

You could not just aim at the Imp, cause there was no up or down on the
mouse, just side to side, because it wasn't really 3d and didn't even
fake it well like Duke Nukem 3d did.

Whether or not "Doom" was 3D really falls into a question of
semantics. It didn't use 3D polygons to generate its worlds, and
lacked room-over-room capability. But it did have a Z-axis component
to the game. It allowed you to jump and fly, projectiles could zip
above you, monsters could move below (well, in some versions of the
engine like "Hexen"). It's techniques (2d raycasting) are less
sophisticated than creating a map out of polygons, but in the end it's
still a form of 3D. It's why those sorts of games are commonly
referred to as "2.5D", because saying it's not 3D is as inaccurate as
insisting it is.

I would not count what happened in later iterations of the DOOM engine
used in other games as having anything to do with DOOM itself, which was
in no way 3d, it was 2d and looked 3d, but you could not aim at all at
things that were not on your level until the game did it for you when
you hit the right pixel.

One other point, although not a FPS per se, X-Wing and Tie Fighter both
had joystick or mouse controls, around 1993-ish.

>
True, but those games owed a lot to flight-simulators and were
considered a subset of that genre. Flight simulators were commonly
played with joysticks.

And as I said both X-Wing and Tie Fighter supported flying with mouse,
since anyone who wasn't a flight sim geek, didn't have a joystick.

Also the mechwarrior games, similar time period.

>
Mechwarrior falls in-between flight-sims and FPS games.

But still had mouse aiming.

FPS's were not the be all and end all of gaming at the time.

The mouse had a huge impact on gaming, far more then FPS's, far more
then EGA.

Xocyll