What intrigued me about "Dungeons of Daggorath" is the graphics themselves. While primitive by today's standards, I'm sure the "vector-like" graphics were pushing the state-of-the-art for its day! I say this because I can't think of another CRPG game of the time period that utilized 3D-computed shape tables to display the graphics.
It may have been done before (most likely on the Apple II), but 3D shape tables of "Dungeons of Daggorath" seem to predate polygon-based first person games, or even other shape-table games such as "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom," or even "Elite."
To call these graphics "3D shape tables" is a stretch, too. They are simply predefined 2D vector shapes with no 3D engine behind them. The Apple II had drawing routines for this built into the operating system and could be called from BASIC - as the original version of Ultima 1 was mostly a BASIC program it made drawing the monsters easy.
Scaling the shapes to bigger or smaller sizes was no problem - it's a built in feature, too.
Elite on the other hand had a full vector graphics 3D engine with hidden-line removal (for display solid and not transparent bodies) but it came out 1984 and was written in 6502 assembly language. Conversion for the more popular computers came out a year later.
The iD games you mentioned are using a raycasting-engine and came out at least 10 years after DoD (Wolfenstein 3D = 1992 and Doom = 1993).
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Real-time, first-person dungeon crawling seems to be quite an innovation. Add the adrenaline-pumping "heartbeat" sound effects, and it sounds like you have an immersive winner of a game for it's time!
U1 was AFAIK turn-based (never played it) and didn't have the heartbeat.
Another CRPG that used vector graphics was "Questron" from SSI (1984 Apple II, Atari and C64 versions shortly after that). http://www.mobygames.com/game/questron
As there were legal problems (Richard Garriott aka Lord British sued or threatened to sue SSI because of the similaritied to his Ultima franchise) the game got delayed until the royalties/license fee were sorted out so I don't know exactly when it was being developed. It's probably safe to say that it was "heavily inspired" by Ultima 1.
After SSI cleared the legalities with Garriott it pumped out several RPGs with similar tile-graphics ("Wizard's Crown" 1985, "The Eternal Dagger" 1987, "Shard of Spring" 1986, "Demon's Winter" 1988) before starting the AD&D games with "Pools of Radiance" in 1988 - but none of them used vector graphics for dungeons, AFAIK.
There are other graphically interesting RPGs (or RPG-adventure-hybrids) like for example "Shadowkeep" by Trillium (1984) with full color illustrations like a graphics adventure. I don't know if the graphics were simply loaded from disk or drawn on the fly, though. Instead of a dungeon the game features a single "evil tower" to "cast down an evil demon" who helds a wizard captive.
A similar game is "Realms of Darkness" from SSI (1987) which drew static pictures from picture definition files using the Graphics Magician toolkit - often used for graphics adventures as it was royalties-free. This saved lots of disk space as it used much less memory than a pre-rendered graphics page. This is the logical conclusion to the 2D vector shapes used in the earlier games.
What intrigued me about "Dungeons of Daggorath" is the graphics themselves. While primitive by today's standards, I'm sure the "vector-like" graphics were pushing the state-of-the-art for its day! I say this because I can't think of another CRPG game of the time period that utilized 3D-computed shape tables to display the graphics.
It may have been done before (most likely on the Apple II), but 3D shape tables of "Dungeons of Daggorath" seem to predate polygon-based first person games, or even other shape-table games such as "Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom," or even "Elite."
Ultima 1 (1980/1981 original Apple II version) indeed had this a year before DoD (1982).
http://www.mobygames.com/game/ultima
To call these graphics "3D shape tables" is a stretch, too. They are simply predefined 2D vector shapes with no 3D engine behind them. The Apple II had drawing routines for this built into the operating system and could be called from BASIC - as the original version of Ultima 1 was mostly a BASIC program it made drawing the monsters easy.
Scaling the shapes to bigger or smaller sizes was no problem - it's a built in feature, too.
Elite on the other hand had a full vector graphics 3D engine with hidden-line removal (for display solid and not transparent bodies) but it came out 1984 and was written in 6502 assembly language. Conversion for the more popular computers came out a year later.
The iD games you mentioned are using a raycasting-engine and came out at least 10 years after DoD (Wolfenstein 3D = 1992 and Doom = 1993).
Real-time, first-person dungeon crawling seems to be quite an innovation. Add the adrenaline-pumping "heartbeat" sound effects, and it sounds like you have an immersive winner of a game for it's time!
U1 was AFAIK turn-based (never played it) and didn't have the heartbeat.
Another CRPG that used vector graphics was "Questron" from SSI (1984 Apple II, Atari and C64 versions shortly after that).
http://www.mobygames.com/game/questron
As there were legal problems (Richard Garriott aka Lord British sued or threatened to sue SSI because of the similaritied to his Ultima franchise) the game got delayed until the royalties/license fee were sorted out so I don't know exactly when it was being developed. It's probably safe to say that it was "heavily inspired" by Ultima 1.
After SSI cleared the legalities with Garriott it pumped out several RPGs with similar tile-graphics ("Wizard's Crown" 1985, "The Eternal Dagger" 1987, "Shard of Spring" 1986, "Demon's Winter" 1988) before starting the AD&D games with "Pools of Radiance" in 1988 - but none of them used vector graphics for dungeons, AFAIK.
There are other graphically interesting RPGs (or RPG-adventure-hybrids) like for example "Shadowkeep" by Trillium (1984) with full color illustrations like a graphics adventure. I don't know if the graphics were simply loaded from disk or drawn on the fly, though. Instead of a dungeon the game features a single "evil tower" to "cast down an evil demon" who helds a wizard captive.
A similar game is "Realms of Darkness" from SSI (1987) which drew static pictures from picture definition files using the Graphics Magician toolkit - often used for graphics adventures as it was royalties-free. This saved lots of disk space as it used much less memory than a pre-rendered graphics page. This is the logical conclusion to the 2D vector shapes used in the earlier games.
take care,
Calibrator
take care,
Calibrator