The Best Modern 2.5D Engine - GZDoom or EDuke32?

[Gez]

ROTT is technically the Wolf 3D engine, and it does feature a sort of makeshift solution to have height. I've seen Wolf3D mods with various approaches to bringing in elevation, too. (The Wolf3D modding scene is very different from the Doom modding scene as generally each mod gets its own engine fork... You don't have a separation between engines and mods like we have here.)

[Herr Dethnout]

40 minutes ago, jmpt16 said:

 

No GZDoom, no Eduke, what's the best 2.5D engine then? (inb4 Edge)

 

The Blessed Engine

[Dweller Dark]

I'd have to go with GZDoom considering it's the target of several mods, game development, and is capable of running most BUILD games and Doom-derived games. The latter is especially rare, since a lot of other sourceports only support Doom or partially support Heretic/Hexen, but GZDoom can run all of them and RAZE can run virtually any BUILD game that isn't Ion Fury or AWOL.

[KillPixel]

I'd really to make something with gzdoom

[lucius]

3 hours ago, Gez said:

Quake is not a "2.5D engine", though. It's fully 3D. Same for Descent, or Terminator Future Shock/SkyNET.

 

For competition in the 2.5D category, I'd say... Dark Forces/Outlaw. It's got the same basic design as Build (portal-based), but with the fun addition of a full 3D polygon renderer that is added on top (quite literally) to allow to add some simple 3D models to a scene. The mouse bots and the Moldy Crow use it. Its modern "port" would be @lucius's Force Engine.

 

Honorable mention include the Raven/STEAM engine (no modern ports), the Wolf 3D engine (ECWolf I guess) and... I can't really think of another at the moment.

The Jedi Engine (the engine that powers Dark Forces and Outlaws) is interesting because it supported most of the things that Build did, especially if you count the additions made in Outlaws. And often the new features, like "Room over Room" were implemented in a more seamless fashion (rather than multiple passes). Add 3D model support from the beginning with pretty decent sorting with walls (generally better than the original oriented sprites in DN3D, in my opinion), with animation support (using the Vue format) and a PLANAR texture mode, which implements the same texture scheme as the sector floors and ceilings, as well as various other modes such as affine texturing, Gouraud shading, etc.

 

That said, for modern use, it will be very difficult to beat GZDoom - most of the advantages of Build and Jedi have been surpassed. Though I think TFE (The Force Engine) will have some advantages over EDuke32 for modern mods when using the GPU Renderer, such as much higher limits (millions of sectors and walls, etc.) - and will get slopes, Room over Room, colored lighting, better surface overlays, etc. from Outlaws. The downside is that the minimum requirements for GPU rendering are higher, OpenGL 3.3+ or equivalent hardware - since a lot of the geometry setup, 3D clipping, and such have been moved over to the GPU to save per-frame bandwidth. This requires the sector and wall data to exist in GPU memory, the draw data being sent per-frame is pretty lean.

Edited November 14, 2022 by lucius

[HalfLife9000]

I think that GZDoom is the better source port

[HalfLife9000]

3 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

 

The Blessed Engine

whatever made Super Noah's Ark 3d

[HalfLife9000]

3 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

 

The Blessed Engine

oops. I'm dumb. I forgot about The Sky May Be

[TasAcri]

6 hours ago, jmpt16 said:

So GZDoom gets use quite a lot for 2.5D styled FPSes, but Eduke only got used once (AFAIK) for a standalone commercial game.

I personally think EDuke is the better engine, at least for the inherent advantages Build Engine has over the Doom Engine, but I can't deny the ease of use GZDoom has.

Raze handles Duke Nukem 3D just as well as Eduke and it supports more build games like Blood and Shadow Warrior at the same time.

 

Raze is based on GZDoom.

[Shepardus]

21 minutes ago, TasAcri said:

Raze handles Duke Nukem 3D just as well as Eduke and it supports more build games like Blood and Shadow Warrior at the same time.

 

Raze is based on GZDoom.

Raze is also based on EDuke, as that's one of the sources for its game modules.

 

This is irrelevant anyway, as Raze is not GZDoom, it just uses GZDoom tech. It shouldn't be used to argue that GZDoom runs Build Engine games, because it doesn't.

[Kinsie]

I think the biggest point of comparison that everyone has forgotten about is editing tools. GZDoom, and indeed all Doom ports, has some pretty wonderful and user-friendly tooling for developing new content in the form of the extended Doom Builder family tree. Over on the BUILD side, all the level editors are still directly inherited from the original MS-DOS BUILD.EXE with all the UI issues and eccentricities that implies. And let's not get into the whole weird tile system compared to Just Throwing A PNG File In...