Does anyone else feel like Build games are by design worse than Doom/Quake?

[Rudolph]

5 minutes ago, D4NUK1 said:

That would be Raze ongoing.

Oh, right! I have completely forgotten about it.

 

I blame my overall preference for Doom for not having played much Duke Nukem 3D lately. :P

[LexiMax]

Graf is right, but I always like to bring up a specific example of how different Doom and BUILD are, and the most obvious difference is how each game figures out what it can and can't draw.

 

Doom uses prebuilt NODES lump containing a BSP tree to figure out what the player can see from a given view point.  It's very academic, and more importantly, fast.  On the other hand, BUILD doesn't use any sort of precalculated BSP and instead draws by brute force - it assumes that the sector the player is currently standing in is visible, paints it, and floods outward from that sector until the scene has no more unpainted pixels.

 

The incomparable Fabien Sanglard has done a compare and contrast to the two approaches.

• https://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php
• https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php

Just this difference alone has several deep ramifications on what you can do with the engine.  Because BUILD didn't use a precalculated BSP tree, walls and sectors could move freely without the sort of spinning plates routine that you have to go through with the Doom engine.  On the other hand, Doom was much faster on the machines of the time - I had a 486 SX that could play Doom at an acceptable framerate, but Duke was well into "seconds-per-frame" territory at any playable resolution.

 

So to summarize, you can't really recreate a BUILD game like Duke3D with the Doom engine, unless that Doom engine was very advanced.  Could you recreate Duke3D in GZDoom?  Maybe, but you probably wouldn't enjoy it.

 

For what it's worth, when I see people create their own toy Doom-style engines in modern times, they tend to go with the BUILD style of drawing, likely because it's easier to comprehend and we have cycles to spare these days.

 

 

Edited April 18, 2023 by LexiMax

[Koko Ricky]

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

Build's and Doom's features are not really compatible. You cannot do moving vehicles in Doom but those are a staple of Duke Nukem.

There's also that often overlooked thing that parts of the game depend on the engine's quirks. Otherwise it'd be a lot easier to rewrite it in a more robust fashion.

With Duke we must never forget that it's not only the Build engine at play here but that the actual game code is also in a league of its own when it comes to poor coding.

 

A voxel vehicle couldn't be programmed to roughly mimic this?