Welcome back! Last time we took a closer look at how stories and storytelling evolved through the years. This time we’ll take a look at something more interesting – the graphics. This subject can be both insanely interesting and dauntingly boring depending on the way we look at it. For this article we’ll try to avoid the boring technical terms and look at the changes from a more relaxed perspective, so expect lots of pictures and possibly even more observations.

Before we can start analyzing the changes we should set some “rules” that will be followed throughout the article. Common sense dictates that we should observe games that moved the bar in some way. Mostly this means looking at how first person shooters evolved, as they are the games that usually profit the most from new technological advances.

The above picture represents one of the first (possibly the first) FPS game ever. As you can clearly observe there are no textures or colors present. Animations are also non-existent. The player moves on a grid, having the option to either move forward, backwards or turn left or right by 90°. Each move forces a screen redraw (resulting in a jerking movement).

1. “True” vector 3d graphics

Picture 3 – Ultima Underworld - 1992	Picture 4 – Doom – 1993

UU, while not strictly a FPS, is the first game to include both a 3d world and textures within it. Until this game, the only true 3d engines featured flat-polygon graphics. The added textures make a world of a difference (just check the pictures). Unlike Wolfenstein3d which was released shortly afterwards, the game featured inclined surfaces and walls of different heights.
The same goes for the original Doom, which is to this day known as one of the best FPS games ever created. Both games used sprites to display enemies, as true 3d engines were not yet possible due to technical limitations. Games released later (like Duke Nukem 3d in 1996) used a similar engine, named the Build engine. They used completely different mechanics, but the end effect was similar.

What this era brought us:

1. textured levels
2. sprite enemies
3. elevated surfaces

Games closer to what we know as 3D shooters today, started appearing in 1995. It was then that the first completely 3D games came out. By today’s standards they were ugly, with pixilated textures and low-poly models all over the place.

Dynamic lightening hits the scene. Although the direction of the light source is still missing, the intensity and color are dynamic. This is also one of the first games to support out of the box 3d acceleration (via OpenGL).

The Quake 3 engine is one of the most widely used game engines to this day. It featured stencil shadows (which are still often used today) and curved surfaces, something which was not seen until then.Many games following the year 1999 used either the Quake 3 engine or the Unreal engine. To list just a few: Call of Duty, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Knight 3 and 4 on the Quake side and Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament and Undying on the Unreal camp. There were other proprietary engines used, but they were mostly one hit wonders (Max Payne, No One Lives Forever…).
With the years the games displayed more polygons at the same time, the screen resolution went up and the textures became bigger (more detailed). But other than that it wasn’t until late 2002 that another major step was taken.

What this era brought us:

1. True 3D worlds
2. Levels built in 3 dimensions
3. Light sources affecting their surroundings
4. Particle effects

If you take a look at today’s games almost every single one uses pixel shaders for various effects. The reflective water, bump-mapped walls and light distortions are just some of the effects that would probably not exist if it weren’t for pixel shaders. This article will not delve into how pixel shaders work, but we’ll rather take a look at how games benefited from them.

One of the first noticeable benefits of pixel shaders was the shaded water. In the above picture we can see one of the first attempts at pixel shaded water from the game Morrowind. Another game that used pixel shaders in the same manner was No One Lives Forever 2.

One of the best known FPS games of the recent years relied heavily on pixel shaders to display bump-mapped walls, refraction and reflection effects on the water. While all of them are common today, 4 years ago they made Far Cry the prettiest game available.Other games from this era include Half Life 2, Doom 3 and others. Besides relaying heavily on pixel shaders to give depth to both NPCs and the scenery (forests, Sci-Fi corridors, etc.) they use advanced shadowing techniques to display real-time shadows (The Doom 3 engine excels at this).

What this era brought us:

1. Reflective surfaces
2. Scene distortion (blur, refraction, etc.)
3. HDR
4. Bump mapping and displacement mapping to give depth to surfaces
5. General improvements in polygon density and texture resolution