Re:War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Play...
by pengaru on Monday December 20, 2021 @04:30PM
(#29630563)
What always impressed me about Doom was the dynamic shading/lighting effects they managed in a 256-color mode.
The "3D" part wasn't any more impressive than Wolfenstein3D was, which was running on significantly slower PCs.
I dabbled in PC demo programming at the time, the limited color palette was a major challenge for me in attempting shaded texture mapping. Once we had ubiquitous "TrueColor"/"DirectColor" RGB modes, the shading challenges became trivial.
Doom made clever use of a finite colorspace. When I tried recreating some of that myself it became rather obvious why Doom's palette was so muted and basically dark gray/brown/green gradients they could then illuminate. But it worked very well for Doom.
The "3D" part wasn't any more impressive than Wolfenstein3D was, which was running on significantly slower PCs.
I dabbled in PC demo programming at the time, the limited color palette was a major challenge for me in attempting shaded texture mapping. Once we had ubiquitous "TrueColor"/"DirectColor" RGB modes, the shading challenges became trivial.
Doom made clever use of a finite colorspace. When I tried recreating some of that myself it became rather obvious why Doom's palette was so muted and basically dark gray/brown/green gradients they could then illuminate. But it worked very well for Doom.