Shadow Warrior
Shadow Warrior was developed by and is property of 3D-Realms.
Below (at bottom of page) are some images, mostly from levels
that we (Eric Reuter) worked on during the development of Shadow Warrior.
Shadow Warrior was pretty advanced for its time. The Build engine
allowed for simulated "room over room" to give
the illusion of real 3D spaces, and incorporated slopes on floors
or ceilings, as well as driveable vehicles
Features of the Build Engine
The stock-standard features of Build up
to it's last incarnation include:
- 2.5D aspect (ie. not flat 2D like Doom and not 3D like Quake)
- High-resolution VESA modes with framerate not limited at 35 FPS
- Multi-coloured lighting
- Fog
- Translucency for sprites and masked walls
- "Wall" and "floor"-flattened sprites
- Voxel objects for three-dimensional "sprites" (these
appeared in Shadow Warrior and Blood)
- Sloped floors and ceilings
- Overlapping sectors
- Moving sectors
- Looking up and down (faked - done by stretching the screen
vertically to produce the illusion)
- Fully three-dimensional WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) map
editor
- Textured 2D (overhead) map view
- Ability to change the FOV (Field Of View) on-the-fly
Other capabilities of the Build engine that were never really
considered an official part of it include:
- Ability to use Mode-X (chained) video modes (a feature which was
phased out in 1996 because of lack of usefulness due to new VESA drivers)
- Ability to support stereoscopic modes for red-blue glasses and
other headsets like Crystal Eyes and Nuvision
Some game production houses enhanced the engine by adding extra
capabilities like:
- Mirrors
- Stacked sector/"true" room-over-room effects (eg. Blood
and Shadow Warrior)
- Reflective floors. (This was in Lameduke but it never seemed to
work quite right in all video modes)
- Weird and wonderful things like the ability to replace a bunch of
sectors with another bunch (eg. Shadow Warrior)
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