Rise of the Triad, often known as ROTT, was DOOMed from the start. It came out shortly before Christmas 1994, two days before Heretic, two months after DOOM II.
And it had orthogonal walls.
Having orthogonal walls in the days of DOOM was simply an unforgiveable sin. While most critics were enthusiastic, it was soon generally acknowledged that ROTT sucks. Why? Because Doom rules.
The ROTT engine initially started out as the Wolf3D engine. The Wolf3D engine was a REAL mode engine rather than a PROTECTED mode engine like Doom. My first task was to rewrite the engine so that it was a PROTECTED mode engine. Once this was done, ROTT could take advantage of linear memory and access to high memory without using EMS or XMS (remember those?) Wolf3D also generated all the code necessary in memory to scale a 64 high textured line from 1 pixel to the maximum scaled size which was about 300-400. This took up a bit of memory, and while it was an amazing innovation for 286's (it allowed WOLF3D to be as fast as it was) it didn't make a lot of sense for the 486. I took that stuff out and then had to convert the renderer from 286 assembly to protected mode assembly. John Carmack gave me a little piece of code which turned out to be the assembly inner loop for Doom. ROTT, it turns out uses the same scaling routines as found in Doom (who would have thought). Apogee also signed a deal with id that would allow us to put floor and ceiling code in ROTT. Once this was done the game really took on a whole new look.
The conversion from REAL mode to PROTECTED mode required a complete rewrite of almost every subsystem in Wolf3D which in the end made the ROTT engine VERY different from the Wolf3D engine. One of the subsystems which had to be re-written was the sound system. That is where Jim Dose came in. He wrote an amazing sound system outside of Apogee/3D Realms that would later be used in all of Apogee's products. Once he was near completion he was brought on to the ROTT team and helped finish up the game (he created RANDROTT among other things).
After the initial hard stuff was completed the ROTT engine turned more and more into a bastard child as features were added like room over room and transparency which were clearly never intended for an engine like ROTT's. The finished product is by no means an engineering marvel but had a certain charm to it.
Here are some of the things that are in the ROTT engine:
- Multi level orthogonally based levels.
- Room over room (sort of).
- Transparency.
- Textured Floors and Ceilings.
- Dynamic Lighting.
- FLIC support (although we never had any in the game).
- CINEMATIC engine (also never used. The ending sequence is scripted but doesn't utilize the cool shit developed before hand).
- 11 player network support.
- Masked Walls (Textures with holes in them).
- Moving Walls.
- Stairs (sort of).
Quoted in
ROTT in Hellby KevinFragmasterBowen
Taking a screenshot of the title is not easy. The title is
animated, and after it is fully displayed you have only a fracture
of a second before an RSAC warning attesting the game Wanton and
gratuitious violence
is cut in. Annoying as it is, the warning
is technically correct. No previous FPS revelled in gore as much as
Rise of the Triad did. When you frag an enemy, you are usually
rewarded with the graphic of a severed eye or hand flying across the
screen. The hand, amusingly, has its middle finger stretched out in
the well-known gesture. Was it, you may wonder, aimed at the RSAC?
Rise of the Triad is full of such amusing details. It has been a tradition in first-person shooters dating back to Wolfenstein 3D to display random confirmation images when the player exited the game. These messages were usually humoristic, and from game to game became increasingly insulting. But Rise of the Triad was the first (and, I think, remained the only) FPS to interpret quitting the game as suicide. Well, there is a parallel in another genre: in Transarctica, quite a different kind of game, the way to quit is to click on the revolver lying on the desk.
Rise of the Triad is one of the most under rated games ever produced.
