Hovertank 3D
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| Hovertank 3D | |
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| Developer(s) | id Software |
| Publisher(s) | Softdisk |
| Release date(s) | April, 1991 |
| Genre(s) | First person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS |
Hovertank 3D is a first-person shooter computer game developed by id Software and published by Softdisk in April, 1991 that is sometimes claimed to be the first first-person shooter or even the first 3D game for MS-DOS (inaccurately - it was preceded by several years by Elite amongst others, which reached DOS in 1987). The game used the same combination of scaled sprites and drawn walls that would later show up in Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, but the walls in Hovertank 3D were in solid colour, without any textures.
The unprecedented significance of the graphics engine in Hovertank was a breakthrough in that it was the first program to only render what the player could actually see in his field of vision rather than everything around him or everything in front of him. Instead of wasting processor power on unnecessary rendering, the computer could instead draw much higher resolution and detailed graphics, immersing the player into the game even further.
The credits are John Carmack and John Romero (programming), Tom Hall (game design) and Adrian Carmack (artwork).
