I’ve read that enemies in Doom are rendered as sprites because of hardware limitations. But why is it that walls, stairs, etc. appear fully 3d by contrast?
[example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmf9dgso84)
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In: Technology
The walls of Doom aren’t fully 3D, they use a trick to look like 3D but you can’t look up and down, only straight ahead (there are mods that let you look up and down but it doesn’t look correct like a modern FPS it makes the view distorted).
This trick was needed because it’s faster to render than 3D and most computers at the time wouldn’t have been fast enough to draw 3D. That’s also true of the enemies which is why they are drawn as 2D. Possibly they could have had very low poly 3D enemies but they would have looked much worse than the detailed 2D sprites.
Obviously the above doesn’t apply to some modernized Doom versions that do render the levels as 3D so that they can use your graphics card.
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