Get the latest tech news
How much of a genius-level move was binary space partitioning in Doom? (2019)
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.
Even more significantly, the performance of VSD, done in an unsophisticated fashion, scales directly with scene complexity, which tends to increase as a square or cube function, so this very rapidly becomes the limiting factor in rendering realistic worlds. Abrash was writing about the difficulty of the VSD problem in the late ’90s, years after Doom had proved that regular people wanted to be able to play graphically intensive games on their home computers. Still, Carmack found himself faced with a novel problem—”How can we make a first-person shooter run on a computer with a CPU that can’t even do floating-point operations?”—did his research, and proved that BSP trees are a useful data structure for real-time video games.
Or read this on Hacker News