[Hendricks266]

I don't feel like sifting through Wikipedia's edit history, but the common phrasing goes something like this:

"Shadow Warrior uses a more advanced version of the Build engine with additional features: voxel sprites, room-over-room rendering, and sector vehicles."

This statement is only accurate for voxels. (Even then, the ENGINE.OBJ in the Duke 3D source, dated 19961209, contains symbols related to voxels.)

[Kawa]

Player-driveable vehicles, that is. Even Tekwar has sector vehicles.

[Micky C]

Kawa, on 30 November 2016 - 08:11 AM, said:

I'm a little tempted to bring it back for my game.

I'm still a little confused. Is it not just an animated texture? What's special about it?

[Kawa]

The texture is drawn in code, by the game, live.

[Micky C]

Damn that's cool. I wonder why they didn't use it in the final game, too computationally expensive? Looks pretty smooth.

[Daedolon]

Considering the renderer uses CPU only anyway, I guess it was cheaper to throw the texture in memory and only have the CPU worry about it once?

[NNC]

A n00bish question, but I know jack shit about the technical side of the games:

Are the security cameras of Duke 3D working the same way as Shadow Warrior's fake ROR? You can basically view into another sector not in visible range...

[oasiz]

Mirrors are probably closer, if you view those against a null texture, you can see what kind of a weird hack it is

[Hendricks266]

Security cameras (when you aren't viewing them in first-person) use render-to-tile functionality.

[Kawa]

Daedolon, on 01 December 2016 - 04:44 AM, said:

Considering the renderer uses CPU only anyway, I guess it was cheaper to throw the texture in memory and only have the CPU worry about it once?

To be fair, movelava is only called when drawscreen notices that particular tile is visible, same way it skips processing mirrors when there's none in view.

Yeah, movelava. Its variables are also lava, yet it animates a texture named slime, which is green, and is used for water in LameDuke.

[oasiz]

Micky C, on 01 December 2016 - 04:41 AM, said:

Damn that's cool. I wonder why they didn't use it in the final game, too computationally expensive? Looks pretty smooth.

While it looks kinda cool, it's still barely better than typical filled circle demonstrations in qbasic.
I guess this wasn't really fully explored since they moved to reflecting water (seen in 1995 promo and LD), before that was scrapped in favor of a simpler animated floor texture.
Main reason why I think it was abandoned is that the LD water has pitch black clipping with certain generation steps and this is also present in the much later 1995 build too, while floor mirror seems to work a bit better.