Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20140221183807/@comment-1496755-20140621143828

Yeah, fog in the Doom engine! It's not exactly 100% realistic, but it looks fairly good. And it really affects the overall mood of the levels it appears in.

Texture variety was a problem in the early 1990's because of size concerns. Heretic was made in a time when games still had floppy disk versions, which meant they had to make it as compact as possible. Quake never had a floppy version and came out directly on CD, so larger amounts of texture data were not such a big problem anymore.

Here is an interesting example - Descent. The first game had limited textures, but it could be fitted on several disks. Descent 2, on the other hand, came out on CD, so the designers did something brilliant - they made separate color palettes (and texture sets) for each part of the game, so that you can get dedicated ice or volcanic or jungle planet themes, instead of just one "common" game theme that tries to accommodate all of these into itself :)