MSDOS had a hard-coded limitation of 640 KB of RAM for the entire system. Early on games had to use whatever tricks they could to run within that limitation, and when people did upgrade to amounts of RAM beyond 640 KB games that wanted to use the extra RAM had to bundle an upper memory manager to allow bypassing the memory limitations in DOS.

Also, hard drives in 1993 were very slow, and many people still had older computers with slower drives than were being sold in 1993 (this was the pre-Windows 95 days when many people were still just running MSDOS by itself). id Software had to account for the PC hardware that they expected their customers to be using, which wasn’t going to be the latest and greatest, and some manufacturers at the time were still making hard drives with capacities ranging from 10 MB to 30 MB.

Also keep in mind that DOOM originally shipped on floppy disk, and those had a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB, so unless they wanted the game to take up a couple dozen floppy disks they had to keep it small. Note that I think it may have come on 4 floppy disks originally (not referring to “Ultimate DOOM” here, which was a later release), and archive(dot)org shows a DOOM 1.2 release in 1994 with 4 floppy disk images, so that’s probably correct.

They were slower, but they weren’t THAT slow. I remember entire Doom II loaded in like 10s on my old 486 I got when I was 8. Also WAD AFAIK is an uncompressed format more for the convenience than anything else. Plus Doom textures when dumped out of the WAD are like 4kb each, and that’s after conversion to PNG. The original ones probably are much much smaller. I think it’s more of the fact that Carmack didn’t think about adding streaming than it wasn’t possible back then.

No. 15fps tops. 30fps is somewhat fluid. What is in this video does not represent 30fps at all.

N**ga, who’s we?

Hard drives were significantly slower back then, and a lot more fragile/unreliable. They were not suitable for dynamically loading texture data while playing a game. They also didn’t have very much storage capacity, so games had to be small.

I don’t know when texture streaming was first introduced, however in those days it was unheard of (I don’t remember hearing about it until well into the 2000’s).

Textures could have been loaded and unloaded as needed from the disk. Not every level requires all mobs, walls, floors and objects either, so this also could give additional savings.

Isn’t there a mod which fixes that, though?
Beautiful Doom or something…
That would be better than 3D voxels.

I don’t think it was an issue with laziness, I think it was an issue with textures using too much memory. Consider it a technical limitation (this was a DOS game after all).