🚀 go-pugleaf

Another month, another monthly ramble. Time for me to start yammering
about some vaguely game-related topic for... what was the reason
again? Oh yeah, a vain hope of spurring conversation. Usenet is not
dead yet, damn it!

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This is going to be a shorter ramble. It's about what I thought games
of the future would look like, in the heady days of the mid 90s.

So, let us go back to 1996. A younger me was reading an article in a
gaming magazine (remember those?) about the upcoming Flight Unlimited
II. Now, I was interested not so much because of the game itself -
when I do flight sims, I want my planes to have guns! - but because it
was developed by Looking Glass, the guys behind the beloved Ultima
Underworld, Terra Nova, and System Shock. It didn't hurt that the
first Flight Unlimited game was visually astounding - head and
shoulders above its rivals, like Microsoft's venerable Flight
Simulator series. 

But what caught my eye in the article was the claim - a boast, almost
- that the developers intended to render every building on the map (a
simulated San Francisco) of ten stories or more. This was, for the
time, an astounding feat; with most flight simulators of the time,
"cities" were rendered as only three or four of the tallest buildings,
with muddy flat ground textures representing everything else. But
Looking Glass was hoping to not only render the map based on
"real-world elevation data" and "satellite photography" but populate
it with potentially hundreds if not thousands of structures? It was
mind-blowing.

Now to be fair, at the time I seriously over-estimated the number of
buildings > 10 stories in San Francisco; the actual end product, while
impressive enough in its graphical fidelity, still suffered greatly
from the "pop-up city" appearance of most other flight sims with their
equally limited number of structures on the map. But regardless of how
inaccurate my take, Looking Glass's boast really triggered my
imagination.

Now, you have to remember this was 1996. Video games were just
starting to experiment with huge open worlds and even then, the
attempts were fairly primitive; you just have to think of the
pyramidal mountains studding the otherwise flat plains of Mechwarrior
2 to remember how primitive the technology was at the time. Some games
- Strike Commander, Terra Nova - were attempting more natural curves
and texturing, but even these simulations were simplistic. Most of
Strike Commander's map was un-textured ("gouraud shading" was the big
thing of the time), and - large as they seemed - Terra Nova's maps
were tiny in comparison to the needs of a flight simulator. On the
other hand, SimCopter (1996) was already showing us it was possible to
create fully detailed cities - albeit with a significantly decreased
visual fidelity from Flight Unlimited efforts. Utilizing maps
generated from the venerable SimCity games, the small maps of
SimCopter could contain hundreds of tightly-placed (mostly identical)
structures. 

So my thought process went something like this:

   In 1994, Strike Commander released with naturally elevated terrain,
a few textures, and a handful of buildings.

   In 1995, Flight Unlimited presented us with fully-textured maps,
and a handful of buildings.

   In 1997, Flight Unlimited would improve upon its predecessors
already impressive graphics by upping the number of buildings.

Technology was moving so fast; what would 1999 bring us? A map with
every buildings four stories or higher rendered in 3D? Would a map in
2001 include /every/ building in a city - down to the smallest shack?
Would this level of detail - limited to just San Francisco in Flight
Unlimited II - extend outwards and outwards, until the whole world got
that sort of fidelity? And after you reached that level of detail,
where would you go from there?

Might the developers not decide to start rendering the INSIDE of the
houses then? Perhaps they would start populating these worlds with AI
peoples. It didn't seem that far-fetched; SimCity 2000 already was
attempting that; couple its technology with "modern" 3D-rendering and
who knows what would come from it?

These days we have (almost) achieved this goal, so these fevered
imaginings seem almost prescient to modern eyes. Flying across Los
Santos in Grand Theft Auto V and it's difficult to believe we
/haven't/ achieved this promised level of fidelity. Of course, most of
the buildings are empty shells and the AI fades in and in an
existential bubble around the protagonist, but it's a beautiful
illusion. Of course, in 1996 I would believed we would have achieved
all this by 2005...

Looking back, I made several mistakes in my thought experiment. First,
I totally missed the "resolution wars". In 1996, most DOS games were
still played at 320x240; while there was a slow movement towards
higher resolutions, it was in no way certain that this trend was going
to continue. And even if it did, many monitors couldn't go higher than
1024x768 anyway, so it seemed a limited advancement in any case. The
idea that one day we might have multiple 4K monitors hooked up to one
computer (with a possible resolution of more than 9000x4000 pixels)
was just beyond imagination. Similarly, I completely missed out on the
potential of 3D-rendering, a technology still in its infancy at the
time (seriously, at the time 3D graphics cards were a lot like VR tech
is today; nifty graphics but who knows if they were going to really
catch on?). It was - I thought - the ever increasing CPU speeds that
were going to create this gaming revolution, and while fast CPUs can
structure detailed worlds, they aren't that great at pushing pixels.
So as amazingly comprehensive as I believed those worlds might be, it
escaped me that pixel count wouldn't remain limited to that of
DOS-era games.

More importantly, I totally missed out on the fact that - even were
technology able to present such vivid worlds - somebody would still
have to go around and build those worlds. More than anything, this is
the constraining factor in game-world development today; games like
Minecraft show that the technology exists to create worlds millions of
times larger than the Earth but you still need somebody to create the
content - the buildings, the NPCs, the quests, the gameplay - that
make those worlds worth exploring. Without that sort of hands-on
touch, you get something like Daggerfall's world: generic and
uninteresting terrain. Even in 1996, developers were looking at
procedural generation to help out with the workload and with graphics
limited to 320x240, art design was significantly less complicated than
what is needed for the high-resolution computer-generated worlds of
today. The hundreds or thousands of people needed to create just the
few hundred-square miles for GTA5 or Skyrim were unthinkable levels of
excess. Even I wondered if the sheer scale of such an imagined
endeavor - detailing all of the Earth - might not result in a map
shared out between multiple games and developers - and wouldn't /THAT/
be neat, to play a Flight Simulator game in the air while somebody
else used that same map for a racing game, a third used it for a
football sim, and a fourth used it in a realistic "Doom clone"?

So, yeah; my predictions were a bit off target. Then again, so were
pretty much everyone's in 1996. 

But I still think back at times at these imaginings prompted by a
single sentence in a long-forgotten article in a now defunct gaming
magazine. Sometimes it's with disappointment that we've yet to achieve
a fully-rendered game-world;  the closest realization on
home-computers is the flight-sim mode in Google Earth, and even that
has only a limited selection of 3D buildings and is unpopulated
(although when it's taken to its full extreme - like they did for New
York City - it is truly amazing and as jaw-dropping as my 1996 self
imagined it would be). Other times it is with admiration and amazement
at the level of fidelity - if not scale - that our games /do/ present
us with. As the Mick Jager once sang, we don't always get what we want
but sometimes we get what we need.

But I don't make predictions about where gaming technology is headed
anymore.

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Okay, this ramble was far longer than I expected. If you have managed
to get this far, first of all, congratulations: you have a stronger
stomach for pointless nonsense than most. Second, share some of your
own predictions for gaming - either from the past (where you were
proven wrong, or right), or where you think gaming is going in the
future. And thirdly, here's a gift for the quickest of any of you
strong-willed enough to make it to the end: a key for Resident Evil 6
on Steam. First come, first serve, and thanks for reading. 

Resident Evil 6: 5KPR5-H66XD-7KMPZ