🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7/16/2017 6:09 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> 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!
> 
> -------------------
> 
> 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.
> 
Something that occurs to me is it still might be possible to game map 
the entire real world.  You just have to find a way of importing all 
that satellite radar, lidar and visible light data into a game usable 
data set.  Just think, in another 20 years you might be able to do that 
in real time!  :D


-- 
Inquiring minds want to know while minds with a self-preservation 
instinct are running screaming.