🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2017-07-17, Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> -------------------
>
> 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.
>
I used to have a demo of Flight Unlimited. You could only fly the
glider. I used to play it quite a lot, it was relaxing flying around
from vortex to vortex. I remember being pretty wowed by the terrain,
which had a big photographic texture.

I'm playing Dishonored 1 DLC at the moment, having recently finished
Dishonored 2. After about 10 minutes in the game the graphics feel no
different to Dishonored 2, because I adapt to the shortcomings. Which
is to say that we really don't need rendering of whole cities to have
fun. What we need is good tight mechanics.

-- 
-Toby
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject to circumvent my email filters.