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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

That's gorgeous!! I haven't played with scenery software for so long... but this reminded me of becoming obsessed with VistaPro[1] in the early 90s, even buying a FPU coprocessor to speed up rendering fly-throughs of landscapes. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. This would have been a dream toy for me back then.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistaPro

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Oh gosh, me too. I recall calling a number in the back of a magazine to buy VistaPro 3. I was a dirt-poor kid at the time. I asked for the upgrade, and was worried because I didn't own v2, just the first version. They laughed and said it would work fine.

It came and was the full install, they were just giving a discount if you owned the previous version. It came with two additional CDs filled with DEMs. One with DEMs in the US, the other across the world.

Fun times, getting lost in the madness of creating.

Reminds me of Bryce too...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryce_(software)

And the pure assembly demo's showing realtime Mars like landscapes, my brother was always looking for precomputed tables to avoid the expensive div and mul, fun times. Software was optimized in size and execution speed in the early days. Also remember the first voxel based flight simulation like Novalogic's Comanche.

Back then, I spent a lot of time generating amazing landscapes with the free version of Terragen. One of these image served as my desktop background for several years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terragen

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