Flight Simulator gave birth to 3D video-game graphics
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
https://www.frontier.co.uk/our-games/our-gameography/elite
> "Elite set many firsts, and was the first genuine 3D game on home computers. Even many years after its release it is fondly remembered. For example "Probably the best computer game ever" (The Times, December 1988). It went on to sell around 1,000,000 units, and is popular still, having appeared on most popular formats."
I later played it on a 286-based PC, and made Elite level in a few days, which was a huge disappointment. It was supposed to be an incredibly achievement to make it that far!
Turns out that leveling up was based entirely on the number of ships you shot down. They probably just dialed it down for the PC?
Either way, it was a fantastic game.
Followed by Amigas and PCs afterwards, with some occasional Atari STs here and there.
On IBM PC computers, these in early-mid 90's were a thing for uni students and white collar workers. Maybe for writers, technicians, engineers and press people. Not a thing for the common folk. In early 00's everyone got a PC.
*edit* I found the version, version 4, here: https://www.mobygames.com/game/2103/microsoft-flight-simulat...
...my first 3D games were actually on the Amiga, Damocles, Tower of Babel, Falcon, Flight of the Intruder(!), Birds of Prey, Gunship, all great games, but nothing compared to Doom.
It's a "worst case scenario" idea for driving simulation, where each piece can be deformed and tracked to implement various features. As a result, the driving feels more like a collection of pieces rather than one mesh with consistent acceleration. It's subtle during regular gameplay, but emerges excellently in high-stress scenarios like hard corners or crashes.
Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. It feels like the tech is there, but the will to design a realtime physics-based flying simulator isn't.
I think the real reason is that the compute power required for this is not quite there yet.
I remember about 15 years ago, people were floating around the idea that in the future (once we get more compute power) videogames will not be using hard-coded animations for basic actions in games (like shooting in an FPS). Instead, people speculated that we will have enough compute power to just actually simulate the physics of those actions, and create the animations for those actions dynamically on the fly, with each one of them being unique. I believe there are some videogames that already do that (no example at the moment though, will add in a comment reply if I find a few good ones).
The next barrier is obviously full physics simulation for everything present on screen. However, it feels like that would be magnitudes more compute-intense than making just some basic animations physics-similated (instead of hard-coded), definitely beyond what we can do now (possible AI-assisted magic aside, as I cannot say much about it; DLSS still blows my mind). I expect we will see increasingly more physics simulation mechanics trickling into videogames in the future, but not sure how much. After all, it has to serve the gameplay, and often it is just not a good match for the envisioned mechanics.
Iirc my first MSFS was either 1.0 or 2.0 (?) and I played a lot of subsequent titles that featured some more or less sophisticated 3D tech (Lightspeed, Microprose titles like e.g. F-117A etc, Gunship 2000, Strike Commander, Falcon (3.0?), Wing Commander, Comanche ("whoa, Voxels!")..
It was sure enough to save up for a CH Flightstick Pro and/or that Thrustmaster Stick "with the coolie hat".
But the first title that felt truly immersive in terms of 3D (albeit confusing at times) was Descent.
So I'd also assume this type of games caused some niche industries to flourish (both hardware and "consumer-grade military sim" software companies.
There probably were also a lot of sims that really went for the most realism possible.
However, after the era I referred to it was (is?) mostly FPS games that held this benchmark category (Unreal was the first title where my peers would buy dedicated or at least supporting graphics hardware for, like 3dfx voodoo) and soon after titles like Crysis were "the benchmark".
"Airfight is an early 3D graphics-based multi-user flight simulator, created on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Control Data Corporation (CDC) PLATO system in the early 1970s.[1][2][3]
The software was the first ever 3D flight simulator and the first multi-player flight simulator.[2] The first version was developed by Brand Fortner with Kevin Gorey in the summer of 1974.[4] After its release, it became the most popular game on PLATO until Empire became more popular. This software probably inspired the UIUC student Bruce Artwick to start the company Sublogic,[4] which was acquired and later became Microsoft Flight Simulator.[5]
It had group chat, digital emojis, 3D networked games, touch screen, and more, in the 1970s.
To add to the 3D game list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasim : "a 32-player 3D networked space flight simulation game and first-person space shooter[1] developed by Jim Bowery for the PLATO computer network and released in March 1974."
That is was only available at a few schools, most notably UIUC, helps explain the lack of wide cultural knowledge.
For more, read "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture." by HN user brianstorms, or https://spectrum.ieee.org/sxsw-2018-a-look-back-at-the-1960s... (comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615420 ) or https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa3vvg/the-greatest-computer... .
That is all I came here to say.
it was really basic (but awesome for its time). You basically flew over a flat grid - literally a grid - so the only thing "3d" about it was that you could see this 3d grid rotating and moving about. At one edge of the grid was a 2D "mountain" which was orthogonal to the ground-grid.
I found a screenshot here: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/85/9c/39859c5ccf2e08207f72...
If memory serves, one of the grid boxes in the top-left of that image contains the enemy base. You could dogfight against two other planes.
I mean... they were single pixel planes.
I think that TRS80 "graphics resolution" was 128x48 so you know. It would probably fit inside the letter O on today's hardware. Which is pretty cool when you think about it.
Here's another link with lots of screenshots:
I actually learned to fly IRL (didn’t finish my PPL sadly - maybe one day) but I learned to land properly by spending hours and hours and hours in X-Plane on my laptop, with a proper yoke and pedals.
My instructor couldn’t believe how much I had improved in just a week.
I was also really good with instrument flying :)
It's also ascribing some unassailable quality to human-made content that would make it strictly superior to AI generated. There's no reason to think that, likely sooner rather than later, AI generated content would be more interesting and relevant.
As with any new tech it can be used for both good and evil.
The internet actually has a lot in common with human flight. Both made the world a smaller place.