Edited by author 01-25-2003 02:50 PM
Question: do any readers remember the name of a landscape generator program from about 8 years ago? You could design a landscape and it would give you a 3D picture. It wasn't from a major software company, nor was it an add-in to some larger program, as I recall. Also, it isn't a name that currently exists (so not Adobe, Bryce, Kai)- I think it was just a one-time software program.

bryce?

Edited by author 01-25-2003 03:03 PM
Well before Bryce, on the Amiga there was Vista-Pro, which I believe was later ported to PCs. The Amiga version did a very nice job with both stills and animation, and was used (amongst many uses) by a lot of news shows. You could either make your own landscape or import files (DEM files) which were official topographic maps of actual areas. Using these it was fairly easy to make good fly-bys of real-world areas. There was another Amiga program called Scenery Animator which was good, and I think that preceded Vista Pro by a bit. The output of these programs was primitive by today's standards, but pretty breathtaking then. (Don't even ask me about rendering times :-) -- it took forever to do a complex scene, and animating that. But then we were used to a short animation taking days at times to render.)

Here's a link with some Vista Pro pics from the old days:
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/alex/vistapro-pics.html

I would set up a Vista Pro render on my Amiga on a sunday night and let it render all during the work week.
That was back in the days when you didn't have to use your machine to check email and surf the web every day :)

I e-mailed and did my newsgroup arguing (which of course any sensible person back then did with an offline newsreader :-) while the rendering stuff ran in the background. Ooh, multi-tasking. I remember a PC guy asking me what good multi-tasking was (it was popular for PC and Mac users then to claim that multitasking was in fact useless)and I just said, "you'll see". It was kinda fun being an Amigoid back then.

Vista-pro: that's the one... now I can look for a used copy somewhere. by today's standards, it should take no time at all to do a simple landscape, and that's all I need. Thanks!

Wow, it is amazing to look at those Vista Pro pictures that apparently took days to render, and then think that the cheapest PC you can buy today running Quake 3 renders higher quality images over 50 times per second!

Edited by author 01-26-2003 01:07 PM
It's just about 11 years now that I was at a multimedia show in Toronto where they showed all the high end pro goodies, and one of the most amazing for us in the 3D crowd was a $250,000 Silicone Graphics machine rendering a real-time (30 fps) scene with a truck and some buildings and fences. It was a simple scene, very few polys with textures doing most of the job of creating the illusion. They could drive the truck anywhere using the mouse to steer -- we were all talking about it -- just stunned. Two years ago, when I bought a PIII 550 with a 16 MB TNT graphics card and ran Porsche Unleashed, that computer and game were doing far more than the quarter of a million dollar SG machine with custom software had less than 10 years previous -- far more complex scenes, far more complex car and movements, far better frame rate.

(Most individual frames of a Vista Pro animation back then would take less than an hour, depending on detail settings, but multiply that by 30 frames for a second of animation and that's where you got into amazingly long rendering times.)

quake uses some pre-rendered tricks to do what it does. it's not doing all that work 'on the fly' by a long shot.

the cutting edge of landscape generation software is MojoWorld from Pandromeda, but I'm a bit biased.

-calyxa

I think Quake is starting to look a bit tired these days, certainly some of the newer games like Unreal Tournament 2003 have raised the bar quite a few notches. Calyxa, I'll check out MojoWorld - I'm getting back into the CGI thing after being away from it for too long. I used to be able to write POV scripts like the best of them! Cheers, Pete

Edited by author 01-28-2003 05:19 AM
Can't seem to find the Win32 build mentioned in the post over on BoingBoing; has anyone else managed to find it? If so, could you point me in the right direction?

Cheers.

Markedup - you can find the win32 version here...

http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/

cheers

Pete