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.

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.)

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

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.