I mean it is pretty cool, but do people not roll their own graphics engines anymore? When was in to hobby game dev back in 2000 or so, we all wrote our own systems.
Using same game engines and physics lead to a generic look-and-feel, even if they do allow for a large amount of creativity and differences.
This _looks_ different, which is awesome!
Even if the atmospheric effects still need some honing, there's a ton of work around lighting to eventually be done, the edgy polys make it look about 20 years old, and it's a bit pixel-y around the edges, this is headed into a spectacular direction!
If my ADD were in charge of this project, here's what I'd add:
- Optional stars / environment - a universal simulation would be unrealistically computationally expensive, but just having stars would be neat. Later, a planet in the horseshoe nebula, or playing spherical versions of recorded or streaming video for AR or making homegrown music videos.
- Ability for others to share datasets - the Earth is f-ing awesome and I can't wait for the Moon! What about a place where users could share different datasets like Arrakis with it's sand dunes and 2 moons or Tatooine with its 3 moons, then maybe they could fly in a heighliner, landspeeder, frigate, or imperial lambda shuttle, or even the jetcar from Buckaroo Bonzai?
- Solar Mayhem - Simulate a crazy atmospheric and orbital space war simulation or arcade-style game with satellites, lasers, plasma / electrical discharges and arcing, dust and nanorobot clouds, cloaking, jamming, ramming, repairs by robots and soldiers in tethered spacesuits, zooming cameras and 2D/3D scanners in different wavelengths, spacefaring naval ships, UAPs and other secret government vehicles, and complex 20th century fantasies of space stations running on nuclear and otherworldly power.
- Eclipse Support - when you add the Moon, doing an eclipse is not just the shadow but you'll need to handle the cool colors on the edges when the moon is covering the Sun.
- Ocean Simulation - Orcas, fish, eels, coral, lobsters, octopi, old ruins, Atlantis with its merpeople, tictacs and other USOs!
- Beautiful water features in Baltic Sea, Yukon Delta, Mississippi River, Lena River, Petermann Glacier, Brunt Ice Shelf, South Georgia Island, Guinea-Bissau, New Caledonia, Patagonian Sea, and the Icelandic and Norwegian fjords.
- Weather simulation with a way to pull in current atmospheric data historically to fly through hurricanes and tornados or simulate tsunamis after earthquakes.
> Using same game engines and physics lead to a generic look-and-feel
Sure but they're talking about using the same game engine, not the same physics engine. I don't think anyone would say Split Fiction looks at all like Oblivion Remastered. Though they both use Unreal Engine 5
That's would certainly be an awesome game, but did you know that your "Solar Mayhem" concept already exists? Children of a Dead Earth - it's probably a bit more austere by virtue of limiting itself to only somewhat-plausibly realistic weapons, mind you.
The hardware graphics acceleration stack is heavily shader-based now, so there's less and less graphics code being written in systems languages like C. In a way, people are still writing their own graphics engines, it's just for such a different platform from the unusual Turing-computer CPUs that all the old techniques go out of the window.
Nothing stopping you from writing it the old fashioned way though - you can just keep generating a single screen texture in the CPU and let the GPU idle!
As old dog I find this kind of funny, because for folks of my age C was like C# is seen nowadays.
Any serious game would be pure Assembly, and when using Pascal, C or BASIC compilers, they would be full of inline Assembly, almost like a poor man's macro Assembler, as the quality of code generation was awful.
Good point! Wasn't the Sony PlayStation significant for being the first console to ship with a C API from the manufacturer, or am I misremembering? I always thought that Net Yaroze sounded fantastic but never ended up getting one.
Oh, and another question on that topic: did you ever write self-modifying code for games, or had that already gone out by 2000?
