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Influential Video Games Day 4: SubLOGIC Flight Simulator

2020-04-27 22:16:51.27081+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Influential video games, Day 4: Bruce Artwick's SubLOGIC Flight Simulator

I know that by the time I saw Flight Simulator I'd already seen wireframe 3d graphics (I'd seen a CALMA CAD system, for one thing). I had likely done some sort of "plot wireframes of trig functions with orthographic projections" before this (one of my high school math teachers hated that I used the computer to do my homework, another of my math teachers (Shout out to Kevin O'Sullivan) harnessed that and had me write educational software for him; I may still have a printout of the code for a tutorial and quiz program to help understand parabolic equations), but this had the perspective divide in it and everything.

Yeah, it was way slow (after Microsoft acquired it, they did some tweaks to draw solid horizons), but suddenly there was 3d. On a home computer. A virtual world. And physical simulation.

With mountains in the background, and sometimes some disorientation while trying to find the runway...

Amazingly, it was probably another decade and a half before I got really comfortable using matrices for 3d graphics; my first ray-tracer (published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in the late '80s) did all of its transforms with high school algebra and trigonometry.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Games Microsoft Aviation Software Engineering moron Graphics Mathematics Video Woodworking ]

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