But it was a fantastic game, if you overlooked the issues). ![]() Simply increasing the frame rate to modern standards would probably make the thing keel over. (And honestly, from my experience with it, the simulation was dodgy enough that it probably needs a complete reimplementation rather than just a port. I keep hoping that someday someone will make a version of Red Planet that will run on modern computers, but it doesn't seem likely. Location-based gaming was probably well on its way to dying by then. They made a new 4.0 series of hardware which had texture mapping (gasp) and made use of 3D acceleration (double gasp). Even now, two decades later, I can still pretty much recite the dialog from these videos from memory they're seared into my brain the same way that the VWE logo was seared into the CRTs that displayed these videos approximately every ten minutes. Walnut Creek was a 2.0 site, but I don't see any differences in the trainer videos. These are labelled as being the trainer videos for version 3.0. The requisite "all-star cast" trainer videos used for orienting new players (which by law must be linked to in any post mentioning Virtual World Entertainment) are on YouTube here (BattleTech) and here (Red Planet). And the whole suite of cockpits were controlled and configured from Mac servers. Each cockpit included a PC (by memory, it was in the realm of a Pentium 70, I think?) running the main display, an Amiga running the supplemental instrument displays, and well over a hundred functional switches and buttons, in addition to the joystick, throttle, and rudder pedals. But they were some of the earliest 3D games around, and heavily networked in an era before networking was common. In truth, it was cockpits with multiple forward-facing screens, rather than proper VR, in a themed environment. ![]() (With "But with no helmet to mess up your hair" tacked on, when speaking to someone who was particularly well-coiffed) ![]() It wasn't really VR in the sense that we'd use here, but VR is usually how we described it to entice people to come into the location. But to avoid merely posting a "me-too" post, I'm going to mention that my first experience with something that called itself VR was working at a Virtual World site for a while, back in the mid-90s (the Walnut Creek site).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |