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To Dream, to fly - adventures in flight simming
To fly, perchance to dream. The dream of flight seems fundamental to the human condition. From the legend of Icarus to the notion of astral projection it seems to be present in all cultures. On a personal level, surely most of us have had "flying dream" where, escaping the clutches of gravity we seem to be able to float away from our wordly cares. However in years of civilisation it is only in the past (not quite) 100 years that sustained, powered flight has become a reality. And it is only in the past 20 years that the masses have been able to spread their wings in virtual flight. One of the best selling programs for the Apple II computer and Tandy TRS-80 personal computers in the early 1980's was Flight Simulator 1 by Sublogic. The primitive wire frame graphics moved oh, so slowly, but it did include "British Ace 3D Aerial Battle".
In the early 1980's I used to sit around with friends trying picture where this technology could go. "Wouldn't it be great if you could actually see trees... and .. how about... power lines! Power lines you could fly under. And what about real terrain, with hills, coastlines, rivers." Ah, how our little minds boggled. However I had learned enough about computers to know that it wasn't likely to happen in my lifetime. The math was simple. For a start, to draw dots on a screen took processing power. The more dots, the slower the animation ran. Add colour and the display slowed again. The Apple could display a whopping 16 colours... but not all at the same time, and not any colour in any position. The coulur displayed at one positon depended on the colout being shown on each adjacent pixel. Complicated and slow. |
The early personal computers just weren't designed to move graphics around the screen. It wasn't until the "games machines" came along from Commodore and Atari and they bundled a 16 bit processor with dedicated graphics hardware that flying got interesting looking enough for the average punter to look at the screen and go "wow" ! |
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The contents of this website are copyright © 1998 - 2007 by MiGMan |
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