TODAY’S COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES VERGE ON THE PHOTOREALISTIC, SOMETHING THAT WAS A LONG WAY OFF SOME 30 YEARS AGO. BUT IN 1992, THERE WAS ONE GAME THAT GAVE US A RARE GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE OF 3D GRAPHICS
At the beginning of the Nineties, not many people had NovaLogic on their radar. The company, founded by John Garcia in 1985, first converted arcade titles such as Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid to IBM PCs and Apple computers, and created decent games like the submarine simulator Wolfpack (1990) and The Rocketeer (1991). Not exactly mind-blowing. But then came the 1992 ECTS in London, and what ran on a CRT monitor at the small NovaLogic booth left the entire audience both speechless and depressed, it was Comanche: Maximum Overkill.
Why was that? Flight simulators of the time had the problem that they basically looked like nothing, especially at a low altitude – untextured polygonal surfaces are not good at creating a realistic landscape feel. Comanche took care of exactly that problem, thanks to Kyle Freeman, the game’s sole developer. “Kyle developed a unique bitmap effect: he took a tiny image of a woman’s face, repeated it in 3D space, and gave each pixel its own Z coordinate,” NovaLogic founder John Garcia tells us about the humble beginnings of Comanche’s groundbreaking 3D technology. “Applying a sine-wave function made it appear like a flag waving in the wind. Later, those coordinates were replaced with digital elevation maps, enabling real-time renderable terrains.” That wasn’t all though. “The first demo halfway through development had you shooting green balloons, because I was using a text based 3D renderer to make the sprites and entering a sphere into the text file was easy,” Kyle adds.
The most important factor in this calculation is called voxel, which is a combination of volume and pixel (see What Is A Voxel?). A landscape built from them allowed for hundreds of times more detail than the most advanced polygon technology of the time. “A radical new technology,” as it was called on Comanche’s box. But where did these 3D graphics come from, which made detailed, natural-looking landscapes possible? “Earlier in my career I worked on medical imaging,” Kyle tells us. Voxels have been used there for several years, delivering three-dimensional pictures of the human body – in magnetic resonance imaging, for example. But how do you turn this technology, which can take 10-15 minutes to capture a single image, into a system that runs in real-time and at a minimum of 20 frames per second on a standard PC? “I ventured into 32-bit assembler, before there were 32-bit compilers or even operating systems. Comanche was, to the best of my knowledge, the very
