“You can see the use of linear texture how it just modulated the color across the polygon,” Hichborn said.īy the end of the decade, Hichborn was responsible for leading product demonstrations as a part of GE’s Advanced Technology Group, headquartered just across the street from Daytona International Speedway. These were entire rooms filled with racks of beige boxes, capable of producing a “couple of thousand polygons at 30Hz,” in Hichborn’s words, with crude, linear textures that modulated solid colors across vast surfaces.Ī screenshot from a C-130 flight simulator running on Compu-Scene II technology from the early 1980s. By the ’80s this morphed into a series of Compu-Scene image generators, used to train tank operators, pilots and the like. It was the job of people like Bob Hichborn to find new clients for GE’s graphics products, which began with the Visual Docking Simulator built for NASA’s Apollo space program. The late 1980s had not been kind to the military-industrial complex, which had to contend with both a lack of conflict and a sweeping overhaul of the Department of Defense’s procurement process, ostensibly designed to increase competition and stamp out fraud. Getting there alone would take too long, and GE had the tech.įor GE, however, deals like this presented a possible lifeline. Sega needed the hardware to accelerate its development of 3D arcade titles. The agreement Sega entered into with GE in September of 1992 couldn’t have been more obvious for the Japanese video game giant. Story continues It Started With a Phone Call Some of our were modeling this ship for something - I don’t remember what that was originally for - but they ended up putting that ship off in one area.” “I’m like ‘yeah, someplace on this side of the cliff, just put this giant dinosaur fossil in the cliff.’ Just find really interesting things to set in locations. “I just sat down, I made out these big lists,” Buchanan told me. So he reached out to Sega designer and artist Jeffery Buchanan for help. It couldn’t not blow anyone away, and yet Suzuki was underwhelmed. Rock formations were distressed and layered glass reflected the sky. But in Daytona USA, trees looked like trees, not verdant spikes jutting from Earth. The asphalt and grass alternated stripes of grays and greens, respectively, because one consistent color would’ve made depth perception impossible. Mountains in Virtua Racing were piles of defined triangles painted shades of brown. Suzuki’s last racing game, 1992’s Virtua Racing, was fast and striking but lacked the hardware to apply textures to 3D models. These Cars Should Never Have Been Killed Off The 15 Most Successful Formula 1 Cars of All Time The NASCAR-inspired racing title will be the first to utilize groundbreaking 3D graphics technology sourced from General Electric Aerospace Simulation & Control Systems, enabling texture mapping and filtering for visuals more lifelike than any seen in the medium before. Sega’s AM2 division, the studio led by Yu Suzuki, the mind behind Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner, is making great progress on one of its big arcade tentpoles for ’94, Daytona USA. Real life has a funny way of underwhelming sometimes.
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