Interestingly I've always thought that Elite was the first game with 3d graphics, but the timeline doesn't seem to agree. Elite was developed in 1982 (published in 1984), while MSFS was developed in 1976. I wonder why Elite is still considered by many to be the first game with 3d graphics.
> "Elite set many firsts, and was the first genuine 3D game on home computers. Even many years after its release it is fondly remembered. For example "Probably the best computer game ever" (The Times, December 1988). It went on to sell around 1,000,000 units, and is popular still, having appeared on most popular formats."
I don't think I've spent more hours on a single game than Elite on a Commodore 64. Back in the day, it wasn't clear what were the requirements to level up your rank. I never made it past Deadly, which IIRC was the last level before Elite.
I later played it on a 286-based PC, and made Elite level in a few days, which was a huge disappointment. It was supposed to be an incredibly achievement to make it that far!
Turns out that leveling up was based entirely on the number of ships you shot down. They probably just dialed it down for the PC?
Your quote says “on home computers”. IBM PCs, on which MSFS ran on, were not considered home computers [0]. In the 1990s, home computers were finally displaced by the PC (and by consoles) for gaming, and the PC effectively took over the role that home computers used to serve. But the term “home computer” wasn’t used any more, at least partly because PCs were always also business computers.
That makes sense. I missed the early days of home computers, but still cut my teeth on a hand-me-down Tandy 1000 in 1995. So I was playing games like Star Trader, Elite and Kings Quest on a decade old computer a couple decades after the games were released. I was fortunate that my initiation into PC gaming coincided with the end of life for all of these games (thanks to the shift to CD installation) so bargain bin software was a GOLD MINE for me.
Even on home computers, Psion Flight Simulator would have been earlier than Elite, although calling the graphics in Psion's '3D' is perhaps stretching the term a little far.
Probably because home computers like the C64 were a lot more popular (and cheaper) than boring "office PCs" in the 80's (at least in Europe, don't know how it was in the US).
This, and maybe some Master Systems in late 80's. Early 90's were the place of cheap Chinese NES clones, with testimonial SNES presence. Later eveyone got into the Play Station. The Game Boy was far more ubiquitous on the Pokémon era.
On IBM PC computers, these in early-mid 90's were a thing for uni students and white collar workers. Maybe for writers, technicians, engineers and press people. Not a thing for the common folk. In early 00's everyone got a PC.
I played MSFS on System 7 Apple Mac Performa back in 1992 or so. It was the first game I ever played with 3D graphics that I can remember so I’m keen to agree with the article. Wolfenstein 3D was actually 2.5D but both of them were probably equally responsible for 3D real-time graphics today. I say real-time because Pixar has been doing 3D since the 80s with SGI and there was a wireframe 3D game called Elite that was popular. Without filling in the polygons though they missed being the grandfather of it all.
IMHO the '3D craze' only really started with Doom (even thought that isn't 3D either - but it fools the player well enough). Watching a 5 fps 'slide show' is only so impressive, even when it's fully 3D rendered, but playing Doom fullscreen, 'per-pixel textured' at 35fps was a frigging psychedelic experience at the time.
...my first 3D games were actually on the Amiga, Damocles, Tower of Babel, Falcon, Flight of the Intruder(!), Birds of Prey, Gunship, all great games, but nothing compared to Doom.
I've been playing MSFS since Flight Simulator 4, on a 286. The latest incarnation is nothing short of incredible, especially compared to how good early versions were for their time. What they've done with the latest version blows me away every time I play.
I have only one grief with (all) PC Flight Simulators: the feeling on landing. As a private pilot, I find that takeoff and flight is actually quite well simulated, but not the landing. In a real small plane, the controls begin to feel wobbly, you feel the floating on the cushion of air, you feel the wind: all totally different in the simulation. I wonder how they could get it right.
It's a "worst case scenario" idea for driving simulation, where each piece can be deformed and tracked to implement various features. As a result, the driving feels more like a collection of pieces rather than one mesh with consistent acceleration. It's subtle during regular gameplay, but emerges excellently in high-stress scenarios like hard corners or crashes.
Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. It feels like the tech is there, but the will to design a realtime physics-based flying simulator isn't.
> Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate.
I think the real reason is that the compute power required for this is not quite there yet.
I remember about 15 years ago, people were floating around the idea that in the future (once we get more compute power) videogames will not be using hard-coded animations for basic actions in games (like shooting in an FPS). Instead, people speculated that we will have enough compute power to just actually simulate the physics of those actions, and create the animations for those actions dynamically on the fly, with each one of them being unique. I believe there are some videogames that already do that (no example at the moment though, will add in a comment reply if I find a few good ones).
The next barrier is obviously full physics simulation for everything present on screen. However, it feels like that would be magnitudes more compute-intense than making just some basic animations physics-similated (instead of hard-coded), definitely beyond what we can do now (possible AI-assisted magic aside, as I cannot say much about it; DLSS still blows my mind). I expect we will see increasingly more physics simulation mechanics trickling into videogames in the future, but not sure how much. After all, it has to serve the gameplay, and often it is just not a good match for the envisioned mechanics.
After watching the recent episode[1] of "AI & Games" on why Machine Learning hasn’t seen widespread use in the Gaming industrie yet, I wonder if ML could indeed fill the gap between what we have now and a accurate physics simulation. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
The closest I've seen to that ideal is Noita - every pixel if its (2d) world has full chemical/physics simulation. Overall its quite reminiscent, and certainly inspired by the 'falling sand' flash game from the 90's. Of course it doesn't quite qualify as a realistic simulation but still quite impressive.
For some reason when using VR I feel like MSFS 2020 landing is realistic that I get the ground effect keeping me afloat longer; wind sometimes pushes me to a side as well. I used to fly sailplanes which were extremely sensitive to these things and that feeling is there again in VR.
My first one was Sublogic's FS3 (same software, but Microsoft sold it for PCs and Sublogic sold it to other platforms). When I realized I could use Sublogic's Jet with the FS3 disk for scenario, I quit the little Cessna and started to fly an F-18 all over the place.
I just realized that "3D graphics/flight sim" was kind of a hardware/tech benchmark back then (prior to the (PC) demo scene).
Iirc my first MSFS was either 1.0 or 2.0 (?) and I played a lot of subsequent titles that featured some more or less sophisticated 3D tech (Lightspeed, Microprose titles like e.g. F-117A etc, Gunship 2000, Strike Commander, Falcon (3.0?), Wing Commander, Comanche ("whoa, Voxels!")..
It was sure enough to save up for a CH Flightstick Pro and/or that Thrustmaster Stick "with the coolie hat".
But the first title that felt truly immersive in terms of 3D (albeit confusing at times) was Descent.
So I'd also assume this type of games caused some niche industries to flourish (both hardware and "consumer-grade military sim" software companies.
It still is a benchmark. The latest and greatest sims are getting pretty realistic but will still bring any machine I've seen to its knees with everything cranked up.
Right, the latest FS graphical features can be cranked up quite good.
There probably were also a lot of sims that really went for the most realism possible.
However, after the era I referred to it was (is?) mostly FPS games that held this benchmark category (Unreal was the first title where my peers would buy dedicated or at least supporting graphics hardware for, like 3dfx voodoo) and soon after titles like Crysis were "the benchmark".
"Airfight is an early 3D graphics-based multi-user flight simulator, created on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Control Data Corporation (CDC) PLATO system in the early 1970s.[1][2][3]
The software was the first ever 3D flight simulator and the first multi-player flight simulator.[2] The first version was developed by Brand Fortner with Kevin Gorey in the summer of 1974.[4] After its release, it became the most popular game on PLATO until Empire became more popular. This software probably inspired the UIUC student Bruce Artwick to start the company Sublogic,[4] which was acquired and later became Microsoft Flight Simulator.[5]
PLATO is the forgotten predecessor to a lot of technology.
It had group chat, digital emojis, 3D networked games, touch screen, and more, in the 1970s.
To add to the 3D game list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasim : "a 32-player 3D networked space flight simulation game and first-person space shooter[1] developed by Jim Bowery for the PLATO computer network and released in March 1974."
That is was only available at a few schools, most notably UIUC, helps explain the lack of wide cultural knowledge.
I always wondered how it worked. It seems to me that with its limited hardware, it can only display ground features, not whole 3D surroundings. Am I completely wrong? Is it something like this?
it was really basic (but awesome for its time). You basically flew over a flat grid - literally a grid - so the only thing "3d" about it was that you could see this 3d grid rotating and moving about. At one edge of the grid was a 2D "mountain" which was orthogonal to the ground-grid.
If memory serves, one of the grid boxes in the top-left of that image contains the enemy base. You could dogfight against two other planes.
I mean... they were single pixel planes.
I think that TRS80 "graphics resolution" was 128x48 so you know. It would probably fit inside the letter O on today's hardware. Which is pretty cool when you think about it.
I remember on the Apple II that I played SubLogic Flight Simulator on, there was a dogfight mode. I've been flying virtually ever since and I'm about to complete my first trip around the world in MSFS2020 in VR.
I actually learned to fly IRL (didn’t finish my PPL sadly - maybe one day) but I learned to land properly by spending hours and hours and hours in X-Plane on my laptop, with a proper yoke and pedals.
My instructor couldn’t believe how much I had improved in just a week.
I remember playing Skiing on my TRS-80 Color Computer in 1980 and being pretty impressed by the (crude) 3D graphics: https://youtu.be/ex1QblMz_nU?t=404
I had to get my bearings by looking up Battlezone (1980) but I suppose that it lacked six degrees of freedom in the graphics, so flight simulator (1981/2) is more 3D than it was.
It's typical Gatesian tackiness to compare the first heavier-than-air flight to the Web. Much as the Web has changed things, flight was a much more profound change. It made the world more physically connected, completely upended warfare, and fulfilled a dream held by humans for millennia.
Since the VC-backed beginning of "social", Internet became a shared cesspool with gamed interactions. Not really a fulfillment of a dream of the majority of humanity.
Dunno, I remember early Internet; I think we will see it getting in a much worse shape with ChatGPT/Stable diffusion-like tech deployed at scale. Pointless interaction with bots all the time on bot-generated websites with viewers being gamified to spend as much money/attention as possible, original human-made content disappearing everywhere.
Again, this is rhetoric, if you're not prepared to turn it off now.
It's also ascribing some unassailable quality to human-made content that would make it strictly superior to AI generated. There's no reason to think that, likely sooner rather than later, AI generated content would be more interesting and relevant.
There was a book published by Sun Micro about Unix Games, perhaps in the mid or late 1990s. It had a chapter on a flight simulator game with simple 3D graphics. Does anyone have a link to more information about such a game.
https://www.frontier.co.uk/our-games/our-gameography/elite
> "Elite set many firsts, and was the first genuine 3D game on home computers. Even many years after its release it is fondly remembered. For example "Probably the best computer game ever" (The Times, December 1988). It went on to sell around 1,000,000 units, and is popular still, having appeared on most popular formats."