Erstellt am: 19. 11. 2009 - 11:51 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Star Wars and Battlezone
Remember Star Wars?
The one with the little droid, and the old dude, and that blonde kid with the bad haircut?
The one without the massive amounts of computer generated special effects?
It turns out that they did actually use computers for one scene. While the rebels are planning their assult on the Deathstar, the plans are illustrated with a 3D representation of the station. It seems like it's one of the few scenes Lucas DIDN'T change when he went back to spruce up the films for their DVD releases.
And that's a good thing too, because the floaty green thing was just too cool. And it was something the people involved with had been pretty proud of. And now you can find out how they did it in a documentary in which Larry Cuba shows us how they actually managed to get computers to draw and animate the Deathstar in real time.
No small feat considering he was probably using computers much less powerful than your ancient "just a phone" phone.
Watching all that vector graphic display goodness made me wonder if one of my favorite examples of that tech was still around.
Battlezone was an awe-inspiring game using vector graphic displays to put you in the seat of a 3D space tank on a strange planet filled with other tanks that were shooting at you. It was very likely the first example of a somewhat immersive virtual reality experience, since the arcade machines actually made you look through a periscope like device in order to play it.
That game ate a lot of my quarters as a kid, but now you can play the Atari version online for free:
www.atari.com
or you can just watch a video right here:
Now if I could just find someway to play the 1983 Star Wars arcade game again, everything would be very cool indeed.
Anyone have any ideas?