In 1996 someone operating under the business name "Axisim" put out a PC flight simulator called "Flight Action," and it's one of the strangest pieces of DOS software I've seen.
It has strong EGA energy, something you won't be familiar with unless you were playing late 80s DOS games; very crisp 640x350 graphics, few gradients, lots of very basic system-ROM-font text, clear "programmer art"
it also has strong "single independent programmer" energy, wherein you see techniques that would not have been used by most software studios of the time. For instance, the image behind the menu is not a bitmap, it's is a single static scene rendered with the 3d engine
This is probably to help the program fit on a single floppy, and yes, this is a 1996 full 3d combat flight simulator that fits in under a megabyte, a concern no commercial developer would have had at the time.
Here's a short clip of the demo, and I have a lot to point out about it.
The color palette & shading techniques are absolutely unique. It looks cel-shaded because typical gouraud is not being used, instead this completely homebrewed flat shading with dithering, and all in the palette of a pamphlet promoting travel to the Florida Keys
The clouds seem to be rendered using an extremely terse technique of splotching circles on the sky and then randomly drawing dark grey rectangles over them, which jostle and vibrate on every frame
The head movement is most interesting to me. Could this be mouse input? It seems almost too organic to accept, as if it were perhaps recorded using one of the early VR headsets of the 90s.
This part is what sticks in my head. Could this be drawn in real time? The camera can smoothly rotate, so it feels like it must be 3D, but looking closely at it, perhaps it's just a brilliant implementation of a hand drawn cockpit that wraps around the camera?
myabandonware.com/game/flight-ac… looks like you can grab it here if you want to see how it runs
extremely powerful enhanced EGA aesthetics just radiating off this program
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