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?
you won't find anything really interesting coming from nearly any media business because their revenue sources aren't "put out interesting writing which people can only get here, so they have to subscribe." now it's... god, I don't even know.
the way things sucked before was so interesting, and now it all sucks in the same way.
it's always the same thing. every day, the same thing. everything is bad for the same reasons. I used to complain about businesses. I gave up. There's no point. It's always the same explanation, and everyone already knows what it is.
thinking about how we've fallen so far from gods light. in 1994, a pc magazine writer tasked with covering doom bit their lip, thought a little, and said "i should put a complete map editing tutorial in there. maybe next to the cheat codes"
let me tell you why the future we live in sucks so much dog shit every single second of every single day: data. as recently as the 2000s, businesses were stumbling through life completely lost and had no idea what they were doing. now they know, and everything sucks
do you fucking know how many people got paid anywhere from a living wage to big bucks to sit around and "i don't know, do something", and then nobody knew how to figure out if the thing they did made any money, or in fact, if they did it at all?
I haven't even hit 100k subscribers and this is what my inbox looks like. every day i get emails
I now receive multiple shill offers daily. Most are "from" electronics "manufacturer" storefronts on amazon that likely do not exist as anything more than a sheet of paper in a government office in China and one of hundreds of rollstamps at a factory in Shenzhen.
I can't figure out the scam, honestly. I'm positive these "businesses" don't exist in any meaningful way - all the six-letter names you see on Amazon and Aliexpress cannot have staff and offices. There have to be millions of them, it's unthinkable.
so it turns out that the rubberized coating on the Latitude E6420 is not the only thing that high-test isopropyl dissolves. it strips the paint right off the plastic.
well, nothing to do but to do it
the upper 2" of paint are absolutely nuclear-grade. must be baked on there from years of heat, took as long to remove 1/3 of that part as it took to strip the whole rest of the thing