Tag: virtualworlds

MS Cedes World Sim

sucks for Avi Bar-Zeev.

So the industrial applications market can only grow, but what about the competitive landscape? While some would argue Microsoft World-Sim and Google Earth are very different tools for different purposes, let’s face it – both are realistic simulations you can fly through, which aggregate real world data for physics purposes. And while Flight Sim was going to deliver underwater as a mode, Google just pulled the trigger. In a story today Google Earth Fills Its Watery Gaps The NY Times reported that Google is now mapping the blue parts of the planet. Microsoft and Google were in adjacent market, on a collision course. Not any more. Somebody blinked.

Generated worlds

“Another big benefit of procedural content creation is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn’t do otherwise. It opens up innovation fields. If you’re creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing, and you can bake in some limitations. Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree. It’s actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices.”

the same will happen to movies too. directors have reached a limit about the level of detail they can micro manage. lord of the rings was probably one of the peaks.