Delta Force (1998)

[Peasant]

Recently re-instaled this game and having a blast playing it. Already 2/3rd through the game.

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

I loved the grenade launcher.

 

[Stefan Fredriksson]

Played it a LOT, but mostly DF2 online. Really enjoyed it.

[Mr King]

That was by Novalogic I think. I played a lot of their first Armored Fist game.

[Stuart Galbraith]

I played one of the armoured fist series, cant remember which one. Fun, although looking back on it, it wasnt really that much of an advance on Koronis rift, albeit with a lot more pixels.

[Ssnake]

Occasionally I still wonder what would have been, had all the effort that was put into triangle-based geometry acceleration been redirected into voxel technology. All the volumetric effects could have been much easier.

[Stuart Galbraith]

It certainly offered something. It felt almost like the way people actually saw things, except in lower fidelity if that makes any sense (it probably doesnt).

Anyway, Novalogic games were generally a lot of fun. I felt they to some extent they picked up the torch Microprose had dropped.

[Der Zeitgeist]

After coming from Gunship 2000 and other Microprose sims, seeing Comanche's terrain depiction for the first time was pretty mind-blowing.

[Ssnake]

The simulation bit was rather terrible, but yeah the engine was impressive as hell back then. It just didn't scale so well with ever increasing screen resolutions, and triangle-based accelerators made progress so fast that Voxel engines effectively became a dead end with Delta Force 2.

[Stuart Galbraith]

26 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

After coming from Gunship 2000 and other Microprose sims, seeing Comanche's terrain depiction for the first time was pretty mind-blowing.

Yeah, I dont think I ever got Comanche sadly.

I just looked up armored fist, and today it looks unimpressive as hell. Although to be fair, this is only 4 or 5 years down the line from M1 Tank platoon, to which it compares visually fairly well.

 

Im strangely reminded of Koronis Rift, which was probably about the best you could make an 8 bit tank game look.

 

[Ssnake]

41 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

I just looked up armored fist, and today it looks unimpressive as hell

The video capture, encoding compression, and upscaling from 320x240 to full HD or higher hasn't done the visual impression on Youtube any favors. These DOS games were meant to be played on 15" CRT monitors. Now, as 30 years have gone by, of course they no longer look as impressive as they did in the age before 3D accelerator graphics cards. My point was, the voxel technology had potential. Up close the terrain looked ugly, but from mid-range on it was better than anything non-accelerated (until, ahem, Steel Beasts came along half a decade later), and it offered theoretically infinite lines of sights, as voxel technology is indifferent to render distance (but scales badly with an increase in voxel resolution).

Voxels offered fluid, gently shaded rolling hill terrain out several kilometers range, which all the triangle-based (non-accelerated) 3D engines at the time couldn't. You could render tree canopies in voxels, or volumetric fog or explosions. dynamic terrain wouldn't have bbeen much of a probblem for the underlying technology. So, what if there had been hardware accelerators to smoothen out the edges of voxels at short range, and to boost the overall voxel resolution?

It could have been a really grand technology for anything organic/natural looking fractal geometries.

[Stuart Galbraith]

I really liked the way it modelled smoke and dust, that was certainly ahead of the game.