Terra Nova - Strike Force Centauri: How it runs on a 1994 PC — Pentium 90 MHz / ATi Mach 64 / AWE32 скачать в хорошем качестве

Terra Nova - Strike Force Centauri: How it runs on a 1994 PC — Pentium 90 MHz / ATi Mach 64 / AWE32

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available! MIDI soundtrack (using SoundFont from game’s SBK-file) provided by AWE32. What happens when you take System Shock, add a little bit of streamlining to the controls and put yourself in the boots of a squad commander tackling a series of short but sweet missions? You might end up with something like Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (Looking Glass Technologies, 1996), a fast-paced outdoor shooter where the number of missions is big but they only last a few minutes each. You get to pick an approach, anywhere between hard-hitting up-close laser and lightning devastation or sneaky and cunning sniping mixed with calculated mortar bombardment, with which you then do as much damage as necessary to complete the objectives required to progress to the next mission. With roughly 38 missions in total, you won’t be starved for content. What’s the performance like? Consider the following; large outdoor landscapes with hills, lakes and mountains visible from afar; dynamic lighting brightening up the ground underneath explosions; texture-mapping (with perspective-correction) applied liberally on terrain, drones, buildings and vehicles; water with real-time reflections of ground, objects and special effects alike mirrored back at you with a jittery quality not unlike that of a liquid surface; large encounters between computer-controlled squads of characters all fiercely engaged in raging laser-spitting combat with fast thinking and reflexes involved; humanoid entities made up of multiple body parts and individually animated limbs with procedural leg motions enhanced by inverse-kinematics to account for surface elevation differences; these are some of the significant components that shape the technical foundation for Terra Nova, giving it an all-encompassing look and feel worthy of the game’s system requirements. You can turn some of the details down/off to increase performance further but I left the Master Detail at its default of maximum (everything except Ground Detail is dialled up to 11). I may cover alternative settings in a bonus video. This isn’t to say that it looks perfect in every way imaginable for an early 1996 game (the early-take-on-Trespasser-like image caching used for distant terrain gives the environmental geometry a blocky look) but the way some people talk about its presentation makes it clear they never played half of the stuff from ‘95 on a old Pentium and walked away with an ounce of understanding of how many tradeoffs programmers had to make when balancing looks with speed during this time. If it wasn’t up-close detail that ate sh*t, it was draw distance or level-of-detail that did it to save on performance and vice versa. I’m honestly surprised critics of the time singled this game out from the likes of Hi-Octane, Slipstream 5000, Flight Unlimited, Mechwarrior 2, Terminator: Future Shock and Screamer (etc.) because those sure as hell don’t run any smoother at higher detail settings in busy scenes, nor look significantly better in most regards. Mach 64 drivers: Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM default. AWE32 drivers: Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM default. This footage and audio was captured from the following computer: Gateway 2000 P5-90 case and motherboard (manufactured April 27th 1994) Intel 430NX chipset Intel Pentium 90 Mhz processor (S-Spec SX879, heatspreader is marked week 12 1994) 256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64 GX) 4 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision without white arrow, sticker with “FCC ID: EXM255” on card, manufactured around April 1994) Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, board manufactured week 8 1994, serial number is 2765) 48 MBs of FPM DRAM; 8MBx2 (Q1 1993) and 16MBx2 (week 10 1997) SIMM, 60ns The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x400 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Harbor shootout 2:32 - Destroying base 5:33 - Pirate hunting 8:00 - Cool character animations! 8:36 - Destroying fuel depot 11:31 - Capturing truck 13:14 - Snowfall ambush! 15:07 - Assisting convoy 17:26 - Sabotaging vats #terranova #pentium #awe32 #midi #ati #mach64 #soundblaster #periodcorrect #msdos #lookingglasstechnologies #lookingglassstudios #upscaling #datapath #gamecapture #visionrgb #e1s #softwarerendering #inversekinematics #430nx