I've Seen The Future!
Now that Back to the Future has become Back to the Past, it's time to re-evaluate our expectations of the future.
In 10 short years, I see computers with processors that have increased in power by an order of magnitude. Many terabytes of memory will be commonplace. Graphics cards will have multiple cores and have hundreds of gigabytes of dedicated memory. Hard drives will grow in capacity perhaps a thousand fold. And internet speed and bandwidth will skyrocket.
Naturally, ProFantasy products will evolve to take advantage of this technological explosion!
Campaign Cartographer 4 will no longer use symbols. Instead, its vast symbol library will be converted to 3D objects. 3D villages can be viewed at any camera angle, and with complex lighting possibilities. In fact, CC4 becomes an add-on to FT4.
Fractal Terrains 4 now has an editing resolution so fine that you can define a pebble on the beach. After creating a wonderful new planet, users zoom in to village scale to place 3D castles, houses, and farms. With support for 3D vegetation, newly created worlds are covered with forests and fields, that actually sway naturally in the wind. Temperature and rainfall are no longer just settings. There are now dynamic cloud systems that form and dissipate on their own, dropping rain and snow in accordance to user-definable weather patterns.
The newest product, MMO 4, allows the placement of animals, monsters, and interactive NPCs throughout the world, and lets groups of players adventure within that world.
World of Warcraft struggles to hold on to a fraction of the market share, while ProFantasy becomes not only the greatest mapping software company in the world, but the greatest gaming company as well!
Naturally, Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox have become their new spokesmen.
In 10 short years, I see computers with processors that have increased in power by an order of magnitude. Many terabytes of memory will be commonplace. Graphics cards will have multiple cores and have hundreds of gigabytes of dedicated memory. Hard drives will grow in capacity perhaps a thousand fold. And internet speed and bandwidth will skyrocket.
Naturally, ProFantasy products will evolve to take advantage of this technological explosion!
Campaign Cartographer 4 will no longer use symbols. Instead, its vast symbol library will be converted to 3D objects. 3D villages can be viewed at any camera angle, and with complex lighting possibilities. In fact, CC4 becomes an add-on to FT4.
Fractal Terrains 4 now has an editing resolution so fine that you can define a pebble on the beach. After creating a wonderful new planet, users zoom in to village scale to place 3D castles, houses, and farms. With support for 3D vegetation, newly created worlds are covered with forests and fields, that actually sway naturally in the wind. Temperature and rainfall are no longer just settings. There are now dynamic cloud systems that form and dissipate on their own, dropping rain and snow in accordance to user-definable weather patterns.
The newest product, MMO 4, allows the placement of animals, monsters, and interactive NPCs throughout the world, and lets groups of players adventure within that world.
World of Warcraft struggles to hold on to a fraction of the market share, while ProFantasy becomes not only the greatest mapping software company in the world, but the greatest gaming company as well!
Naturally, Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox have become their new spokesmen.
Comments
Ha ha ha! Nice wish list, my friend. I can hardly wait, whatever version it might be!
Cheers,
~Dogtag
Although I don't seriously expect all those changes, they certainly could all be accomplished in 10 years time if the desire were there.
However, that last line would probably be a bit tough to pull off.
With today's — or tomorrow's! — technology, they could be amazing.
3rd-Party Vendor Descriptions:
Realm Overseer 3D description (German) (English, translated by Google)
City Overseer 3D description (German) (English, translated by Google)
Free Demos that I downloaded back in 2004, before the company vanished!
- L'EssenTowerMap.zip
- RhyshoonMap.zip
- TellorreMap.zip
Note: The files above are zip archives hosted on my web server. The original files were self-extracting archives but they are tripping false positives in Avast! when downloading, so I repackaged them in normal, non-executable archives. When unzipped, they are self-contained, executable demos of CD2 maps, converted with the City Overseer 3D software. Be sure to check out the Settings>Options menu item.Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
Clearly that was just for fun, but the computer stuff probably wasn't all that unlikely. You are entirely correct about hard drives. But, in my defense, although it isn't quite accurate, I do think of SSDs as simply being a newer type of hard drive. It would have been more correct to say SSD instead, and I do hope that we will see 200 TB SSDs in the not too distant future! I've got a LOT of mapping to do, what with those 3D villages and all.
Only thing I found was patch and some demo files and that required a lot of searching and way backing.
Maybe a future version of CC will use obj, daz/poser models, and other 3d formats.