slightly ot: 1980s military flight simulator with flat-shaded polygon graphics

[Rusty Venture]

This reminds me of this program I saw talking about a former Soviet air base (the show was filmed in circa 2004 or so) and it covered some American pilot going there or something.

Other than the talk of lack of funding for the place, and the fact the place looked like it was falling apart (which they said it looked like that when it was funded and still maintained) the flight simulator was *FAR* behind what I was used to seeing the US military use.

If you ever used one of those car/plane games where you have the little model that is over a endless loop of paper "terrain", this thing was its gigantic big brother. I don't think this was that old of a simulator (maybe ~20 yrs old when the show was filmed) because they were training to fly Mig-29's, and there was a Mig-29 model on this thing. I don't think the U.S. Military has used something like that since the 1960's...maybe 1970's.

Even this simulator from 1981 totally blows that Soviet simulator away.

[parallaxscroll]

That's really interesting about the Soviet flight simulator, I'd like to see a video of it, if there is one.


BTW the Evans & Sutherland CT-5 stands for Continuous Tone 5. From what I gather continuous tone has something to do with scanline raster graphics. It was the 5th generation Image Generator, from a line that started in the 1970s. CT-5 was concidered a tremendous, major step forward in computer graphics at the time.

E&S CT-5's great rival from General Electric Aerospace, was the Compu-Scene line of image generators. i.e. CT-5 was equivalent to Compu-Scene IV. Many of the features of Compu-Scene were scaled down into the Model 1 and Model 2 arcade boards for Sega.

Perhaps in some way, the capabilities of E&S CT-5 were scaled down into the System 21 and System 22 boards for Namco. I'm not saying that's true, but it is known that E&S helped Namco with at least the System 22 board which first appeared with Ridge Racer in 1993.
I read that CT-5 eventually got texture-mapping capabilities in the 80s. The CT line as well as other IGs were eventually combined into one group, renamed ESIG (Evans & Sutherland Image Generator) in the mid-late 80s.

Evans & Sutherland developed a line of desktop PC graphics cards in the 1990s called REALImage. Guess what they were competing against? Lockheed Martin's Real3D line of PC graphics. Real3D was a decendant of CompuScene, and I assume REALImage was a decendant of the CT / ESIG lines.

Silicon Graphics was not the pioneer of 3D graphics, they simply refined it and marketed it more successfully in the 1990s. Evans & Sutherland was doing in the 60s and 70s what SGI was doing in the 80s and 90s. The same goes for the other great 3D graphics pioneer: General Electric Aerospace/Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin-Real3D (now mostly at ATI / AMD).

All of our modern 3D graphics, for our PlayStations, Dreamcasts, our Sega & Namco arcade games, our old 3DFX or modern GeForce & Radeon cards, our Xboxes, our Wii, etc etc *all* have their origin in one or both of the two great 3D graphics pioneers: Evans & Sutherland, or GE Aerospace.