England's 50,000 square miles were denuded of forest in the mid-17th century, primarily to fuel the country's growling infernal engine of industrial development. Now you can reforest England in 13 minutes. SpeedTree plants a million unique trees in 500-square-mile plots in 8 seconds; 100 such plots suffice to undo the work of Charles I's contemporaries.
And these trees are not like the one your fire-phobic auntie retrieves from its box during the holidays. These trees are beautiful, richly rendered root and tree and branch. At the same time, they chew tiny amounts of processor resources. I flew at 130 miles an hour just above the verdant plane I had made, skimming over a million conifers and palms and hardwoods, with nary a hiccup from my 64MB GeForce3 Ti500 512RAM vehicle.
Your first chance to see SpeedTree in operation will probably come at Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. Other users include Warhammer Online and the hotly-anticipated Wish. Judging from these forests, well, I wish I could go there right now.
Warhammer Online!
I must see what those whacko Brits are up to now.
I love the world of Fantasy Battle. It's such a delicious mix of the voluptuous and the gritty. The question is, can we get enough true fans of that together to try to recreate it in vituousity... err, virtuality. When it comes to trashy fantasy novels, the Warhammer ones are the best. Okay, as an accredited critic I must rephrase that: What one expects to be trashy turns out to be self-consciously parodic in the vein of Monty Python. The foolishness rises, if briefly, to a level that winks in the direction of Lear. Never will they be mainstream, but that does not preclude them from being great fun, even to a sophisticated reader (or especially to).
Who me, drunk? Only on the wild dream that such a world might be brought to life!
And with trees! (I like trees.)
Posted by: Dan Scheltema | Oct 23, 2003 at 22:38