twisted tree games

I think this came up in conversation on twitter a few weeks ago.

About 19 years ago, issue 33 of Amiga Format landed next to my A500+. One of the coverdisks looked like this:

It was a fractal landscape generator. Even back then, the images had a weird grainy charm to them and I spent many days setting up renders and waiting for the results. At the highest detail it took about 45 minutes to render an image, leading to some tense moments turning the TV back on to see if it had got to the final stage of rendering where the image started to become visible. If you were unlucky a piece of terrain that hadn’t appeared in the lower-resolution previews would have popped up in front of the camera and ruin the view!

If you take a look at the “Pages” links on the right hand side of this page you can flick through the tutorial that came in the magazine, including some lovely example shots of a virtual Yosemite valley.

When I have time, I might try and set up WinUAE and render some Vistas for old times sake and post them up, no doubt with more nostalgic blubbing :)

Edit: Fixed the link above, and here’s an image cropped from the magazine scan: