#on the horizon: just real tangible stuff to reference

[doctorbrown]

happy (by present-day standards) one hundred and fourth birthday to this old man right here!

i've never really nailed down a proper time for when i have doc's post-trilogy canon happening, it's always just x date post return to his present with the family. so i've been thinking about it and i needed something solid (for myself at least) to play off of with headcanons, with setting details, all that fun stuff.

so i think i'm leaning towards '87 or later. (of course this is all subject to change with whatever happens in a thread - i'm still totally open for him being wherever, whenever in his timeline).

so if his main default verse is set around 1987 or so, he's turning (chronologically) seventy-seven. officially, as far as the records are concerned, he's only sixty-seven this year.

[notsoharsh]

The Scholarly Adventures of Brain Girl and Blood Dude || Morgan & Harsh

TIMING: Mid July LOCATION: The Scribe HQ PARTIES: @mor-beck-more-problems and @notsoharsh SUMMARY: Morgan and Harsh take a little field trip to read a lot of dusty old books. 

Thanks to her super-strength, Morgan was able to pull more books for Harsh’s soul problem than she ever could have on her own. She lead him down the dusty shelves with the glee of a suburbanite at the fancy grocery store, plucking everything that seemed remotely tied to the subject at hand. “This place is pretty amazing, right? I mean just look at everything you can accomplish with some collective organization and, well, deep pockets, probably,” she said, smiling. “We’re casting a wide net, but, obviously, indexes are going to be our friend, so if you can’t find any of our keywords inside, just move it into a nope pile. I went ahead and put it on a flashcard.” She turned and passed him one. “I hope you don’t mind my getting a little excited. I get it, why you might not be, and it’s not that I don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. I think I just really miss having a reason to come back here.” And something concrete, even tangible, to hope for. 

So this was the Scribe HQ. Harsh hadn’t really thought about the place before, but somehow he had expected it to be harder to get into. Not like he was about to complain about that. He trailed after Morgan, eyes scanning the shelves. “It’s really… something.” He should probably be impressed, but with each title, he had to fight to keep his eyes from glazing over. There was so much. How were they ever going to find anything in here? He took the flashcard with a little nod. “It’s fine. Honestly, I was kinda surprised you were so up for this. And I get that. There’s… a lot in here. Did you come here a lot for witchy stuff?” He grabbed one of the books Morgan had selected, blowing the dust from the ancient cover before opening it and squinting at the writing. “This one looks like it’s just philosophy, ‘what does it mean to be ensouled’. I’m guessing there’s not really a section here with a bunch of how-to guides?”

Morgan continued to look, climbing onto stacks of books on the ground to reach higher ones. “Nope, just my curse. It went back over a hundred years deep so I had to trace back all these obnoxious second and third hand accounts to all the terrible things that happened to my ancestors trying to get down to the source. My mom had a lot of faults, but enforcing a well rounded magic education wasn’t one of them.” She balanced on the tips of her toes to get another book, On the Metaphysical Material of Human Essence, and jumped back down, grimacing only a little when she landed off and had to knock her ankle back into place. “Magic is complicated, Harsh,” she said. “In a good way! Say your magical heart’s desire is the number 20. You can get there by ten times two, or five times four, or fifteen plus five, or nineteen plus one. Lots of roads can get you to twenty. Also, witches are, historically, protective of their grimoires. And some spells are too sacred or too dangerous to really want to pass down, you know? Ooh, seriously, check the index of that philosophical one, though. There might be some reference to some, I don’t know, random Romanian death cult that was known to help vampires restore their souls. That would give us a lead to follow up on.” She moved on to the next shelf before popping her head around the corner again. “I’m kidding about the death cult, by the way. I don’t know if that’s a real thing. But it would be pretty cool if it was, right?”

“Shit. Y’know, as long as I’ve been dealing with this stuff, the whole ‘ancient curse’ thing is still kinda wild. I guess I need to expand my horizons a little more,” Harsh said, watching her scramble about. He should probably offer to help, but… she seemed pretty content. Even he could understand needing a project. That was a lot of numbers, but it sort of made sense. Kind of. “I’ve picked up on the protective thing. That coven weren’t the first ones I tried to go to. A bunch of them would’ve rather staked me than let me see any of their dusty old books. Yeah, got it.” He flicked through the book, finding the index number before scanning the pages again. “I’m not seeing Romanian death cults, but there’s some Latin stuff in here. Well, I think it’s Latin, but all I know is audio, video, disco, so we’re gonna need some translating if that’s actually gonna help much.” He chuckled as he set the book down and grabbed another. “Hey, trust me, death cults are very real. They throw some banging parties, but you never wanna stay too late. There was this one I ran into in Spain, and--well, that’s kind of a long story, but they would’ve been very into you. They were all about the brain eating stuff.” Trailing after her, he scanned the top rows of the shelves. “How about that one,” he said, pointing at an especially thick, black covered book. “Looks like it’s got little skulls on it, that’s gotta be good.” 

“Well a hundred years and change isn’t ancient-ancient,” Morgan admitted, still pleased to have impressed a vampire as old as Harsh. “But brain eating death cults? That’s kinda hot. Scary, but I’m okay with side hustling as a cult maiden. But the not staying too late, is that because after midnight is when they start to get actually all murder-y?” She laughed goodnaturedly at his suggestion about the skulls on the book. “You know, I have started coming around to the idea of skull iconography being a good omen, but this could just as well be about fun curses or potions.” She tried to climb up for it, but her short arms weren’t quite up to the task. She gave Harsh a sheepish look. “Maybe you could, uh--? And then we can start unpacking what we’ve bothered before we start looking again? I think thirty books makes for a solid beginning.”

“The ones I ran into always treated their zombies pretty well. One of them even made this cool throne for them, it was pretty badass. But yeah, usually they start the murdering right after Cinderella turns into a pumpkin. You get extra drinks if you bring someone to add to the murder pile.” Harsh decided to leave out just how many extra drinks he had managed to earn. Morgan was strangely cool with the soulless thing, but adding a couple dozen murders to that might push things a little too far. He snorted. “You don’t want to spider monkey your way up there? Yeah, I’ve got it,” he said. It was a little out of reach, even for him, but getting a leg up on one of the lower shelves was enough to grab it. The book was weirdly heavy. Maybe that meant it was extra full of magic or something. Hopping down from the shelf, he brushed the dust from the cover. “Yeah, seems like a good place to start. Which ones look the most ritual-y?” 

Morgan pouted as she reached for another, closer book. “I want a throne.Can it be made of bones? My girlfriend has a huge thing for bones. We’d look pretty together on a bone throne.” And for ceremonial purposes, maybe with the right amount of discretion and care with, well, offering selection, it might even be a halfway decent time. She smirked at the thought, wondering what kind of coronets death cults might make for their zombies. She laughed at Harsh’s joke and carried their haul to the nearest desk. The books tumbled from her stack and spread themselves over the surface. “Well, here’s the thing: a ritual with full instructions and ingredients is an endgame, a big ol’ golden goose. But, you know, this might start off with something a little more broad, a little more sketchy. We don’t want to turn our nose away from death cults or norwegian summoning stones or...whatever. Because some weird reference might lead us to the golden egg. And the actual golden egg might be buried in some other archive. And then, because we followed the breadcrumbs, we’ll find it in that other archive faster, and...sorry, I’m mixing way too many metaphors, huh? Anyways, I can start on the books on this end of the table, and you can start on the ones on that end? You read fast, yeah?”

“I’m pretty sure making it out of bones is required actually,” Harsh said, with a thoughtful nod. Honestly, it was a little surprising that White Crest didn’t have any death cults, at least as far as he knew. They didn’t tend to be very public. Attention moving to the books, he grabbed a few and pulled them close, scanning the titles. There were some promising ones in there at least. “Right, it would be boring if it was that easy anyway. This kinda thing seems like it needs a lot of bits and pieces before it goes together. The coven said something about ‘proving myself’ so if you see anything like that, just, I don’t know, highlight it or something. I read pretty quick, yeah.” He flicked through the pages of the first book, an older one laden with dust. The cover might have been green at one point. “Don’t think there’s any eggs in this one. It does have a spell for cooking them though. I think this one’s more basic rituals than the big one we’re after. It does have a little thing about summoning, but mostly just bats and rats and stuff. Any luck over there?”

Morgan was running her finger down the index of the volume in front of her, picking out anything that looked remotely undead or soul related and flipping to the corresponding pages. There were a few technical magic terms that stuck out that she wanted to look at as well before she wrote off the reference as a dead end for this volume. She reached for another and started the process all over again. “Not yet, although, you know, lots of fun stuff about necromancy. And vampire cults, although I guess you already know whatever you want to about that stuff.” She balanced the next one precariously on her lap and started flipping back and forth, one section after the other. “This one looks like it has lots of serious lore, though. We’re talking old myths, druidic shit, some stuff I...can’t actually read. Do you know this language?” She passed the book over to Harsh, finger hovering over the photograph of some runes. 

“I guess necromancy is sort of near what we’re looking for,” Harsh said a little dubiously. Honestly, he didn’t know nearly enough about magic to be sure. It seemed to make sense though. They both had to do with souls and restoring them. Or something. “Vampire cults can be kind of cool, but most of them are pretty anti-soul, so I don’t know if they would be super helpful.” He reached for the book, brow furrowing as he scanned the runes. “Sort of. It looks like Sanskrit, just a little off. I wonder if it’s like some ancient dead version.” His fingers trailed over the letters as he muttered to himself, working to muddle through the meaning. “I think it’s talking about a ritual. It’s a lot of sorta spiritual stuff, but… I think some of it sounds pretty legit. Some of the words are kind of weird, but I think it’s saying there are three, uh, three pieces you need to retrieve a soul. And then there’s some words I don’t know, this one just means really, really old. What about the other bits, the druidic stuff?” he asked, passing the book back as he moved closer to read over Morgan’s shoulder. 

“You never know. Maybe understanding more about how you get rid of them could help us understand how to get one to come back.” Morgan said. Harsh couldn’t afford to turn down any possibility, and neither could she, if she wanted to be good for more than just cheerleading. But as Harsh looked over the text and translated, Morgan started to wonder if the search would be so hard after all. “That...that might just be what we’re looking for! Look, this sigil here, means spirit, but it’s sort of a vague all encompassing sort of an idea, it could me soul, intuition, intention, but when you look at these wrapped around it, you get a soul’s last regret. And when you look at its placement in the circle, it's on a material vector, an ingredient. But it’s also in the center, where you do the conjuring for what you want to accomplish. And in that place it’s also joined by this little squiggly? It signifies a joining, of two planes or two pieces, you see it sometimes in certain kinds of alchemy circles and binding magic.” Her face cracked wide into a smile. Harsh, it’s a spell to bind a soul to a body! It’s real!” Morgan shot up from her chair, almost toppling the book to the floor. “Harsh, your cure is real! I mean, I’m going to need to do more work to figure out the other ingredients, and we need to follow up on that Sanskrit, because that might be important, and who even knows how we’re going to even get some of these things once we know what they are, but still!” She jumped on her toes to give him as strong a hug as her arms could manage. “It’s possible. And that’s what matters most right now, right?”

“That’s a good point, actually. I sort of always thought of them as being two really different things, but… I’m not really an expert on any of this. I should’ve done way more research ages ago.” Harsh had thought as much before, several times… and then done basically nothing. He’d had two hundred years to learn this and he had thrown all that time away. Oh well, he was doing it now. That had to count for something. He nodded vaguely as Morgan went on, doing his best to follow along. It was a little beyond him, but the pieces he could parse were encouraging enough to make a grin slowly spread across his face. “Holy shit--Morgan, you’re amazing!” Meeting her halfway, he locked his arms around her with enough force to lift her off the ground, spinning the both of them in a circle. “You figure out what we need and I’ll get it,” he said as he set her down, still grinning widely. “Whatever we need, just leave it to me.” 

[miloqnzh925]

An Unbiased View of Music Vlog

Explore the world by means of You, Tube travel channels and vlogs Nathan Hutchinson/ Getty Images, The art of travel has actually altered beyond all acknowledgment in the past couple of years. What as soon as cost a fortune and took weeks of preparation can now be documented on a phone and by scheduling a flight en route to the airport. Here's a selection of You, Tube's finest travel channels and vlogs that showcase the creativity the brand-new medium opens up to everyone. Travel stories have actually been shared orally from the earliest days of humanity. Yarns of terrific adventure might have been decorated with the periodic sea monster and one-eyed giant, however even these fanciful accounts had some basis in truth.

Travel books, premium photography and paper accounts quickly followed, prior to TV took control of and brought amazing sights into living rooms worldwide. Individuals who never ever believed they would experience the magic of travel for themselves were now provided the urge to explore, therefore a boom in the tourism industry followed. Today, thanks to the expansion of online travel, you can see the world with the simple click of a button. It's not constantly easy to view other individuals live out fantasy way of lives while we can just search enviously, preparing our annual getaways from house. Sorelle Amore has benefited more than many, but her graciousness and warm approach to viewers make her journey even more satisfying to enjoy.

Having actually checked out the nation extensively, Varhun is now taking on the surrounding area and is eager to get other Indians to do the very same. We really like the way cost is at the top of the list of factors to consider when it pertains to this vlog an uncommon but welcome consideration. Likeable Geroge Benson has actually carefully decided to separate his enthusiasm for travel from his love of football. The travel channel follows George as he checks out different areas in his special design, whereas the vlogger's other channel focuses on his beloved Chelsea FC. You'll be pleased to understand George's dreadful life options appear to be limited to his sporting preferences.

The 10-Minute Rule for Travel Vlog

Mark Wiens has cultivated a big following online, and it's simple to see why. His love of food and desire to hurl himself into every obstacle is transmittable. While perhaps not for travel perfectionists, Migrationology is still one of the most helpful channels to follow on the platform. Once of this parish, Eva zu Beck is now among the most popular characters on the travel circuit. Her videos typically feature the locations we seldom see covered by mainstream media, making her informative take a look at the world particularly welcome. Eva's rise to fame began with a number of early videos going viral in Pakistan, and she hasn't looked back given that.

The only problem these vloggers face is that they are prone to ending up being victims of their own success. Every action away from the "budget plan" idea seems to be a huge mistake, thrusting them back into the clutches of sponsors and brand names excited to capitalise on their distinct skills. This is one group that we want to see less of as their format works finest in periodical dosages - music videos. Marine biology graduate Mike Corey prides himself on taking on the more extreme side of travel through his online experiences. Not all of his choices are worth suggesting, as some border on unethical.

The slick production values on his videos are extremely planned, making Mike a simple watch. Boasting over 1 billion video views and 5 million followers on social media, Drew Binksy has been championed by a number of brands in the fairly short time he has been https://en.search.wordpress.com/?src=organic&q=vlog a professional travel blog writer (vlog). His supreme aim is to check out every nation in the world something he was so near doing before the coronavirus break out. We're sure his experiences will continue again soon, and in the meantime, he can keep refining his golf swing, a sport he frequently takes part in when travelling. Part of the broader byfood.

The smart Trick of Vlog That Nobody is Talking About

The main focus is the nation's culinary delights, but host Shizuka Anderson clearly has a style for travel blogging, too. Explaining herself as a Tokyoite, the presenter winds up discovering locations that would light up any Instagram feed. music vlog. It's one to have a look at if you require enhancing your social media video game. Chas Bruns totally embraces the thrifty lifestyle he espouses in this vlog all about the virtues of penny-pinching. Chas hunts out the least expensive experiences and holidays he can, sharing his ideas with viewers. This series might not be the most polished one on this list, however it's perhaps the most beneficial.

This daring travel specialist might initially look like the stereotypical travel man all of us wish to avoid on vacation, but he's actually established a keen eye for the unanticipated. Louis is a fantastic host who is at his finest when removing on his own with just a small video camera for business. Travel couples are most likely the most irritating people across social media. There's a fragile balancing act in between being extremely smug and fortunate and really appealing and helpful, but Kara and Nate simply about get it right. Their objective of checking out 100 countries by 2020 has actually now been achieved, so we do wonder if the pair will be decreasing, especially offered how tough it is to travel at the minute.

Each destination they visit gets the documentary-style treatment, and their videos are all the better for it. If you're interested in what it's like to live in a country, then Gareth Leonard's much deeper technique to take a trip is for you. The flashy, short-form videos that other vloggers goal for really aren't worth your time if you wish to check out a brand-new place with someone crazy about broadening cultural horizons. Gareth takes his time with each piece of material and provides a series that will make you want to discover more before you travel. Another terrific vlog with a strong focus on food is Miss Mina, hosted by the eponymous Mina Oh.

Best Travel Vlog - An Overview

Both are riveting in their own method, although food videos are absolutely the strength throughout. This honest travel vlog is packed loaded with practical ideas and helpful info. Making viral content does not seem at the forefront of Mark Wolters' thinking, as he and his household explore the world. All of it began with one travel let-down and has now blossomed into a splendidly useful resource. Don't be put off by the rather troubling name of the vlog Aly (who is a psychology graduate from England) is really a great host and guide. Aly is so good that she's self-published a book to assist others seeking to take a trip to some of the lots of locations she has actually visited.

One man making a genuine change is Phil of Philwaukee popularity, who has actually partnered with the Matador Network for this series. It's fun, loaded with positive vibes and something we really want to see more of. Leaping into a vintage Volkswagen (VW) van and repeling into the sundown is the stuff teenage dreams are made from. It's likewise the reality that this vlog follows, as two brave tourists intend to go off the grid and find their own experiences all over the world. VW vans obviously have various nicknames depending on where you are for Brits, they are referred to as camper vans, while Americans call them buses. music video.

Originally from Australia and now settling into the Los Angeles way of life by way of a significant remain in Shanghai, Jenny Zhou's career is just as interesting as her travel content. There are some excellent on-location videos on her channel, however as Jenny attempts to make it in the acting world, we wonder how numerous more travel videos we'll get. There's still plenty to explore in the vlogger's back brochure though, and her Shanghai movies, in particular, produce enjoyable watching.

The Ultimate Guide To Music Vlog

Vlogging has actually ended up being a very popular way for wanderers to package up their adventures and share them with the world. On the viewer side, they condense a whole mess of info down into a tight little bundle, as well as offering a real and tangible sense of what a place might be like, assisting you evaluate whether it deserves a see or not. However not all vloggers are produced equivalent. To help you sort the wheat from the chaff, we have actually gathered a list of the 16 finest and most influential travel vloggers that you should be following in 2021, particularly if this is the year that you're going to explore the land down under!Max & Lee are an Australian/ Canadian couple and in addition to their cute Australian Shepherd dog Occy, they have great enjoyable tape-recording their vlog travel adventures for their huge 1.

If you're a fan of Van Life, then this video blog is for you. You can get some awesome ideas to assist you get your own experience on the road. It might seem a little cocky to call yourself The Specialist Vagabond, however this is a title that Matthew Karsten has well and genuinely earned - vlog. He's been on the road for over 8 years, and is showing no sign of slowing down, in spite of the reality that he's now a dad. He's racked up over 50,000 subscribers on You, Tube, over 150,000 fans on Instagram, and runs an effective and popular blog.

You'll notice an unique lack of Australia on that list, however he can't be too away best Matt?A You, Tube veteran of 13 years and counting, in the last few years Overlander TELEVISION has actually taken its vlog to the next level, with a professional electronic camera crew catching stunning, cinema-level footage. A number of years ago Overlander produced an 87 minute feature film called Australian Motorcycle Adventure, which followed Mark Shea on an impressive two-wheeled tour along Australia's West Coast. With over 23 million channel views and screenings of Shea's movie worldwide, Overlander is revealing a simple You, Tube channel can turn into so much more!Careening towards one million customers, Marko and Alex Ayling are acclaimed travel videographers that let their pictures do (most of) the talking.

Not known Facts About Vlog

They've covered most of the globe, including Australia, so if you're trying to find a little bit of Oz travel inspo particularly the areas that produce the very best shots head to their channel and sign up with the movement!Looking for inspiration that is a little bit more unusual and adrenaline sustained? Brave & Far is run by Mike Corey, who enjoys experiencing (and recording) action-packed hijinks worldwide. Don't expect any run of the mill surroundings shots here; Corey is only interested in activities that disgust, amuse and/or thrill, as his 300K+ You, Tube followers will attest. Kirsten and Siya are a funny, captivating, adventure-loving couple now with a child in tow that appear to attract followers for their characters as much as the destinations they showcase.

The set have collected practically 300,000 customers, and took a trip to Australia in 2017, producing videos along the way (music videos). With over 700,000 You, Tube customers, British backpacker Ben Brown has actually made a profession out of feeding his travel addiction by developing an army of excited fans. Ben has taken a trip all over from the Arctic to Australia and Africa, shooting in an individual, POV style so that you seem like you're right there in among the action and when it comes to his most popular upload, in a cars and truck crash!Hey, Nadine! This travel blogger is a fountain of knowledge when it pertains to take a trip pointers, tricks and hacks, offering up a genuine encyclopaedia of valuable material.

[entergamingxp]

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a once-in-a-generation wow moment • Eurogamer.net

Of course, the first thing I do in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is fly over my house. Heading out from London City Airport in the nimble, aerobatic Extra 330LT, and up into the late evening sky to see the sun melt into the horizon. Skimming The O2, then grazing the tips of Canary Wharf’s mob of skyscrapers before banking left over the Isle of Dogs, buzzing the Royal Naval College as we head up over Greenwich Park and then Blackheath as London blooms into parkland south of the Thames.

Then it’s simply a case of looking out for the cluster of buildings that marks Lewisham to the right, dipping right then left once again to pick up the Waterlink Way. And there it is. My home. In a video game, for what I’m pretty sure is the very first time. I step away from the controls and out into my garden, slightly dizzy from it all, only to see the sky has darkened to the exact same shade of hazy blue as the one I was just flying through.

Microsoft Flight Simulator isn’t the first game to pull in real-world map or weather data to make for a more authentic simulation, nor is it the first game to try and bring us the entire world. But there’s an alchemy here that goes beyond bullet point feature lists or plain numbers, blending together to create one of those rare wow moments that come along once a generation, or that maybe herald the next. This really is a phenomenal thing.

To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings

Think of Microsoft and video games and you might think that Halo’s the flagship, though I’ve often thought Flight Simulator is where you’ll find its real heart. It predates Windows – the first entry came back in 1982, though you can trace its heritage back even further to Bruce Artwick’s pioneering work in the late 70s – and is as quintessentially Microsoft as Encarta: an open-armed, technically astute piece of software that offers an education in the pleasures and particulars of flight. And, for one reason or another, the last entry in the series was Flight Simulator X back in 2006.

“I mean, we did have Microsoft Flight in the middle of it all,” Microsoft’s head of Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann says in wry reference to 2012’s failed reboot. “I don’t know if flight simulators went out of fashion as such. We always re-evaluate priorities – I wasn’t actually around back in 2007, but when [Flight Simulator X developer] Aces Team essentially was divested, the priorities were just different. It was very much about Xbox. Maybe that was the reason. But Flight Sim X was certainly a very successful product, both critically and financially. So I don’t think that was the reason – our focus just shifted over to console.”

This new Microsoft Flight Simulator is of course intended for console at some point – though there’s no real further detail on an Xbox release just yet – but first and foremost it’s a continuation of the PC’s longest-running series, and built upon the foundation of Flight Simulator X. “The idea was to understand everything that had been written, and with a lot of respect to the team that did that,” Martial Bossard, lead technical engineer at Asobo, the lead developers of Flight Sim 2020, tells us. “We had the chance to talk to some of these guys – and to select layers to improve. You’ll find a lot of code from Flight Simulator X in there, even right now.”

FSX was notoriously difficult to run back in the day, but Flight Sim 2020 is a much more forgiving affair – I was able to run high-end settings on a 1660ti and i5-9400, and you’ll get decent results out of a 970. DF will be along soon to give you a full rundown of the tech side of things.

Indeed, why would you throw away something that’s supported by a community of players and third-party developers that’s still thriving some 14 years on? “We benefited a tonne from that because basically, from day one, the sim worked,” says Neumann. “We just made it better one layer at a time. We stood on this wonderful platform and we try to try to improve it wherever we go.”

There’s even a legacy mode that lets you play with the older simulation model while enjoying all the visual splendour that’s now been layered on top, and for Flight Simulator X veterans there’s a commitment to make sure some of the more intricate set-ups are supported from day one. “The idea was to try as much as possible not to break anything,” says Bossard. “The goal was to always improve, never break.”

Of course, the immediately apparent improvement is in the visuals, a fascinating blend of machine learning, real-world map and weather data, plus some smart streaming technology that combines for one of the most visually arresting games of the moment. It’s an unashamed focus of this new Microsoft Flight Simulator, and according to Neumann was the number one request from the community. “The thing that came out from simmers was they were actually quite happy in their flight sim space,” he says. “But they all said the same thing – why is it that we are so far behind things like Forza? That was interesting! And it was all about visuals – I was like, we can do that!”

Fuel for thought

The technology that underpins the new Flight Simulator isn’t unprecedented. Indeed, you might have even played a game that had some form of it in before. Back in 2009 Asobo made Fuel, a ludicrously ambitious open world racing game that boasted a map of some 5,500 square miles.

“With Fuel the idea was to create a very detailed world with very little memory,” says technical lead Martial Bossard. “We had a bunch of techniques to bring details to surfaces, and basically they’re the same kind of techniques we use to improve the photogrammetry [in Flight Simulator]. If you take the raw photogrammetry information, it’s pretty rough, right? It works when you’re flying, but as soon as you’re next to the ground, you need more detail. The new part was to add these photogrammetry studies to do classification to discern exactly where there’s grass with rocks and forests, trees, buildings and so on. But this technical stuff for adding details on areas which have been designed as rocks is specifically the same kind of technique back in Fuel. There’s some shared DNA on both projects that was even if the philosophy of the engine is not the same but at least there’s some common points.”

Do that they have, as you’ll know if you’ve seen any of the trailers in the run-up to Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is an astonishingly pretty thing, with fulsome self-shadowing clouds depositing tangible volumes of rain that, if caught by a sun that also makes for dazzling dawns and dusks, can create volumetric rainbows. It’s backed up with detail that conspires to make something that looks utterly real; skyscrapers cast shadows over each other that darken as you reach street level, cities disperse light at night that radiates the sky, while attention has been paid to make sure the colour temperature of street lights is appropriate.

Head away from the cities and you might discover some of the world’s great mountain ranges where air currents whip up the slopes, or maybe head to the ocean and witness waves foaming against tropical islands, where water’s behaviour is subject to the weather and the wind. Head even further down to the ground and the grass sways to the same forces, while casting the gentlest green glow upon the underside of your plane. Microsoft Flight Simulator can be as beautiful as the earth itself.

Which might be because Microsoft Flight Simulator’s aim is to provide as faithful a recreation of the earth itself as possible. You’ve likely seen the numbers, and impressive they are: there are some 37,000 airports, an entire world it’d take some 14 years to see from the seat of a Cessna and one that contains some two whole petabytes of data, all told. Not that you’ll have to store all that yourself, of course, with Flight Simulator’s world delivered via streaming technology (it will be perfectly possible to play offline, with the procedural part of Asobo’s magic doing the heavy lifting, though there won’t be quite the same amount of detail as if you were playing with a connection).

It’s not a perfect recreation, of course, with buildings being pulled from types, the type determined by a matrix of data from Bing Maps and machine learning so that the brickwork or architectural style is about right. Look back at the flight from London City to Lewisham and you’ll see that Cesar Pelli’s pyramid-capped One Canada Square is now a nondescript skyscraper, and while I didn’t get quite close enough to check I’m fairly sure the shed out the back of my house where I’ve been playing Flight Sim these past few weeks isn’t there. The illusion holds, though, even when flying at low altitude – compare it to a contemporary sim such as X-Plane 11 and, even with Orbx’s excellent TrueEarth add-on enabled, it’s a whole world away.

Multiplayer features, and you’re able to choose whether to muck around with friends or join an instance with more sim-minded players.

Something like X-Plane 11 is a hard-edged, unashamed sim, of course – though despite it’s massively increased marketing budget and place in the mainstream, so too is Microsoft Flight Simulator. “We basically said from the get go, this is a sim for simmers,” says Neumann, perhaps wary of the mistakes made by Microsoft Flight. “Make no mistake about it. Because if you’re not holding on to what the fibre of what Flight Simulator is, you get confused.” Indeed, the sim side runs as deep and is often as staggering as the efforts to make the world believable. I’m no aviation expert with only a couple of hours of flight time under my belt, but these planes, whether it’s a goliath Boeing 747 or more sprightly Icon A5, feel legit.

The new flight model’s a marked improvement over Flight Simulator X, with air shears and drafts more pronounced thanks to better aerodynamics modelling, combined with more surface points per plane being simulated. Ground effect plays a bigger factor as you descend, providing a soft cushion that’s much appreciated if you’ve just had a landing gear failure that forces you to attempt a belly landing. Or maybe you’ll take that Icon A5 and attempt a water landing on any of the planet’s bodies of water, and then proceed to take off from that same point too.

In the cockpit, there’s the dizzying array of functioning dials and instruments with often mysterious purposes, each there to be prodded and poked as you work through the exhaustive, exhausting checklist of procedures that need to be run through before getting airborne. Or, you could not. That deliciously nerdy, astonishingly detailed side of Microsoft Flight Simulator is there – as it should be, lest they incur the wrath of my nephew who draws out by hand his own flight checklist before every excursion he takes in Flight Simulator X – but there’s also the option to have a virtual co-pilot do all the busywork, cueing you up at the end of the runway with little more to worry about than your throttle, yoke and rudders.

To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to fly yourself, you’ll know that rush you get when you’re first given control and you realise that not only is the act of flying yourself as exhilarating as you’d hoped, it’s actually not all that difficult to grasp. Flying in Microsoft Flight Simulator is freeing and fun, and perfectly possible without an encyclopedic knowledge of aviation law and a PhD in aerospace engineering. I’ve even guided a Boeing 747 into the skies from Heathrow with nothing more than an Xbox controller – and at a certain point, it’s possible to just engage the autopilot, kick back and enjoy the flight. If you feel bold enough to land there are prompts, assists and racing-line-style virtual overlays to help bring you safely to ground.

There’s even the lightest throughline provided by way of a flight school and missions in the shape of landing challenges and bush trials that have you navigating your way through the wilderness. Or you could play it as the sandbox Microsoft Flight Simulator has always intended to be. Take whatever plane takes your fancy, spin the globe and take off from anywhere in the world – maybe somewhere you’ve always dreamed of visiting, or maybe somewhere a bit more local so you can get the new sense of home that flight gifts you. And then, you ask yourself – where next?

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/microsoft-flight-simulator-is-a-once-in-a-generation-wow-moment-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=microsoft-flight-simulator-is-a-once-in-a-generation-wow-moment-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[tak4hir0]

Mercury Venus Earth You Are Here Moon Mars Jupiter Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Saturn Titan Uranus Neptune Pluto (we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now. Pretty empty out here. Here comes our first planet... As it turns out, things are pretty far apart. We’ll be coming up on a new planet soon. Sit tight. Most of space is just space. Halfway home. Destination: Mars! It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship.  Better be some good in-flight entertainment.  In case you're wondering, you'd need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours. Sit back and relax. Jupiter is more than 3 times as far as we just traveled. When are we gonna be there? Seriously. When are we gonna be there? This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up.  Too bad they're all too small to appear on this map. I spy, with my little eye... something black. If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi/hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth. All these distances are just averages, mind you.  The distance between planets really depends on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun. So if you're planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map. If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets. The New Horizons space craft that launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter. Don't worry. It'll take a lot less than 13 months to scroll there. Pretty close to Jupiter now. Sorry. That was a lie before. Now we really are pretty close. Lots of time to think out here... Pop the champagne! We just passed 1 billion km. I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale.  It's not hard to draw the planets.  It's the empty space that's a problem. Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space. We're used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this. When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt... Those things are too much for our brains to handle. We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them. We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers. Even so, they never seem to work. Let's try a few metaphors anyway... You would need of these screens lined up side-by-side to show this whole map at once. If this map was printed from a quality printer (300 pixels per inch) the earth would be invisible, and the width of the paper would need to be 475 feet. 475 feet is about 1 and 1/2 football fields. Even though we don’t really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive lengths of time and space.  A drop of water can carve out a canyon. An amoeba can become a dolphin. A star can collapse on itself. It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it. There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist. It’s a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we’d have no point of reference at all. We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand. All this emptiness really could drive you nuts. For instance, if you’re in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up. You see and hear things that aren’t there. The brain isn't built to handle "empty." "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness." Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy of a few select wavelengths. For everything else, we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real. The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying. When you hear people talk about how, "there’s more to this universe than our minds can conceive of" it's usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that you're watching late at night when you can’t get to sleep. Even when Shakespeare wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – he's basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable. But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice. You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring. Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe. Even an atom is mostly empty space. If the proton of a hydrogen atom was the size of the sun on this map, we would need 11 more of these maps to show the average distance to the electron. Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty... but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us. You could safely say the universe is a "whole lotta nothing." If so much of the universe is made up of emptiness, what does that mean to people like us, living on a tiny speck in the middle of all of it? Is the known universe 99.9999999999999999999958% empty? Or is it 0.0000000000000000000042% full? With so much emptiness, aren't stars, planets, and people just glitches in an otherwise elegant and uniform nothingness, like pieces of lint on a black sweater? But without the tiny dots for it to stretch between, there would be no emptiness to measure, and for that matter, no one around to measure it. You might say that so much emptiness makes the tiny bits of matter that much more meaningful - simply by the fact that, against all odds, they aren't empty. If you're drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal. What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They wouldn't be special at all. It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time. Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us. It's reassuring to know that no matter how depressingly bleak or ridiculously momentous we feel, the universe, judging by its current structure, seems well aware of both extremes. The fact that you're here, in the midst of all this nothing, is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it. Congratulations on making it this far. This is how fast light travels... It's the fastest speed allowed by the universe... Seriously. If you're in a hurry to get somewhere in space... you'll need to take it up with Mr. Einstein.

[sarahburness]

5 Reasons Why You Need to Stop Taking Life Seriously

Pretentious title, but far from a call to adopt a stance of apathy within this wondrous and dynamic reality we exist together in.

Well, no. It’s quite the opposite.

The insight I’d like to share with you today is the equivalent of an open-handed, movie-cliche slap to the face, regretfully but lovingly administered to pull a panicked comrade back from the brink of a full-blown meltdown catalyzed by a collapse of rational, critical thinking.

This short read is nothing special. Basically, it’s a reminder of the same thing you’ve always known, but for some reason decided to stuff far too deep into your travel pack. And of course, the bug sprays and painkillers at the top of the pile provide less incentive to dump the bag to re-evaluate priorities of survival.

My motivation this day is to encourage within you a willingness to consider the game you’re immersed in from a different hilltop. It’s one with a joy-horizon not obscured by the clouds of stress or grief.

Brevity is always the best way to get a message across, so let’s sink our teeth into the meat of this feast. Let’s skip the greens for a time when protocol dictates we munch on a smaller fare to prolong social interaction.

Enough ramble, let’s dive in.

Here are practical considerations to stop taking our lives so seriously:

Reason #1: You’re Gonna Die

This is definitely the most obvious and important point I need to share.

If your attention wanders to YouTube videos of dogs wearing hats before you read this essay’s completion, at least commit yourself to finishing this first segment’s diatribe. That way, you’ll still walk away with a much-needed reminder to stop giving such a serious fuck to whatever drama encompasses your life.

I can’t speak for Jesus. I can’t speak for yogis, mystics or other tight-lipped people about prolonging a physical body eternally. However, I can suggest to you that there’s a high degree of probability the animal vessel you occupy will slowly break down. It’ll become enfeebled, endure a six-foot covering of dirt or an unceremonious barbecue behind closed doors, severing your tangible connection to this physical world.

So, let’s look at death from both sides of the coin.

If you believe in a mechanistic, uncaring, fluke of a Universe that big-banged you from dumb luck and random chance, every second of your existence here should be valued as the only shot you’ll ever have to experience happiness or contentment.

So, why would you spend one second engaged in something you don’t want to do? Why would you fill your days ingesting toxic food? Why would you consume tainted water? And why would you believe the ridiculous ideas corporate entities endlessly serve to keep you in perpetual fear of living out your most heartfelt desires?

If you believe in the continuity of spirit, eternal life or any form of reality after the Earth-plane, the same basic questions apply — why would you spend a single second in fear of tackling head on each and every beckoning to revel in the experience of a unique, fleeting world? What could an eternal spirit possible have to worry about?

Don’t think about your fear. The time to jump into the deep end is now.

Whatever your beliefs, the most important thing you need to realize is the only time you’ll ever have at your disposal is this very moment.

If your job is boring, quit it. If your woman sucks the life out of you, ditch her. Or if you tap the snooze alarm ritually, it’s probably the time to consider making fundamental changes to the way you navigate your reality.

You can start climbing any moment you choose.

See Also: 7 Easy Ways to Remove Negative Energy and Unnecessary Stress

Reason #2: Your Telepathic Skills are Most Likely Not Great

I’ve met some bonafide empaths and psychics over the years. For the most part, humans are unable to step into the minds of their fellow creatures and accurately read the thoughts/emotions/intentions of the entity standing 2-feet from their face.

When we inject our personal spin on the motives of another, our egoic speculations are almost always a cause for grief. Judgment and faulty perception lead to obsessive and tormenting conjecture, such as…

“That person must hate me. Why else would she have said that? Look at her hair. What was she thinking? I wonder if my ass looks fat in these jeans. Oh, I forgot to check my Facebook updates, I’m sure someone liked my recent post by now. I’m gonna order nachos, I think they’re gluten-free. Oh yeah, forgot about that nasty person.”

And on and on…

The point here is simple and quick:

Stop judging other people’s journeys when you’ve never sampled their footwear. Stop caring about what people might think of you.

You wanna impress someone? Impress yourself and forget the tortuous speculations of how fellow explorers might perceive you.

Adopt an empathetic approach to life, applying it both to yourself and others. Keep in mind that your travel comrades have been just as duped as you to believe iPhones and designer clothing have any bearing on self-worth. The contributions necessary to healing this broken world will never come with a “Made in China” stamp.

Reason #3: You’ve Been Lied To

I’m doing my best to keep these points as concise and simplified as possible. However, there would be nothing more fulfilling to me right now than to break into a 97-part series about all the things we’ve accepted over the years as “truth.”

From politics to health to relationships to government to history to the very nature of the cosmos, everything our “protectors” have weaned us upon is manipulated, twisted, and skewed. They are so far from authenticity that “facts” are more accurately perceived by assuming the exact opposite of whatever vomit the media spews out.

Ironically, I can probably sum up this segment faster than any of the others with a simple statement. It comes not from a paranoid, untrusting person who rebels for the sake of rebelling, but from one who has experienced the buffet of media and culture first hand.

“Do not accept the sustenance proffered without sampling the fare. It makes no sense to fill your belly with fodder that causes indigestion, bloating or queasiness just because it’s familiar, convenient or steadily dined upon by the rest of the tribe. If the menu is unpalatable, learn to cook for yourself.”

Reason #4: Other Realities Exist

It’s tough to broach this topic in the mainstream without coming across as a foil-hatted nut job. I have a sneaking suspicion that within a decade or two, this next topic might just become the motivation for humans to rediscover the adventurous, limitless nature that lies at the core of our essence.

The subject here is lucid dreaming.

I will forego elaboration for the sake of a concise post. However, I would urge you to do a bit of research into this fascinating practice. Let me share with you the key insight I’ve learned from conscious awareness while in the “dream” world.

Earth is not the only game in town. No matter how much the gods of science and media love to dismiss the things they can’t measure, there’s far more happening under our very noses than the Facebook updates and Netflix subscriptions we’ve come to accept as the comforting norm.

There are other realities beyond the JunkieSphere we inhabit. I’ve visited, I’ve played ball. If a man of science wants to tell me there’s nothing more to my astral experiences than a delusion of synapses firing in my brain, I could easily make the argument Earthland conforms to the exact same parameters.

They’re equally both real or both fake — no further elaboration needed.

If you want to explore beyond your job at the office and renew your zest for life, I’ll give you a dozen links to start your journey of lucid dream exploration. Or just call me, I love shooting the shit with weirdos. Track me down through the bio.

Reason #5: Egos Are Fictional

Perhaps another obvious one, but worthy of a last loving slap to the face.

You can shift your ideals and views of the world you live in with a single thought. Your ego is a fiction you’ve created to provide a frame of reference to experience the world. It doesn’t have to control you any more than Instagram does.

An ego is capricious. It’s fickle, fluctuating, and endlessly malleable. The wider you open your doors of perception, the less controlled you’ll be by it. The less you define it, the grander your nature will become. The less often you feed it the spiritual Cheetos it joneses for, the wider the panorama of clarity will stretch, facilitating an ever-deepening understanding of cause and effect.

Maybe the person you hate at work isn’t a vindictive monster because she never gives you the days off you request. Maybe she’s just feeling impotent to change her own world, unconsciously projecting her shortcomings on the people around her. Or maybe life here on Earth isn’t the stress-filled, grab-as-many-prizes-before-the-circus-ends kind of carnival we’ve been led to believe it was. Perhaps, it’s just a unique opportunity to discover the very nature of who we are, what we are, and why we’ve chosen to pay the extra five bucks to enter the freak-show tent.

I’m not an expert on evolution, creationism or pretty much anything else for that matter. I can’t say for certain why humans wander this planet, but I’ve committed my days to digging as deeply as possible into the existential questions that haunt us all.

It’s up to us to choose when and where we ride

Perhaps, candy-floss isn’t the healthiest thing to walk away with as the carnies shut down the midway for the night, but I’m in no position to judge what might satisfy the longings of a wayward soul. We’re all doing our best to understand the endless stream of data thrown at us. The only way to do so is to experience the roller-coaster with arms up in the air as it peaks each crest. Sometimes, the attraction sucks and other times, we feel compelled to buy another ticket. Either way, it’s up to us.

Life is an amusement park that should be enjoyed, not wandered through in fear of every megaphone-announced call to action. The snake-oil tonics and rigged bottle-toss games will always be part of the show, but we can pass them by just as easily as convincing ourselves happiness couldn’t possibly exist without partaking in whatever the rest of the crowd is doing.

When you pass a long line of humans standing patiently, waiting to give the flavor-of-the-month a lick, don’t feel compelled to take a position among them. There’s a good chance the raspberry/crack cocaine swirl wasn’t engineered with your best interests at heart. Sample if you must, but also consider walking past the bright and colorful kiosk.

In Conclusion

Eventually, we’ll get to where we want to go, but only after donning our hiking shoes and accepting the eventuality our feet will get muddied.

And that’s why so few people stand on Mt. Happiness. If the path leading to it was already well-worn, equipped with safety lines and neon signs, we’d all be up there.

You’ll likely need a machete to find the hill you seek. Snakes and spiders will definitely await the trek. But once you’ve filled your soul with the stunning view after an exhausting journey, the pitiful knolls you’ve been continually encouraged to frequent will never satisfy again.

See Also: 9 Baby Steps To Happiness For The Naturally Gloomy

The really fun things are still out there. The adventure only awaits your willingness to embrace it with fascination and wonder, knowing limitation is merely a concept defined by Fox News and the fiction writers of science who profess their wisdom as absolute.

Grab your hat and walking stick, and find out for yourself.

The post 5 Reasons Why You Need to Stop Taking Life Seriously appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

from Dumb Little Man https://www.dumblittleman.com/dont-take-life-seriously/

[ninjabachelorparty]

OPEN WORLD VIDEOGAMES: A LOVE STORY

My first exposure to video games, a beginning that set into motion a life of love and sometimes obsession, was not a typical one. I was no NES kid at the start, back when Nintendo ruled the world, and the hearts of children. Neither was I a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 convert. My gaming education began with one of Commodore’s more obscure machines, the 16 + 4. This was a machine aimed more toward the business market (the + 4 referring to a package of office tools that came with the machine). But it played games also, and so it was that I received a battered and mysterious cardboard box, filled with a loose collection of tapes and wires. The origins of this box and who it came from is lost to time, but that stranger played an essential part in shaping my life and my interests.

TREASURE ISLAND

Two games stand out from this formative time in my gaming life. The first was Fire Ant, a fairly simple single screen maze game. A slower-paced Pacman with insects, that has the honour of being the first game I ever completed.  But another game, despite being one that I could never finish, cemented within me a love of open-world games that persists to this day. It was a game called Treasure Island. The gameplay was simple, still involving walking through some type of maze, this time however on multiple interconnected screens. Standing in place were pirates, who would throw swords at you if you ventured too close to them. Avoid the throw, and you could pick the swords up and throw them back. Fairly simple stuff indeed, with one caveat; after the initial screen, the choice of progression was handed to you– do you go to the left screen, or the right? A simply choice to be sure, but it was my choice. For Fire Ant, there was only one correct route to finish a level, with minor variations on the way. Treasure Island gave the impression of a much deeper and mysterious choice. One way might lead to a dead end, requiring a retracing of steps to find a new path that allowed progress. Sound familiar? The same roadblocks inhibit every open world game. “Go where you like, but this door is locked until the main quest gives you the key”. Exploration is the allure, and finding a working sequence to progress is the result of this exploration (and still in 2016, the newest Hitman gives me essentially the same feeling. Here’s a huge open level with so many possibilities, now to find the perfect sequence of execution within). Going back to Treasure Island now, it seems a very simple game, and maybe not as open as I once thought. But to an 8-year old seeing the possibilities of the medium laid before them for the first time, it was a revelation.  

MOONSTONE

Eventually the love for my Commodore 16 faded somewhat. Being a relatively obscure machine eight or so years removed from its release, it was almost impossible to find new games for. The lustre of the games eventually went away, the few times new tapes were found being marred by incompatibility and broken software. A future obsession might have been nixed right there, if it were not for the arrival in my life of, in my humble opinion, the greatest games machine of all time: The Commodore Amiga 500. It was Christmas of 1993, and I was 12, receiving, as I am sure many were that Christmas, the Cartoon Classics pack. It was love at first sight, and a massive expanding of my gaming horizons. I could talk for days, combing over every incredible game that I played, but one stands out as a natural progression of my taste for open-world games: Moonstone.

Mention this game to most that hold it dear and they will undoubtedly mention the gore. This game was brutal, making Mortal Kombat look like child’s play.  This game is essentially a single-screen beat-em-up in execution, 2D sprites moving about a plane and fighting. You control one of four knights, battling creatures of all shapes and sizes. And you will be eviscerated, over and over again. Eaten, decapitated, hung, and splattered in to the ground, your deaths were plenty, and brutal.

However there was another aspect to this game, an openness, which despite its fairly simple presentation drew me in. The overworld, if it can be called that, was a single-screen map of what seemed to be an entire continent. Littered around were icons showing places where you could enter a gameplay screen to fight monsters and collect treasures and keys. You avatar was a simple sprite of your knight’s head. It was basically the world map for a modern open world game, but interactive, and completely open for your exploration, in whatever order you wished. Looking back, it’s a very simple set-up, with maybe two dozen places to actually enter. My imagination filled in all the blanks it needed to though, and I spent hours lost as a noble knight, venturing across fields and plains, into dark and dank swamps and beyond.

GRAND THEFT AUTO

Another game from my Amiga days was a top-down driving game called APB. In the game, you drove a police car and apprehended criminals. Any further mechanics of the game are honestly lost to me, as I simply spent my time with the game driving around the fairly open map and ignoring any real objectives. It felt like a glimpse at something truly open-world, but would not be fully realised to me until I played a game for the PlayStation known as Grand Theft Auto. Another sprite-based top down game like APB, but in this game, you were free to go anywhere and do anything. Sure there were missions and critical paths, but no game prior to this had given the option to so freely disregard them and still have a complete and satisfying experience regardless. In APB I could drive around freely, but it was an aimless driving with no purpose. In Moonstone I could move my sprite around the map as much as I wanted, but to have a gameplay experience I still needed to enter the arenas dotted around.

Grand Theft Auto changed this in a major way. Firstly, you could leave your car, and then hijack any other vehicle you wanted. Get spotted, and the police are on your trail. You can leave the car behind and just wander the map, watching the city go about its business around you. Nowadays this is the common standard for open world games, but in this simpler time it was revolutionary. Exploration, police chases, stealing random cars, all of this had no bearing on the overall path, and didn’t push the story forward, but this was the game, or at least a tangible part of it. It was something to actively participate in; instead of something that you felt you had to push yourself away from the real game to experience. Other games needed their limits pushed to experience some freedom. Grand Theft Auto removed the limits and relished in it.

Grand Theft Auto continued to impress as the series continued, especially with the transition to Grand Theft Auto 3, which felt like the true realisation of the concepts on display from the first game. The original top down view obviously gave the game some hard limits, but these were shattered with the transition to a 3D environment. It truly felt like a limitless experience, with no corner unreachable and with every option you could imagine realised. The proceeding games are all fantastic experiences, but there was nothing quite like that feeling of starting up Grand Theft Auto 3. Some special mention must however be given to Grand Theft Auto 5, as it featured a city that felt truly lived in, alive and vibrant. The addition of the first person camera made this element of the game shine through, and it was an absolute pleasure to simply take in the world as it went about its business around you.

MORROWIND

I was never a PC gamer in my youth, and so many games that provided unique and very open worlds were hidden from me. That all changed one day when reading an article online about an adored PC game that would soon be coming to Xbox, a game in which it was claimed you could literally go anywhere and do anything. That game was of course, Morrowind.

This game was a revelation to me. The early games I loved were open essentially in map and your choice of direction, but still had clear and defined paths to completion. The Grand Theft Auto games pushed this further and allowed a sandbox of toys to play with, but whose core was still comprised of the basic building blocks of randomly generated, faceless characters and disposable vehicles, with little permanent consequence for their destruction or death. Morrowind allowed an unseen (to me) level of granular interaction, with a persistent world that granted limitless options.

Steal a car in Grand Theft Auto, and at worst, you’ll get in a police chase, and either get away or be killed. That car has no permanence in the world; it’s simply one of many toys for your sandbox. Steal an item in Morrowind, and that singular, tangible thing is affected forever. You can keep it, and another won’t respawn in its place, or take it somewhere and drop it where it will remain indefinitely. You are no longer causing trouble with generic pedestrians that repeat and respawn around you. Each character in Morrowind is a crafted individual with their own place in the world. When one dies, no algorithm generates a new one in their place when you return, to the point that you can completely cut yourself off from the main quest if you murder certain NPCs.

This level of detail, coupled with a fantastic fantasy setting, and a deep and interesting lore, combined to create something truly special that hooked me for dozens upon dozens of hours. Video gaming can be a good source of escapism, and at that time Morrowind was the closest realisation of another world, that I could enter and inhabit. Countless hours were spent simply roaming the land, on an unrivalled quest of discovery and wonder. I felt part of the world, and able to affect and influence it in at my choosing. It was often the smallest of interactions that left the longest lasting impression, as these gave the world that sense of tangibility that was so enticing.

HITMAN

The idea of open world games has become an industry standard in modern video gaming. Many games utilise the concept now, and has reached a point of much eye-rolling as a new or existing franchise goes that route. Games nowadays have maps that are saturated with icons and objectives and quests to complete, which can be extremely tiring. It might be that sense of wonder and awe has abated somewhat because of this, as developers seem too eager to point out all the awesome stuff that lies before you. The excitement at simply exploring and discovering the world has been lessened somewhat by many clichés and tropes that now come baked into almost all open worlds.

The 2016 release of Hitman seemed to be the perfect antidote to the bloated world maps of many recent games. It could be argued that it does not even qualify for the genre, but I see it as an open-world game that consists of six perfectly crafted, small open worlds. Its openness and freeform nature ignited in me the same love that all the games on this list provided. It has the detail and small-scale interaction of Morrowind, not quite as granular but still persistent and permanently affected on each playthrough. Once you leave a map and then return, everything resets, allowing endless chaos with little consequence in the same way as Grand Theft Auto. It feels like a perfect amalgamation of everything that appeals so much to me in an open world game.

Each map is so well crafted, with the smaller scale allowing a level of detail not present in many games, and is testament to the games design that it is a joy to simply walk the maps, noticing the details and discovering the world you currently inhabit. The size of your sandbox may be reduced, but the sense of wonder at wandering and learning the levels is not.

This list is not presented as some ultimate reference for the best of the genre, and is far from exhaustive in its history. Many games I hold dear are not present here, such as Just Cause, Saints Row, and Deus Ex. It is simply my way of paying tribute to a genre that I love by choosing those games that had the most impact and shaped the kind of experience I look for in my games. In much the same way as music, playing video games can help soothe a troubled mind, and being able to escape for a while into some other world and roam its lands can help immensely when our world might seem a bit too much to bear.