novelODS Chapter 168 begins with the first budding life underwater...
Chapter 168 begins with the first budding life underwater...
Chapter 168 begins with the first budding life underwater...
At 6 a.m., under the watchful eyes of Aaron and Mike, Frank officially turned on the power and entered the game.
"Don't delay, let's get started!"
Mike nudged Frank, urging him to get into the game quickly.
Listening to music while the title screen is displayed is outrageous!
Although Mike himself thoroughly enjoyed listening to it.
"Oh, right, right! We really need to play it!"
Frank then seemed to snap out of his daze, his gaze lingering on the "Online Battle" option for a moment before he used the controller to select single-player mode.
"Choose a civilization?"
The first thing you do isn't to enter your character name like you usually do; instead, you're given a list to choose from.
This is completely the opposite of the design of some past games.
A quick glance at the list revealed that it covered everything from ancient empires like Babylon, which have vanished into the annals of history, to the United States, which has only existed for a few hundred years.
Frank turned his head and exchanged a glance with the two men.
What else is there to say? Let's play the Americans.
"Let me see, Theodore Roosevelt and America—"
As soon as you select it, the screen refreshes and displays Teddy's corresponding character portrait. Although it still has pixelation due to resolution issues, you can recognize him at a glance with his iconic glasses and beard.
Meanwhile, various entries related to the United States were also displayed on the other side.
However, the three of them had no extra attention to the words at the moment.
"This color—is that really something a game console can achieve??"
It's not exactly exquisite, but the transitions are natural and the colors are rich.
"256KB of video memory — not a single bit is wasted."
Even Aaron, who had never been a big fan of 16-bit machines, couldn't help but sigh with admiration.
Even their own PCs can't produce this level of detail!
Aaron turned to look at his desk. The computer was still on, and the green and black DOS interface on the screen looked really shabby now.
The worst thing is to compare things.
"Hey, can we stop being so superficial and look at how to play? If you're only thinking about the visuals and sound, why don't we go watch a movie?"
Mike was the first to react, giving Frank a hard shove. "Look at his biography! Look, there's even a P-51 fighter plane!"
"Huh? What does all this mean?"
Frank snapped out of his reverie and carefully read through the introduction to the United States.
After reading it through once, Frank felt like he was about to develop reading difficulties, and his head was buzzing.
What is all this about?
Not a single word was familiar to me; the more I read, the more confused I became.
"What are natural wonders? What are technology points? And what are culture points?"
"Hmm—okay, I understand completely now."
"real?"
"—Of course it's fake."
'
"This thing is so complicated, no one can figure it out."
Obviously, you'll only understand these things once you actually get into the game.
After selecting the civilization, you also need to select the difficulty level.
This has long been commonplace in past games and is nothing unusual.
Although the difficulty levels in Civilization are not simply written as "easy," "normal," or "hard," they are expressed as "prince," "king," or "monarch."
However, GAMENOVA had already used this model in their previous Wolfenstein games.
"Let's just go with the default Prince difficulty and figure out how to play it first."
As for the map and size below, Frank simply chose the default small-sized continent.
This random map generator, which originated from experiments in Fire Emblem, has gone through several iterations and is far from the simple little gadget it once was.
The revolutionary capabilities of the 16-bit machine allowed Lin Lixin and his team to incorporate more complex mechanisms.
However, even with their advanced algorithm optimizations, it's impossible to make the loading process completely seamless.
Generating random maps ultimately takes time.
But Civilization found a very interesting way to make the process—a little bit more interesting.
From the very first budding life underwater —
Frank paused, startled by the narration coming from the television.
The narration is like a storyteller, telling a magnificent tale in a gentle and detailed way.
"Giant beasts from the Stone Age —"
From the first time humans walked upright, you've experienced so much.
Now, embark on your greatest adventure!
From the cradle of early civilizations to the vast universe!
Theodore Roosevelt, your broad shoulders bore the weight of everything —
The voiceover continued, but a prompt appeared at the bottom of the screen, indicating that you could now press the A key to officially enter the game.
I was so focused on listening to the spoken words and trying to understand them that I didn't pay any attention to the loading process.
"What a clever way to handle this!"
Frank couldn't help but exclaim in surprise.
Civilization will load entirely asynchronously, allowing the audio chip to play pre-set narration while the CPU processes map generation and resource loading at full speed.
In the past, if a game needed to load something, it would usually be indicated by a black screen.
To be honest, Frank and the other two were already completely used to it.
I even feel that large-scale games are missing something if they don't have such a loading screen.
To completely avoid loading is simply impossible given the current loading speed of storage media and processors.
However, Civilization, through this ingenious technique, significantly optimizes the tedious waiting process with almost no additional performance overhead.
This thoughtful little mechanism, which was completely in the smallest detail, surprised even Aaron, who had always held a relatively negative attitude towards the new machine.
This seems to be the complete opposite of what I imagined—that I had overlooked details because of the piling up of materials.
However, the impact of Civilization is far from over.
When Frank finally entered the game, he was greeted by a hexagonal map unlike anything he had ever seen before.
The entire world has completely reversed its past square structure or tile combination, and has become a dense grid composed of hexagons.
Except for a few laps around the spawn point, the rest of the area was completely shrouded in a parchment-like fog of war.
"A hexagon? How did they do that?"
The complete subversion of visual effects led to entirely different interpretations from these three UCLA high-achieving students.
A square grid can be used to represent positions simply and directly using coordinates such as (1, 1).
"I guess it's because the odd and even rows of the chessboard were shifted by half a square."
Mike pondered for a moment before offering his opinion.
This seemingly completely different map can be achieved by shifting all odd-numbered rows by half a grid and then rendering each grid as a hexagon.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but highly mathematical and elegant enough.
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