Anyone remember Vista?

[gkb]

Did anyone else ever use Vista?
It was a fractal landscape generator.

I used to play around with it for hours generating some pretty cool looking landscapes.
Rendering at full detail used to take hours on my A500!

I noticed that there is a modern equivalent in Terragen - but it is Windows/MacOS only, so no good for me.

[Reynolds]

I tried Vista Pro v2 or v3 way back, but preferred Scenegenerator and Scenery Animator more. Yeah, extreme long rendering times were kinda normal in the heydays

[Karlos]

Vista Pro was nice.

[ImmortalA1000]

I tried Vista early on, was a fascinating product back then.

[malko]

Used it as well. Rendering was long but since everything else was at the same speed (68000 CPU wise) we were used to it and then it was "normal"

[RetroPassionUK]

used the demo back in the day, and waiting 2hrs for something that now can be done in 0.025 secs lol

[wiser3]

I actually used Vista Pro to do a school project. I downloaded US goverment elevation data for Mount St. Helen's from before and after it erupted, then used Vista Pro to render the data and show how much one side of the mountain had collapsed. Teacher was amazed.

[fxgogo]

Originally Posted by gkb

Did anyone else ever use Vista?
It was a fractal landscape generator.

I used to play around with it for hours generating some pretty cool looking landscapes.
Rendering at full detail used to take hours on my A500!

I noticed that there is a modern equivalent in Terragen - but it is Windows/MacOS only, so no good for me.

Yeah, remember it well and have been writing articles about it in Amiga Addict. Still so much fun to use, even if you can hit the limits of terrain resolution quite quickly these days.


What OS are you using as there are some other modern equivalents you can use.

[van_dammesque]

Wasn't it on the cover of Amiga Format?

[TEG]

Originally Posted by wiser3

I downloaded US goverment elevation data for Mount St. Helen's from before and after it erupted.

You had access to Internet at the time ??

[arcanist]

Many happy hours spent on Vista! I particularly liked the Mars DEM. Was always curious to try the Terraform and MakePath add-ons, I should get round to that.

The pictures on the front of the box, along with Imagine, sold me on a 68882 add-on for my accelerator. My memory might be playing tricks on me but I remember that speeding up renders substantially.

[shelter]

Wow, yeah...
I played a lot with Vista, thanks for reminding me of the name because I actually tried to remember it yesterday. Now I have to install it.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

Wasn't it on the cover of Amiga Format?

Yup, Amiga Format 33 had it on a cover disk: http://amr.abime.net/issue_189_coverdisks

[Daedalus]

CU Amiga also had the full version of Vista Pro 3 on the coverdisks / cover CD of the September 1997 issue: http://amr.abime.net/issue_655_coverdisks

[jPV]

Originally Posted by gkb

Did anyone else ever use Vista?

Of course, didn't everyone use it, or at least tried it? It was one of Amiga's killer applications after all, bragged on all magazines etc.

I dreamed about fly-by-animations made with it, but unfortunately CPU power was quite limted at the time...


But I had fun to play with it and used it for a title pic for my AMOS game

[ImmortalA1000]

That was the beauty of coverdisks

[gkb]

Glad to see I am not the only one who enjoyed playing with this package.
I found it fascinating that fractal mathematics could be used to generate whole worlds.
I used to spend days generating landscapes, adding rivers and lakes, and flooding them by increasing the sea level .
The worst part was setting up a render script to generate multiple high definition images, and then turning off the monitor and leaving the Amiga on to do its work.
I would then come back hours later to find my mother had unplugged the Amiga to plug the hoover in - Aaarrghh!

I was asked what operating systems I use. They are:

- A new Asus notebook running the latest Debian Linux.
- An older Asus notebook running Lubuntu / FS-UAE.
- An even older Acer notebook running AROS.
- A raspberry pi 3 running Raspberry Pi OS.

[seb132]

I used it together with its import capability ; I remember adding the Stealth Fighter in the scene…

[khph_re]

Loved exploring Mars in Vista,
Also owned Arthur C.Clarkes Mars book.
Rendered partialy on his A3000 in Vista i think.

[stevelord]

I've had a music vid for a vaporwave tune I did a couple of years ago on hold. I rendered a load of background anims in vista, and will (eventually) render some lightwave sequences and composite them on top.

Speaking of lightwave, I think Hold and Modify did a vid of importing Vista data into LightWave to get better render quality a while back but I can't find it.