The final product, including rather exaggerated henge earthworks, looks pretty convincing and is set up to play as a free-for-all multiplayer map, allowing up to four players to explore the landscape simultaneously (no weapons though!). I've added a few weather effects to make exploration interesting, wander too far from the stones and it starts to rain.
In order to stop players falling off the map, in-game time is limited to two minutes, enough to explore the stones and their environs, but not enough to reach the edge of the 2 x 2km map, just right for a public display of the utility of games for archaeological visualisation, sufficient time to get a feel for things, but not so long that one person will hog the display.
All in all it provides a pretty convincing introduction to game-based visualisation. Our geophysical survey team is hitting Salisbury Plain with a variety of high tech kit in the next few weeks, next up may be an attempt to visualise the hidden sub-surface in-game.
All in all it provides a pretty convincing introduction to game-based visualisation. Our geophysical survey team is hitting Salisbury Plain with a variety of high tech kit in the next few weeks, next up may be an attempt to visualise the hidden sub-surface in-game.
