I found this the other day, and I thought it was pretty damned impressive.

Kroah has taken the time to reverse how the fractals worked in Captain Blood.  From bringerp.free.fr:

The procedural terrain generator uses 1D fractional brownian motion (fBm) with random mid-point displacement. Up to 10 curves are displayed on screen.

When a new curve appears at the horizon, 7 vertices are computed. Then mid-point displacement with fBm are applied to thes 7 initial points. This results in a discrete curve of 512 samples.

The random number generator and the fBm Hurst parameter H are adapted according to the current terrain type (flat, canyon…). This gives very different visual landscapes (plains, moutains, desert…).

No more fractal computation is done on the discrete curve. When a curve is drawn, only 256 of the 512 samples are used (according to the position of the Oorxx).

The view is 256 pixels wide, so if the visible part of the curve is larger than the 256 samples, the curve will be drawn zoomed with pixels linearly interpolated between the samples. Otherwise the curve will be drawn shrinked without any interpolation and using only some of the 256 samples.

The raytraced fractal landscape is computed from these 10 curves.

It’s pretty amazing to think that there was that much behind the game.

I played this back in 1988 on the lowly Commodore 64, but the Amiga version was simply amazing.  Such was technology back then.