> how much further we may be from what we wan

The timescale you are describing for 3D graphics is 4 years from the 1997 cover you posted to the release of Halo which you are saying plateaued excitement because it got advanced enough.

An almost infinitesimally small amount of time in terms of history human development and you are mocking the magazine being excited for the advancement because it was... 4 years yearly?

No, the timescale is "the 90s", the the specific example is from 1997, and chosen because of how badly it aged. Nobody looks at the original single-player Unreal graphics today and thinks "this is amazing!", but we all did at the time — Reflections! Dynamic lighting! It was amazing for the era — but it was also a long way from photorealism. ChatGPT is amazing… but how far is it from Brent Spiner's Data?

The era was people getting wowed from Wolfenstein (1992) to "about Halo or Half Life 2" (2001 or 2004).

And I'm not saying the flattening of excitement was for any specific reason, just that this was roughly when it stopped getting exciting — it might have been because the engines were good enough for 3D art styles beyond "as realistic as we can make it", but for all I know it was the War On Terror which changed the tone of press releases and how much the news in general cared. Or perhaps it was a culture shift which came with more people getting online and less media being printed on glossy paper and sold in newsagents.

Whatever the cause, it happened around that time.

I'm still holding on to my hypothesis in that the excitement was sustained in large part because this progress was something a regular person could partake in. Most didn't, but they likely known some kid who was. And some of those kids run the gaming magazines.

This was a time where, for 3D graphics, barriers to entry got low (math got figured out, hardware was good enough, knowledge spread), but the commercial market didn't yet capture everything. Hell, a bulk of those excited kids I remember, trying to do a better Unreal Tournament after school instead of homework (and almost succeeding!), they went on create and staff the next generation of commercial gamedev.

(Which is maybe why this period lasted for about as long as it takes for a schoolkid to grow up, graduate, and spend few years in the workforce doing the stuff they were so excited about.)

Could be.

I was one of those kids, my focus was Marathon 2 even before I saw Unreal. I managed to figure out enough maths from scratch to end up with the basics of ray casting, but not enough at the time to realise the tricks needed to make that real time on a 75 MHz CPU… and then we all got OpenGL and I went through university where they explained the algorithms.

The weird thing about the phenomenon you mention is only after the field of software engineering has plateaued 15 years ago, as you mentioned, that this insane demand for engineers did arise, with corresponding insane salaries.

It's a very strange thing I've never understood.

My guess: It’s a very lengthy, complex, and error-prone process to “digitize” human civilization (government, commerce, leisure, military, etc). The tech existed, we just didn’t know how to use it.

We still barely know how to use computers effectively, and they have already transformed the world. For better or worse.

> Software development seemed rapid and exciting until about Halo or Half Life 2, then it was shallow but shiny press releases for 15 years

The transition seems to map well to the point where engines got sophisticated enough, that highly dedicated high-schoolers couldn't keep up. Until then, people would routinely make hobby game engines (for games they'd then never finish) that were MVPs of what the game industry had a year or three earlier. I.e. close enough to compete on visuals with top photorealistic games of a given year - but more importantly, this was a time where you could do cool nerdy shit to impress your friends and community.

Then Unreal and Unity came out, with a business model that killed the motivation to write your own engine from scratch (except for purely educational purposes), we got more games, more progress, but the excitement was gone.

Maybe it's just a spurious correlation, but it seems to track with:

> and only became so again when OpenAI's InstructGPT was demonstrated.

Which is again, if you exclude training SOTA models - which is still mostly out of reach for anyone but a few entities on the planet - the time where anyone can do something cool that doesn't have a better market alternative yet, and any dedicated high-schooler can make truly impressive and useful work, outpacing commercial and academic work based on pure motivation and focus alone (it's easier when you're not being distracted by bullshit incentives like user growth or making VCs happy or churning out publications, farming citations).

It's, once again, a time of dreams, where anyone with some technical interest and a bit of free time can make the future happen in front of their eyes.