Sim Future – How About a New Viewer?

One of the biggest complaints that we hear in the game is about the Game Viewer. If you are going to watch your horses on Saturday run their races, you sit down and and hit the “Watch This Race” link. After loading you are left with either the brown screen for dirt or the green screen for turf. The somewhat wooden horses with their identical colorless jockeys move in a straight line as if on a rail as they traverse to the finish. Let’s face it, the Game Viewer hasn’t quite caught up to today’s technology. But don’t forget my young “Video Game Generation” that it wasn’t so long ago that that things were not so far advanced and we have come a long way baby, both in the Sim and in life itself.

For example, back in the early 1980’sthere was a movie called War Games that was about the way home computers had come so far and could influence the world on a grand scale. Here is a quote from that film:

• Stephen Falken: What you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer enhanced hallucination!

If you really want to see how far Computer Screens and Special Effects have come, just take a look at this screen shot from that movie! LOL

Computers and Video Games have come a long way. Perhaps we are a bit spoiled by the full High Definition Playstation 3’s of the world. Believe it or not, my very first Horse Racing game, (that I enjoyed immensely by the way!) was on an antique game system called Mattel Intellivision. There was a game with the inventive name of Horse Racing. You would bet on races and if I remember correctly, you could even run the jockeys a bit. Here is an exciting screenshot from that game:

Here is a screenshot from G! Jockey4 2007 for PS3.

Wow, things really have come a long way! Wouldn’t you love to be able to watch your races on that last viewer? Well believe it or not, things have actually come a long way in the Sim as well.

The original race viewer is still online if you go to “DOWNLOADS” on the game where there is a scary set of instructions telling you how to install the “New” Viewer. From what I can gather, the viewer was written in the late nineties by a player named DeBee who wrote the download instructions that are still there today. He was one of the first tipsheet writers too for the old Sim Newspaper. The reason why it’s called “New Viewer” on that page is because Mike had to patch it a couple times and rewrite it as well. It had to be changed again in early 2000 when the racecards expanded from 12 races to 15. It may have changed a few more times in the early 2000’s. The viewer itself didn’t change — it just needed coding updates so it wouldn’t crash as much and when the racecards and fields were expanded you had to re-download the viewer. The Viewer had rather cartoonish horses compared to what we have today. Here’s a snapshot:

According to veteran players, Larry Coker came out with the first versions of his downloaded Viewer sometime in 2001. Not long after that, the Sim came out with the Online Viewer that is in the game that has not changed much from then. Coker’s viewer was improved a couple of times but without support from the former player and updates on silks and such along with the complexity of downloads and patches and such it has gotten much less use. Not to mention the fact that it is far easier to just click on the link in the viewer to watch your horses than to go to another program. Here are screenshots from Cokers Viewer and our current Race Viewer:

That leaves the question, “where do we go from here?”

Once again , we go straight to the top to find out the current answer to that question. I asked Mike about the future of the viewer in the game and here is what he told me:

“A new Race Viewer is something I would love. But I’m an awful graphics programmer, and trying to learn the languages necessary and gain enough experience to produce a product any better than the Coker viewer would take away from the things I am good at. Unfortunately, the prices I’ve been quoted make buying a new viewer a financial impossibility at the moment. If the football game does what I hope it will, I plan on it being one of my first investments of those funds.”

So at this point it appears that we have to pretty much live with what we have and dream about the future.

Hey! Can you imagine someday in the future watching your horses holographically race across your desk top!?! It may not be so far off!

Good luck to all!

Email your comments to pazjazz.btb@gmail.comI love to hear from you!