IPhone: iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS: 320x480 It didn’t matter that there were no locked gates in their way – in the end, there might as well have been.MacBook Pro 13.3" Retina, MacBook Air 13" Retina, MacBook Air 13.3"(2020, M1): 2560x1600 Dual monitor: Instead, those down in steerage were simply lost – they’d never been up to the higher decks before where only first-class passengers were permitted, and there were no maps of the ship to help them navigate. James Cameron’s movie script doesn’t quite tally with survivor accounts on that front. It’s a misconception that those in steerage were locked down in the lower decks to allow the first-class passengers to board the lifeboats first. Not only are they incredibly tight, they’re also laid out like a circuit board, tangles of right angles and precious few signs anywhere. The dimensions of its corridors are nightmarish when you think about people trying to escape with their lives from them, up onto the boat deck. You can walk around in Honor and Glory’s Titanic and understand for the first time how difficult this space must have been to navigate even when everything was fine, in the middle of the daytime, long before anything started taking on water and its 2200 inhabitants were all rushing to make it up to the lifeboats. But it just does, doesn’t it? Virtual worlds give us an immersive document for preserving environments that photography and even cinema can’t. Not only is the wreck now much too weakened to withstand any attempts to raise it, within years it won’t even exist at all.Ī collection of Unreal Engine assets shouldn’t really have a bearing on that sense of loss. The aforementioned bacteria, halomonas titanicae, is eating the vessel at a prodigious rate and if there was ever any conversation about raising the wreck and preserving it on land before, it’s been categorically ended by the bacteria infestation. Although it’s remained exactly where it fell on the ocean floor that night 110 years ago, 4000 meters down, it will not be around for much longer. But there are also so many details the movie didn’t show, areas that we’ve generally only seen after the fact, on the sea bed, overrun with rust and bacteria. It says a lot about the movie’s place in the absolute fabric of our culture that as soon as you load it up, you instinctively know your way around. Honor and Glory is free to use all of Unreal’s muscle to bring realism. It’s vastly impressive in its own right, but it’s bound to the old tech. It’s been in development for over 15 years, and it’s largely the work of one man, Dutch maritime engineer Robin Bongaarts. A Mafia: City of Lost Heaven mod simply called ‘ Mafia Titanic Mod (opens in new tab)’ uses Take Two’s 2002 crime caper as the foundation for its own virtual restoration of the ship. Incredibly, it’s not the only project to take on this exact objective. It seems to matter an awful lot that every conceivable effort has been taken to get each architectural and design detail right, down to the precise layout of the ship and the riveting of its hull panels, the wood detailing on the pillars of its famous feature stairway that leads down six decks from the boat deck down to E deck. So you find yourself coping in odd ways, like taking great comfort in a virtual preservation project like Titanic: Honor and Glory. And once you’ve imagined it, the image is ingrained. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like me, you’d imagined what it must have been like to have been aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage on the night of April 15, 1912, and to have been faced with standing aboard a sinking unsinkable ship in the north Atlantic ocean. The Titanic disaster is one of those events that seems to have shaken the collective psyche indelibly, a trauma that passes down from generation to generation. Turning it into anything like a traditional ‘game’ is a secondary concern.Īnd obviously, you’re interested. If you’re at all interested in the ship and its tragic sinking, you understand intrinsically that the project feels of great importance. Its team of amateur developers has been building the ship in Unreal Engine (opens in new tab) for the best part of a decade, funded exclusively through Patreon (opens in new tab) backers and motivated, as far as one can tell, by sheer historical imperative. Welcome to the existential puzzle that is Titanic: Honor and Glory.
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