Panther, a battle tank-driving simulation, was one of a handfull of early first-person computer games developed on the Plato IV muti-user computer-based education system, developed by John Edo Haefeli and Nelson Bridwell in 1975 at Northwestern University.
Nelson contributed the original concept of a tank combat game, which was inspired by Brand Fortner's Airfight, Jim Bowery's Spasim, and an unfinished tank game effort of Derek Ward. Nelson also provided the original Panther tank artwork, the initial vehicle motion and view equations, and the random number generation of terrain features. John was a highly-capable Tudor IV programmer who turned the concept into a workinig game, later adding a number of refinements.
The game was originally delivered on the multi-user interactive PLATO system and programmed in the TUTOR programming language and utilized scalable vector graphics called linesets. A 1977 development of Panther, with more refined graphics, was named Panzer, the German word for tank.
The graphics for the initial version of Panther was very simple, compared to modern combat simulations. The world was a flat, planar desert surface, and the only features were the views of the tanks, and a static horizon line across the middle of the screen. The tank views consisted of a selection of either side, rear, or front views of the turret and body, magnified according to distance. Hidden view elimination was a very simple 2D process of not displaying more distant vehicles where the view was possibly blocked by a closer vehicle.
These limitations were in part because the Plato IV system, simultaneously shared by hundreds of users, provided very limited computational bandwith and memory.
98.232.182.106 (talk) 03:09, 11 September 2011 (UTC) Nelson Bridwell 503 740-5102
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BetacommandBot (talk) 16:36, 19 November 2007 (UTC)