Nope

[PlotinusRedux]

Jeroen,

There's also a bit of palette magic going on with the shading.  If you look in palette.pcx, it's got several color gradients in it.  The shading code just increases or decreases a pixels palette index with no concern for what actual colors that represents--so the degree of luminosity change in each gradient is essentially defining it as a different material with more or less participation in specular and shadow lighting.

As for how it ran--unlike a modern 3d game, it doesn't re-render the scene every frame.  It draws the terrain in view to the backbuffer once, then just keeps displaying that backbuffer until something changes (you scroll the map or terraform or something).  Since it limited scrolling to big jumps, essentially all it needed was a framerate of maybe 2 fps even when scrolling, at 1028x768x8 resolution.

Still pretty impressive for it's day, though.

[BFG]

It's too bad SMAC didn't have a 16-bit option.  I'm pretty sure that 16-bit was available at that point in time, and I know for certain 12-bit was (though it was never very widespread).  I supposed they stuck to 8-bit to maximize compatibility.  Still, as you've said, it's quite impressive what they were able to pull off.

[Vidsek]

  To Yitzi and Plotinus:

             Making the elevations rational and more realistic would be a truly great thing!
 
   Probably more for mapmaking than actual gameplay, but I'm sure there are a fair number of us who like to mess with the maps. 
   My main annoyance is placing a river source and then having it run what looks to be uphill, along the side of a ridge (instead of in the valley), in a circle, or so on.
   (Also irritating is having an added river totally changing the course of existing ones, but I'll wager that is determined by a different part of the code.  As is an added then removed river permanently changing the elevation of some tiles)

   Drawing the non-stepped appearance with each tile having only one slope for the whole tile apparently required some serious compromises with a good look taking precedence over the underlying topography.
   My initial suggestion would be having the center of each tile at it's "true" elevation and the visual slope(s) being comprised of "graphic tiles" who's 3D orientation is determined by the four tile centers at their corners.  The "real", locational tile boundaries could be drawn onto that surface to reduce the visual confusion there would be between the landscape squares and the movement/location ones.

   Another peculiarity I've noticed is for areas and strips of elevation 10, 1010, etc. to occur between places you have changed the elevation of.  Often these are the rogue tiles that send the rivers off in weard routes.
(Probably part of the calculation oddity mentioned by Yitzi earlier in this thread, and hopefully one that is easy to find, and better yet, change).

   I haven't played a hex-map game in so long I can't remember how they deal with slope in them.

 (side question: would it be possible to convert SMAC/SMACX to hex w/o it becoming an absurdly huge project?  I'm sure folks have considered it before, but don't know how many would welcome it.  I personally prefer the greater realism in travel distances they allow, even if square tiles look more familiar and  "maplike".)

                                                                                Vidsek the Cartographer

[Yitzi]

  To Yitzi and Plotinus:

             Making the elevations rational and more realistic would be a truly great thing!

It would take a bit of doing, but probably not that much, and it would solve some otherwise unsolvable bugs.  When I start taking nominations for the next patch...
 

My main annoyance is placing a river source and then having it run what looks to be uphill, along the side of a ridge (instead of in the valley), in a circle, or so on.
   (Also irritating is having an added river totally changing the course of existing ones, but I'll wager that is determined by a different part of the code.  As is an added then removed river permanently changing the elevation of some tiles)

I was just thinking of changing the way elevations themselves work; rivers are another matter entirely, though I could probably figure out those as well.

Another peculiarity I've noticed is for areas and strips of elevation 10, 1010, etc. to occur between places you have changed the elevation of.  Often these are the rogue tiles that send the rivers off in weard routes.
(Probably part of the calculation oddity mentioned by Yitzi earlier in this thread, and hopefully one that is easy to find, and better yet, change).

Yes, this sounds like a side effect of the calculation oddity.

(side question: would it be possible to convert SMAC/SMACX to hex w/o it becoming an absurdly huge project?  I'm sure folks have considered it before, but don't know how many would welcome it.  I personally prefer the greater realism in travel distances they allow, even if square tiles look more familiar and  "maplike".)

If someone else can do the graphics, I could probably do the rest; it would be quite a large project, but not a hugely large one.

However, "probably" in this case is of the "I won't know even after I do it, and if I don't catch every relevant function it could lead to significant bugs", so doing it safely would probably be an absurdly huge project at this point.