News :: 15MR: Earth 3D Screensaver (Video Samples)
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today appears to be a Screensaver Saturday with Earth 3D Screensaver (No version visible) by 3Planesoft
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As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Turn your monitor into a realistic space shuttle window! Earth 3D Screensaver is a hard-nosed 3D globe model. Our planet looks exactly as it is seen by astronauts. You see the blackness of outer space with sparks of stars on it. You are flying around the Earth, a colorful ball with a veil of atmosphere.
This is not like looking on a school globe. The view on the Earth from your monitor is so real. It’s so easy to imagine…”
Quick Pros
- Earth with realistic elevations looks great
- Space shuttle looks great
- All in all a great feel to this application
Quick Cons
- No antialiasing or advanced graphics
- Icons installed outside desired Start folder and on desktop even though asked not to
- Scale of ‘landmarks’ out of scale significantly
- Textures on the ISS take away from the scenery
Expansion
As since this is a Screensaver Saturday, I won’t go into great detail on this one. While the usual issues I have with 3Planescape exist (Desktop icons & 3Planescape’s folder installing on the Start menu home folder rather than where you designate and no advanced rendering features such as antialiasing or anistropic filtering,) it’s a little easier to overlook with the quality of this screensaver higher than previous ones from 3Planescape. While it does look gorgeous and run nice, still a few issues; the scale size of the landmarks are massive, some looking way out of place (Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Taj Mahal, etc.) which wouldn’t have been bad, but does take quite a bit away from the ‘realism,’ especially since realism was the name of this application. The elevation mapping is nice too; It’s amazing watching Mount Everest coming over the horizon.
Not much more to expand on; All my feelings are pretty much summed up in the pros/cons section fairly well. It is an improvement over previous for sure.
Final Verdict
While this screensaver is an improvement over previous screensavers, it has an inflated price tag as well. While this screensaver is great for free and would be for a few dollars, but at $17.95, it’s quite a bit to chew on, considering it is built to run on Pentium II 500MHz systems, systems that are around 10 years old. I will be hanging onto this one to put in rotation with Twingly Screensaver
Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, March 10, 2007
