On Wednesday, the Gathering of Developer's showed up at GameSpot's offices to show off two upcoming titles: Fly! and Railroad Tycoon II.

　　Fly!, being developed by Terminal Reality Inc. (the makers of Monster Truck Madness 2), is the company's first flight simulation. It's a title for die-hard desktop pilots looking for heightened graphics, more detail, and added features not always found in flight sims.

　　The game runs on the company's in-house Photex3 engine (it was the Photex2 engine that made all that graphic eye candy in MTM2 possible). Currently, the game is being developed for both the PC and the Mac and will run with all of the popular 3D hardware APIs on the market including Rendition's RRedline, 3Dfx's Glide, and Microsoft's Direct3D.

　　Maps cover San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York - although a map editor will ship with the game to give creative gamers the ability to add in their own airports. Map data was extracted by using five- and ten-meter satellite shots of particular areas, and this gives detailed maps for hard-core pilots. Another key point about the maps is that TR is building the game with more realistic colors. The folks showing off the title said that competing products like Flight Unlimited 2 took maps and tweaked the colors for a better look. TRI decided to go with colors that emulated what a pilot would see looking out the window. For example, when a pilot looks at water from a plane, it isn't blue but a dark greenish color. Little examples like this show that the Fly! team has its sights on aviators looking for even more realism.

　　The game sports real time of day and passage of time allowing you to fly for hours. Pilots can see the sun go down, the moon come up, and see some of the stars you'd see if you were up above civilization.

　　Weather fanatics will go crazy over some of the game's weathering features. The underlying engine runs almost any weather condition - rain, sleet, snow, and anything else Mother Nature has in her weaponry.

　　But the team has jumped to a new height of realism by adding the use of official government weather broadcasts to the game. Say you want to fly in the worst snowstorm in history - you would only need to go up to a site, download the data for the area and day, add it to the game, and you get your snowstorm.

　　Fly! will be shipping sometime around Christmas and already has gained the close support of Cessna. Terminal Reality has a lot riding on Fly! and in many ways it should - TRI's president Mark Randel helped codesign and program the engine for Microsoft's Fight Simulator 5.0.

　　Another of the Gathering's developers, PopTop Software, was with the entourage and showed off its upcoming strategy game, Railroad Tycoon II. Undoubtedly, RTII is going to help branch out the real-time strategy with its focus on building railroad lines. The original Railroad Tycoon, by Sid Meier, still has many fans, and PopTop is trying to make the new title as addictive as its predecessor.

　　Phil Steinmeyer, president of PopTop Software, summed up the premise of the game: You are a rich investor that wants to build better train lines to make even more money. Sounds like the basic American dream, right? You build tracks from different factories to help build a stable infrastructure in order to transfer goods. For example, you'd build a track between a rubber tree farm to a tire maker and a track from the tire maker to an automobile maker. Most of the game is set around the great age of the train, the 1800s, but the RTII team has built in over 59 engines that include high-speed trains like the French TGV and mag lev trains (magnetic levitation) as well.

　　The RTII engine is 3D but runs through software at 1024x768, at 16-bit. Playing the game requires a great deal of screen room if you want to micromanage your areas. If you just want to play a SimCity-like game, you can, but with all the details within the game, we can't imagine anyone would want to. Railroad Tycoon II definitely upgrades detail in the game. The title has a strong economic engine, 35 cargo types, 20-30 maps, and multiplayer games for up to 32 players.

　　If you want to build your own levels, the level and event editor is literally only a click away. Building your own level is fairly easy. Download a PCX map with texture data, import it into the editor, set up the terrain with a painting tool, and you're basically done. If you're looking to create scenarios with triggers and differing effects from certain business decisions, the event edit will allow gamers to make the most minute choices in the areas of gaining or losing money, local politics, social problems, and tons of other options.

　　Although the game is set for an early November release, the game feels solid even now. Some of the features the team is hoping to add when the game does release include special scenarios with goals or historical events. While many might think the game will have only niche market appeal, Steinmeyer pointed out that model train magazines outnumber computer gaming magazines - so maybe we're the niche market.