to launch in the second quarter of 1995, the game was released on March 5, 1996; by this time, its graphical technology had been surpassed by other video games, according to Schmidt. Lead programmer Art Min later expressed dissatisfaction with the game: he believed that, while the team coalesced at the end of development, they shipped the game too soon because of "an overexcited VP of Product Development". Technology Unlike Looking Glass' previous first-person games—Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II and System Shock—Terra Nova takes place in outdoor environments. The game's engine, named TED, supports weather conditions, day and night environments, real-time water reflections and moving clouds, among other effects. Most of the work on the outdoor renderer was done by programmer Eric Twietmeyer; however, contemporary computers were not powerful enough to display fully three-dimensional (3D) outdoor environments. The problem was solved by programmer James Fleming: the game's engine renders and applies textures to foreground objects in full 3D graphics, but—according to PC Gamer US—it displays a "bitmapped background in the distance" to provide the "illusion of detail". As with Flight Unlimited and the CD-ROM release of System Shock, Terra Nova was designed to support head-mounted displays. The game features QSound technology. Describing QSound's effect before the game's release, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner of Popular Science wrote that "you'll hear the rustle of leaves from the right speaker a split second before you hear it in the left[,] signaling you that the enemy is approaching from the right". The game's characters are procedurally animated via simulated physics models and inverse kinematics (IK)—a system designed by programmer Seamus Blackley. Basic physics are used to move character models through the environment, and the models are animated by the IK system in accordance with this movement. Designer Richard Wyckoff later compared the character physics to those of a marble, and Schmidt described the technique as akin to putting each character in a hamster ball. The system's imperfect nature can result in animation glitches. A more realistic simulation of bipedal movement was originally planned, but it was simplified before release because of coding difficulties. Schmidt later said that the original method "almost always worked", but that "every thirty minutes someone would put their foot down slightly wrong ... and then go flying off across the map". A physics model is also used to simulate weapon recoil, the arc of projectiles and the gravity of each planet;