root@leo.UUCP ( Big Brother) (06/06/88)
Just came in last week, hot stuff!
3-Demon is a 3D object modeler. Some notable features:
Reads objects from Sculpt 3D or VideoScape3D
Create objects for Sculpt 3D, VideoScape3D, Forms in flight,
Silver, and Gossett Graphics. (Anybody know about Gossett?)
Many viewing options like:
Colored solid, B&W shaded, wire frame, fish-eye to flat
perspective, Zoom, shift, view from any angle.
Handles hierarchical objects.
Numerous editing tools.
Selectable diffuse and specular reflection, metallicity,
transparency, and refractive characterisistics.
And I probably left a lot of other things out. 3-Demon saves
in its own format, which seems to be the sum total of all
Amiga ray tracing formats, so creating objects with 3-Demon
will give you the best possible object definition for the
most capable ray tracing programs.
F-18 Interceptor.
Very realistic simulation:
Missles have launch sounds, flame trail, look real.
The plane shakes when:
You exceed the speed of sound.
Catch the wires on the carrier deck.
Initial power on of engines.
Cutting in of the after burners.
Etc.
The heads up display is fantastic!
Lots of defensive goodies like Infrared flares, chaff,
Electronic Counter Measures.
Realistic destruction (explosions), watch planes smoke
into the drink.
Nice rendition of San Fransisco, a bit better than Jet
or Flight Simulator.
To qualify for missions, you have to be able to take off
and land on the carrier deck.
There are five advanced missions to be performed, like
chasing down a cruise missle, protecting Air Force One,
returning stolen F-16's, etc.
If anybody knows how to destroy the submersible carrier,
let me know!
The disk is not copy protected, but the game requires
lookup on a code wheel.
Western European Tour Scenery Disk.
Covers London, Paris, and southern Germany.
Although I haven't tried yet, Moscow is included.
Well, enough for now. Have fun!
F-18 Interceptor.jfoust@well.UUCP (John Foust) (06/10/88)
> From: root@leo.UUCP ( Big Brother) > And I probably left a lot of other things out. 3-Demon saves > in its own format, which seems to be the sum total of all > Amiga ray tracing formats, so creating objects with 3-Demon > will give you the best possible object definition for the > most capable ray tracing programs. Probably? Where should I begin? I've been beta-testing 3-Demon for more than six months. The program and manual was written by Todor Faye, the primary author of SoundScape, also from Mimetics. 3-Demon's format is triangle-based, which means 3-Demon isn't optimal for VideoScape or Forms In Flight, which can do polygons as well as triangles. Sculpt 3D, Silver and Gossett have only triangles. I haven't seen the final shrink-wrapped disk, but all the versions I've seen support only Silver 1.0, which is not polygon-based, as you might recall. (Instead, it has mathematically defined objects including spheres, cones and triangles.) Also, Silver 1.0's format is ASCII-based, which means a reasonable-sized triangle-based object takes up about 150K on disk, and takes about ten minutes to load or save in 3-Demon. However, triangle-based objects in Silver 1.0 are impractical, which is one of the reasons they made Turbo Silver. When considering making a Silver 1.0 module for InterChange, I rendered the VideoScape "InfLoopShip" in Silver. It has 478 triangles. It took about 3 1/2 hours in Silver 1.0, and less than half as much time in Sculpt or Turbo Silver. Turbo Silver, a $30 upgrade to Silver 1.0, is optimized for triangles, although the 1.0 mathematical objects are retained. It has a binary file format incompatible with Silver 1.0. We just released an InterChange module for Turbo Silver. The package includes a module that smooths objects for Phong-shaded programs such as Turbo Silver and VideoScape 2.0. > Handles hierarchical objects. Funny, the 3-Demon manual doesn't spell "hierarchical" that way. :-) > Selectable diffuse and specular reflection, metallicity, > transparency, and refractive characterisistics. To a point. For Sculpt 3D, you must enter a magic number into a gadget instead of selecting Shiny, Mirror or whatever as you do in Sculpt itself. So you enter 130 to get Smooth Mirror, which is 128 plus 2. For textures in other programs, you set ambient light, diffuse, specular, metallicity, reflection, transparency and refractive characteristics. The manual explains what these settings are, but doesn't really explain how these become textures in other programs, so you're pretty much left in the dark as to how things are going to look in your favorite program. As for Forms In Flight format, 3-Demon has limitations, too. It only converts the first 32 colors used in an object. So if you load an object from another format, the colors could get screwed up. InterChange, by comparison, chooses the most popular 32 polygon colors, and remaps the rest to those. The InterChange Forms In Flight can also match palettes between objects. > Create objects for Sculpt 3D, VideoScape3D, Forms in flight, > Silver, and Gossett Graphics. (Anybody know about Gossett?) Gossett is named for Phil Gossett, a sometimes Mimetics employee. He designed their ReaSyn frame buffer. He has some kind of custom rendering machine in his bedroom, and he plans to someday offer a rendering service: you send him an object and he renders it in high res for you. So that's why Gossett format is there. Maybe the rendering service will ship when ReaSyn does. I guess we could call Gossett "WYSIWYGE", (whizzy-wiggy), for "what you see is what you get elsewhere." You can't see it until he renders it. > From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) > How much memory does this take? Somehow I don't think putting I/O for > a zillion formats into a 3D-modeler is the way to go (or is this a The 3-Demon executable on disk is 189K, the Workbench said 189K was used to load the program. Is that too much? I think this is one of the biggest advantages of the InterChange system. I could name about six more 3D products coming in the next six months, all with different formats. How fast is Mimetics going to update 3-Demon to handle these formats? (Related trivia question: How long did it take Todor to produce the SoundScape Utilities Disks?) I noticed a few other problems with 3-Demon. It loads VideoScape objects incorrectly. Severely wrong, depending on the polygon. I reported this in my beta-testing, to no avail. The manual doesn't mention this feature of its translation. 3-Demon needs to convert VideoScape's complex polygons to triangles in the equivalent shape. 3-Demon starts at one vertice and starts cutting triangles, which means the letter "C" turns into a scallop shell, because it cuts triangles across the concave bay of the "C". When InterChange converts "C" to Sculpt or Silver, the "C" looks like it should. My partner in Syndesis, Harriet Maybeck Tolly, wanted to see what this problem meant in practical terms, using the alphabet objects from the VideoScape disk. She said 3-Demon converted the objects correctly, as long as you don't want to use the letters A, B, C, D, E, G, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y or Z. (In other words, these letters were translated as various kinds of Tar Monsters. Only F, I and H were OK.) Also, 3-Demon is copy-protected with a "look up a word" scheme.
jfoust@well.UUCP (John Foust) (06/18/88)
Geez, I thought I'd get a response or two from my posting about 3-Demon. I'd like to hear more experiences from 3-Demon owners. Or for that matter, from InterChange owners out there in netland. If we can start a thread going again on 3D programs, I'll have a better chance of finding a place to start talking about our new products without it sounding like a true commercial announcement. John
David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG (David Plummer) (12/27/90)
Another question among the "hardware wanna-be" thread: are the proper lines passed on the A500 expansion slot to create an A2320 (deinterlacer) circuit? And another... why doesn't the A590 provide a pass through? And another, more involved, possibly redundant question: why can the custom chips not be redesigned/improved to run faster than 7MHz? Cost? Technology? NTSC compatibility? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- = plummerd@uregina.ca or plumme@hercules.uregina.ca (BITNET) = =---------------------------------------------------------------------= = Amiga__ | Make it possible for programmer's to = = __ /// IBMUBMWEALLBM4IBM | write code in English and you'll soon = = \\\/// | discover that programmers cannot = = \XX/ | write in English. = ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- David Plummer - via FidoNet node 1:140/22 UUCP: ...!herald!weyr!70!David.Plummer Domain: David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG Standard Disclaimers Apply...
lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) (12/30/90)
In <1038.277C32DA@weyr.FIDONET.ORG>, David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG (David Plummer) writes: >Another question among the "hardware wanna-be" thread: are the proper >lines passed on the A500 expansion slot to create an A2320 >(deinterlacer) circuit? No. >And another... why doesn't the A590 provide a pass through? This is a two part question. The first part is "Why?". People always ask that question, and have, since the beginning of humanity. The best philosophers have been unable to definitively answer it, and the discussion of the attempts to do so are beyond the scope of this newsgroup. The second part of this question is "Doesn't the A590 provid a pass through?" The answer to this part is easier. No, it does not provide a pass through. <sorry, couldn't resist> Seriously, the A500 was designed to fit a particular niche, at a substantially lower cost. It was not meant to be as expandable as the 2000 or 3000. Adding a pass through would violate the spec that CBM mandates for the expansion connector. -larry -- The best way to accelerate an MsDos machine is at 32 ft/sec/sec. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | // Larry Phillips | | \X/ lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca -or- uunet!van-bc!lpami!lphillips | | COMPUSERVE: 76703,4322 -or- 76703.4322@compuserve.com | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com (Hans Ridder) (01/09/91)
In article <2442@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) writes: >In <1038.277C32DA@weyr.FIDONET.ORG>, David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG (David Plummer) writes: >>And another... why doesn't the A590 provide a pass through? > >Seriously, the A500 was designed to fit a particular niche, at a substantially >lower cost. It was not meant to be as expandable as the 2000 or 3000. Adding a >pass through would violate the spec that CBM mandates for the expansion >connector. Just to clarify the point about violating specs. I'm pretty sure that passing the bus through wouldn't necessarily be violating the spec. (at least not the specs I have), but that it *would* add significantly to the cost. Buffers and associated logic, plus connector and FCC problems make it a fairly expensive proposition. >-larry -hans ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hans-Gabriel Ridder Digital Equipment Corporation ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com Customer Support Center ...decwrl!elvira.enet!ridder Colorado Springs, CO
daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) (01/10/91)
In article <2253@shodha.enet.dec.com> ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com (Hans Ridder) writes: >In article <2442@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips) writes: >>In <1038.277C32DA@weyr.FIDONET.ORG>, David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG (David Plummer) writes: >>>And another... why doesn't the A590 provide a pass through? >>Adding a pass through would violate the spec that CBM mandates for the >>expansion connector. >Just to clarify the point about violating specs. I'm pretty sure that >passing the bus through wouldn't necessarily be violating the spec. Well, you can ask for trouble one way or another. If you buffer the pass- through, you have a good chance at voilating the timing parameters expected by the next SOTS box. If you don't buffer the passthrough, you'll definitely violate the bus loading. There's no proper way to support passthrough. If you want more than one add-on, get a machine with a backplane (or add one to your SOTS edge machine). >Buffers and associated logic, plus connector and FCC problems make it a >fairly expensive proposition. FCC problems do, certainly, increase with any passthrough. >>-larry > Hans-Gabriel Ridder Digital Equipment Corporation -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy "Don't worry, 'bout a thing. 'Cause every little thing, gonna be alright" -Bob Marley