3DCK TIPS #4 – ENTRANCES AND MODES

The manual already covers entrances pretty well for travelling between areas when you are using the same mode all the time, e.g. WALK. If however, you wish to permit the player to change modes, i.e. be able to both walk and fly, then I have the following advice:

Entrances are best created/set in the same mode that you wish to use when you goto them. Not doing this gives quirky results- for example if you set an entrance in FLY2 and then GOTO the entrance while you are in WALK, then you will find yourself standing on the entrance, at double standing-height effectively. Moving in any direction would make you fall to normal standing height. So my advice, if you wish to change modes in the game, is to create an entrance for each mode type that you are utilising.

For example, if your projects allows the player the ability to both walk or fly between different areas, then you could have a doorway-entrance handling condition as follows:
IFHIT <DOORWAY>
THEN
ELSE
END -- Didn’t bump into the doorway, so exit this condition sequence here.
ENDIF
CMPV 1 <VAR> -- Assuming variable <VAR> is set to 1 when the player mode is set to WALK.
IFEQ
THEN
GOTO 1 <AREA> --Assuming that entrance 1 in <AREA> was created in WALK mode.
ELSE
GOTO 2 <AREA> --Assuming that entrance 2 in <AREA> was created in FLY2 mode.
END -- As this is the final end of the condition, we can skip the closing ENDIF to save 1 byte.

We had to draw a how a room once looked from a book in English at school, being a geek a made it on the 3dck and took my c64 in to show it off as we didnt have any software like that in the school at that time. Think we then spent the rest of the lesson playing Creatures... yay!
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3DCK TIPS #5 – HOW TO CREATE A MASSIVE AREA

Total Eclipse and Castle Master have starting areas of a desert and a glassy plane, that are vast in size, with a ‘horizon’ that goes on forever.

The 3DCK allows the area scale to be set under the ‘edit area’ menu option. The lower the scale value, the larger the area is. 1 is the lowest scale value that you can set. However this does not give an area as vast as the aforementioned Freescape games.

A further trick for making a scale 1 area bigger is to do what Phil Boyce did in his ‘The Time Crystal’. He set the MODE to crawl so that the player was lower down and moved in smaller increments. As the player doesn’t realise he is crawling, he thinks the area is bigger!

The ultimate trick for making an area as big as possible is described in the 3DCK Newsletter. The idea is to use scale 1 and set the MODE to FLY1, which has the smallest movement increments. The player must be restrained from attempting to fly by continuously loading the player Z position variables 116 and 117 with a constant value. Of course this means the player will not be able to climb anything in such an area without having to cater for it with specific conditions.

The 8-bit version of the 3DCK does not provide the horizon feature that can be seen in Total Eclipse and Castle Master. However, the effect can be achieved by creating four eye-height rectangles at all four extremes of an area. When these are coloured the same shade as the floor object, it gives a good illusion that the ground goes on forever, and that the horizon where the ground meets the sky is always distant. The effect is akin to standing in an outside giant empty eye-height swimming pool when all 4 walls are painted the same colour as the floor.

3DCK TIPS #6 – MODIFICATIONS TO SUPPORT FAST EMULATION AND SUPERCPU

Of course a 3DCK project should be written to be played on a real C64, or emulation at 100% speed.

However, not all C64 users appreciated the 1FPS Freescape performance, and these days emulators can easily provide SuperCPU speeds of 2500% (25x).

Unfortunately you can’t just run a standard C64 Freescape game at 2500% speed as the player finds turning uncontrollably fast, and any strength sappers or time limits in the game are accelerated to make the game impossible. Plus messages flash up much too quickly to read. Fortunately, with the 3DCK editors, all of these shortcomings can easily be address, so that you can create an alternative version of your 3DCK project, specifically optimised for fast emulation or SuperCPU.

VICE is very capable at emulating speeds around 25x. For Freescape games, you can ease the CPU load by reducing the refresh rate to 1/6 or even 1/8. This should get you SuperCPU speeds easily even on very old PCs. (When I run at 25x, everything runs 25x faster, including sound and timings. I have heard of a fast emulation that maintains normal clock speeds, but I have never tried it.)

Right then, assuming you have a finished C64 3DCK project, here are the modifications you need to do to create a 10x-25x CPU version:

• decrease the walk and turn increments to improve the smoothness and controllability: In the condition editor, access menu option General>Setup and ‘Turn Speed’ to 5, and ‘Walk Speed’ to, say, 35.
• In the condition editor, access menu option General>Set Window and set the X and Y sizes to the maximum sizes of 32 and 14.
• Wherever the FCL TIMER command is used, increase its parameter value, perhaps to the maximum 255
• Wherever the FCL DELAY command is used, increase its parameter value to 255.
• Create a new PROC with three DELAY 255 commands. Call this procedure whenever a message is printed, or whenever you wish the game to pause for moment.
• If you use a variable to represent Strength or a time limit, then decrease any additions/subtractions to 1, or disable the strength or time limit concept so that the player has infinite strength and time. If you do retain strength or time limit variables, ensure that you use the full range of the variable, from 0-255.
• SPACE activates the target icon in Freescape games. This is useless with fast CPU speeds as the icon whizzes around far to fast to control. Therefore, if there are any items to shoot/activate, then ensure these objects are edited to be large enough to shoot/activate using only the movement keys, so that the central targeting icon can be moved over the object in question.

Guys,

Take a look at this fantastic new website that Stuart has created:

http://www.3dconstructionkit.co.uk/

Here's hoping that all these 3DCK developments are worthy of a mention in Retro Gamer magazine, and may even worthy of an article...

A very very nice website !!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Now that's an excellent website, a perfect port of call for anyone who interested.
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I have terrific 3D Construction Kit news!

I have discovered that it is possible to extract the data out of a standalone 3DCK game, so that it can be loaded back into the 3DCK editor! It works!

Expect the datafiles for The Time Crystal, Cyborg 2900 and Remote Control to appear on Stuart's http://www.3dconstructionkit.co.uk/ sometime in the near future, as I will be emailing the datafiles to him.

This means we can examine the innards of the games, discover any hidden secrets, and see if they have endings.

Furthermore, it means that existing games can be updated to run with 25x speed emulation and SuperCPU

The technique for extracting the data is as follows:
1. Load and run a C64 3DCK standalone game.
2. Freeze the Action Replay cartridge
3. Enter the monitor and type S"KIT-DATA0",8,4A00,6000

That gives you a KIT-DATA0 file on the disk that can be loaded directly into the 3DCK editor!

Awesome! ... will be great to learn of anything found in these games that was unused!
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Forgive me, I get really nostalgic over the look of C64 Freescape graphics from 3DCK. I would like to share the following 3DCK images with you.

Screenshots from Phil's "The Time Crystal":



Screenshots from my "A Chance In Hell":
















Screenshots from Incentive's "Kitgame":

Hope that Stuart will fix the filedata's download (it does not work for me as now): I wanna check if I can use those data on the Plus/4 version too, it would be quite cool!

Found reference to Bodycount in a fanzine i'm currently scanning, and which I thought i'd share:



Here is the game:
http://www.gamebase64.com/game...18&h=0
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No problem!.... I had a quick sift through Gamebase, and found this one too ... http://www.gamebase64.com/game...18&h=0

Not sure if you have that one already.

EDIT:.. Oh, and did I pass on the unfinished effort I did many moons ago? ... It was basically going to be a 3D run around of my old house, turned into some type of game

MY HOUSE - http://www.gtw64.co.uk/mystuff...yhouse.zip


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Apologies for www.3dconstructionkit.co.uk being down for several weeks. whilst we moved the server from one location to another. We had some issues with our ISP which caused the downtime to be longer than anticipated.

I'm pleased to announce that it's back up, with loads of new content for all formats, thanks to flanimal, (and Luca, the datafile is now fixed!)

3DCK Tips #7 – Colours

Thinking about it, colouring and shading areas was quite time consuming work, so it might pay dividends to put time into this area early on in the design stages, with perhaps some experimentation. The sky colour is shared with the border, and this is usually left the same colour, usually black. The other colours impact the look of the any global floor and wall objects activated, so that is worth considering. I tended to make colours of objects symmetrical, but a more advanced technique would to be decide on a light direction and shade the objects accordingly, so that they are lighter at the light source side and darker at the shade size. One avoidance I made in ACIH was shade clash – if one object is slightly behind another, ensure that different shades are used otherwise they will appear to ‘merge’ and the player may be disorientated. I wasn’t especially talented at colouring and shading in ACIH. I did a so-so job. I remember there being a big choice for each area, whether to use two similar shades like brown and orange to give finer shading detail, or go with vividly different colours to achieve a high colour variation, at the cost of some garish shades. I think a whole chapter could be written on C64 4-colour area shading designs! I hope this has been food for thought for you, that was my intention.
FCL COLOR Command can be used to great effect in an area. For example, you could have an area that slowly moves between day and night, or hot and cold, or ghostly white. The colours of an area reset to their defaults if you re-enter the area, but can be overridden with FCL COLOR at any time. Colours are normally changed for a particular area, but you can also change colours in the general conditions for all areas! You could even have a rainbow-world, where all areas are coloured predominantly red at first, and then as you solve puzzles, progress through yellow, orange, and the rest of the rainbow colours.
0 = Black 4 = Purple 8 = Orange 12 = Grey 2
1 = White 5 = Green 9 = Brown 13 = Light Green
2 = Red 6 = Blue 10 = Light Red 14 = Light Blue
3 = Cyan 7 = Yellow 11 = Grey 1 15 = Grey 3

Firstly I'd better make it clear I'm the Doctor above going by the name nintendwho It's been great rereading the comments about The Time Crystal and Parallel Logic above, thank you all for your kind words!

Now that I'm back full-time with my 64 I'm going to start dedicating more time to the idea of creating another 3DCK game, as I've already said to Flanimal and looking forward to getting properly acquanted with everybody again.

Cheetah, if you'd still like the info on the "lost" software like Util 1541 or the text adventure, or more info behind The Venus Trail, Colin's SEUCK game or The Time Crystal just gimme a shout, I'd be more than happy to help out!