Domark
£24.99

One of the great programming innovations over the past few years has been Freescape, a system of creating a three dimensional world where the player can have total control over movement. No longer were you only able to walk around objects, you could fly above them and took down, stand below and look up - the possibilities were endless.

Incentive produced four games using Freescape: Driller (97%, Issue 47), Dark Side (95%, Issue 54), Total Eclipse (93%, Issue 60) and Castle Master (85%, Issue 76). Now they've gone one step further - 3D Construction Kit.

Basically, this is a utility to create your own Freescape worlds. The original games were created by typing in lists of coordinates (a very tricky business) but now it's as easy as two key presses to put a 3D object on the screen. The kit uses pull-down menus and a pointer which are simple to use and understand.

You choose the shape you want from a list including hexagons, triangles, cubes, lines and pentagons and can then stretch, shrink, turn and shade it and position it in your world. Using this method complex buildings can be easily built up.

Creating buildings and doors to walk around is all very well but would make a very boring game. This is why a 'conditions' option has been included. By putting a condition on a certain object (IFSHOT THEN GOTO AREA 2, for example) you can start to make a game. In Total Eclipse, shooting blocks created stairs and in Castle Master a switch opened the drawbridge. Each part or room of the game is called an area. You can have as many areas as memory will allow.

As you can imagine, storing and calculating the movement of all the objects you put into a game can be very memory hungry and annoying when you think that many of the objects are simply repeated from area to area. Global objects can be used to save having to recreate a new situation each time. An example of this is four walls and a ceiling for a room. You can just use the global object for this as each room of your game.

Sensors can be used to make something react when the player comes near it - a monster firing at you for example. When creating remember that you're not restricted to building on the ground. You can choose whether you want your player to fly on a jet-pack, in a plane or just walk.

Once you've created the world for your game you can start to concentrate on the presentation. The size of the window your player uses to see into your world can be changed. The smaller you have it the faster things will scroll by.

A normal SCREEN$ file drawn with any art utility can be incorporated to use as a border and status panel. Text and score lines to represent energy, lives, etc are a must and there's even an option to use scrolling bars to give your game a more professional look.

Within a few minutes of loading 3D Construction Kit you will be creating worlds for pleasure or even monetary gain. The great thing about the system is that it creates stand-alone programs so you can load them without having to reload 3D Kit. Perfect for sending into CRASH Powertape!

This is an excellent game creation utility. Whether you want to create whole games for friends or models of your house to fly over, it's simple to use and great fun.

Domark
£24.99 cass
Reviewer: James Leach

Before I go any further, let's make one thing clear. 3D Construction Kit isn't actually a game. It's a way of creating games. So don't expect me to go on about horizontal scrolling and the number of levels and whatever else, okay? Right.

3DCK (as I'll call it, even though it sounds a bit rude) uses a system called Freescape, which anyone who's ever played Castle Master or Driller (or any of those other Incentive games) will know all about already. Quite simply, it's a way of creating a 3D world by building objects, then positioning them accordingly. For example, a house can be made up of a cube with a pyramid-shaped roof bunged on top. Chuck in a door (and windows if you want) and, voila, your very own bungalow! (Rather crap, I admit, but let's not run before we can walk, eh?)

In fact, it's all a bit like Lego. You start off with an area to build on, like those big Lego base-plates. This can be the inside of a building, a street, a universe - anything you want. Then you select a shape (a pyramid, say), and enlarge it in any direction, spin it round, stretch it or squash it. From the moment it (or any other object) is created it's given a number, so you can easily go back and change it later.

You can also inspect your work from any angle, at any time, by simply walking or flying around the area it's in. You can add tiny bits of detail or get rid of things you don't want. In fact you can do pretty much anything at all, including SAVEing and LOADing your areas (which is seriously useful). And you can have as many of these areas as you want, so it wouldn't be hard to invent an entire town, complete with the insides of every building. (It'd take an unfeasibly long time to do of course, but the option's there if you want to take it up).

FUNNY LANGUAGE THINGIES

Right, so it's all jolly good fun - but what exactly can you do with it? And this is where it gets seriously funky, Spec-chums - because you can actually write games with it! Blimey You see, as well as the 3D designing bits there's something called the Conditions Menu. This lets you access a special language in which you can control things, enter doors, pick up objects, display messages and so on, using a sort of customised BASIC. Take a simple routine like

INVIS 005
IFHIT OBJECT 005 THEN VIS 005

for example. Here there's an invisible object (called 005 - could be big rectangle), which only becomes visible if it's walked into (giving the player a secret codeword or a key or something). It might sound a bit complicated, but there's a full list of commands in the manual and they all make some sort of sense. (It's certainly easy once you've got the idea.)

So, out of this simple language comes your 'gameplay'. Ideally you've worked out what you want everything to do beforehand, so it should all be dear, neat and logical. This is also the time to add any sounds (which you can choose from a special menu and fit in anywhere).

Right, once you've written your masterpiece. It's time to playtest it. Check out everything you can think of, and then make sure you haven't made any monumental cock-ups. If it all works okay, you can then save your game with the compiler provided. This allows the game to function separately from the program (which it obviously doesn't save) so you can give copies to your friends. And it'll be just like a real Freescape game, with a plot, goals and missions, whatever you want - they won't be able to edit or alter anything. (Actually, 3DCK comes with a of game itself, showing all the aspects of the program and it can do.)

What's more, if you've got a Speccy art package you can even design the info display screens with it, and then import them to make the whole thing look even more professional!

I'D NEVER HAVE BELIEVED IT!

So what do I reckon? Well take a guess. 3D Construction Kit is, quite simply, an absolutely incredible piece of software. It's not something you can dive into at first sitting (so shoot-'em-up fans beware), but, then again, it's not at all complicated once you've sussed it out. And, as the ads say, the only limit really is your imagination (and, ahem, the memory of our humble little chum! But even that's not a real problem because it's available, quite unbelievably, on 48K mode).

Of course, it's not technically a game, but since you can use it to create them I'm call it a Megagame anyway. It's £25, but it's worth every penny. So go out and but it, persevere until you've created something really amazing, and then send a copy into us and we might just bung it on the covertape. (And then again we might not.) Hurrah! Either way, you'll feel as though you've really accomplished something and praise the day you read this review and decided to go out and buy it.

Label: Domark
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £24.99 Tape, £24.99 Disk
Reviewer: Steve Keen

I know what you're thinking. "Twenty five quid for a computer game, you've got to be pulling my leg with a tug boat!" But don't be put off straight away, 3DCK is not your everyday piece of disposable software. Domark have created a masterpiece in the home computer gaming market.

3-D Construction Kit is a high-tech package that not only lets you create three dimensional worlds and interact with them, but also lets you create slick, professional-looking games.

The package gives you all the tools with which to build your own games world. Imagine building your own castle complete with secret passages, traps, drawbridge and moat. Perhaps you'd like to build an entire alien habitat or a carbon copy of your house and actually be able to walk or even fly around from room to room?

Over four years in production, 3DCK lets you dive into your dreams and bring them to the screen. A wise gamer once said "Don't condemn a game by the size of it's manual." And that's good advice here because this instruction book would not look out of place in the Old Testament! If you're the sort who refers to their manual when loading a 48k a on a 128k Speccy, then you're already fighting an uphill battle, but those thoughtful people at Domark have provided a step-by-step tutorial video that lets you build your confidence slowly.

On first confrontation with the main "world" window you will be horrified to find that their are 33 separate icons to click on. Many lead to another directory or fable, but don't panic. Most of the commands (Copy, Create, Shade, Delete etc) speak for themselves. The best way to tackle this apparent nightmare is to switch off the computer and turn on the video.

The kit is fashioned on the Freescape system (as used in Castle Master). All building work takes place in "areas'. You chose your shape from the table and it materialises in the window on the area's surface. Once in view you can edit the 3D form to suit your needs, squashing and stretching it until you're happy to move on to the next addition. For all the cowboy builders there is the option to back and make any amendments later. Practice, as they say. makes perfect.

Unfortunately in the Spectrum version there isn't any colour so we have to make do with shading our creations. This can be as good, if not better, as the colour option, just as black and white photography can be infinitely more dramatic than it's colour counterpart.

What really makes 3DCK exciting is the Freescape Command Language. With these simple programing commands you are able to interact with your world by picking up objects and carrying them or, by using the GOTO command, move to a different area. For example if you walked into a door, instead of bumping your head, you could pre-program the command GOTO into the memory. Once you reached the appointed pixel you would be placed safety on the other side. This language lets you shoot objects to reveal things, move objects around, open draws a infinitum, in fact just about anything you'd expect to be able to in a game you'd shelled out quids and quids for!

If you find that you're not as imaginative as the video would lead you to believe then there's a ready a shoot 'em up adventure for you to explore, but once you've discovered the awesome capabilities of 3DCK you won't want to spend too much time on that. The only limit is your imagination say Domark, my limitation is that there's only 24 hours in a day!

A stunning achievement on the home computer made even more impressive by it's ease of use, manual and video. 3D Construction Kit will nurture the beginnings of many a new programmer. So fork out for it once and you could be buying whole games designing career!

MATT:
A hefty price tag, but you really get your money's worth. It'll have you coming back for months.

GARTH:
Lets face it you could buy a lot of rubbish for 25 quid so do yourself a favour and invest it wisely in this. Just think, you may never have to buy a game ever again...