Imagine a world within your computer, a world which you have created, a world of infinite
possibilities.
Welcome to the world of 3D Construction Kit.
Whether you want to devise devilish adventure games set on desert islands, or design the
mansion you've always dreamed of, construct a futuristic car for your driveway, or even
create a 10,000-seater football stadium and then charge down the pitch, 3D Construction
Kit gives you all the tools you need to generate worlds where the only boundaries are your
imaginations.
Using its simple, icon-driven control panel, you'll soon be turning your ideas into exciting,
new environments just waiting to be explored.
Harnessing the program's incredible power is as easy as clicking on a mouse or joystick.
Start with a small selection of basic building blocks.
Stretch and shrink them until they're the correct size and shape, then move them into
place.
Then, duplicate whole walls with a few clicks on a button as you assemble increasingly complex
structures.
Everything you do is shown on screen instantly so you can experiment to your heart's content.
When you've finally finished constructing your world, you can move around at will, investigating
objects from every angle, and complete 3D Construction Kit environments will run independently
of the creator program so you can share them with your friends.
With 3D Construction Kit, there are no limits.
Now prepare to take a trip through virtual reality as we introduce a few of its possibilities.
Whether you just want to doodle in three dimensions or meticulously create alternative landscapes
right down to the tiniest details, 3D Construction Kit gives you the power.
Techniques which were only available to professional programmers are yours as incentive software
unlocks the secrets of its incredible FreeScape system.
Seen in smash hit games such as Driller and Castle Master, become the architect of buildings
large and small.
What does it look like to play at Wembley?
Grab your kit and design your own stadium.
You will almost believe you can hear the roar of the crowd.
For a more peaceful view of the planet, take a ride on your very own space shuttle or sculpt
the streamlined contours of an award-winning racing car.
With 3D Construction Kit, you're soon up and running.
You'd like to invite friends around for a tour of your new house, but there's a problem.
They live 3,000 miles away.
Send them a 3D Construction Kit model for their computer and they can step through the door
and wander around.
And you don't have to worry about them overstaying their welcome.
With 3D Construction Kit, you can visualize anything from a room layout to an exhibition
stand.
Now hop aboard our helicopter for a trip into the realms of fantasy.
3D Construction Kit allows you to create adventure games which are every bit as polished as ones
you find in the shops.
Develop diabolical puzzles for players to solve as they pit their wits against yours.
The program's simple command language allows you to create sophisticated responses to their
every action.
Shooting the coconuts didn't help, so let's try the chest.
Now, what lies around that corner?
The answer's up to you.
3D Construction Kit gives you the tools.
You just provide the inspiration.
Hello, I'm Ian Andrew from Incentive Software.
In this short video, we'll take you through some of the techniques involved in creating
your own FreeScape environment.
3D Construction Kit contains all the commands you need to create your own worlds.
Which you can explore at will, providing you don't walk into too many trees.
As with any set of tools, it helps to have an idea of how to use them before you start.
We'll be introducing some of the basic techniques and you'll find further details in the manual.
We'll also mention any major differences between versions of the program.
This is particularly relevant if you have an 8-bit machine such as a Sinclair Spectrum
Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC.
However, most of the techniques are the same on all versions, so normally we'll just show
the Commodore Amiga.
Now we've cleared the cliffs, let's start with a plain landscape.
We communicate with the program using a cursor.
On 8-bit versions, we use a joystick or the keyboard.
For 16-bit machines, we control it with the mouse.
At the top of the screen is a menu bar which contains all the major functions.
To make a selection, just move the cursor over the menu until the correct command is
highlighted, then press the joystick button or click with the mouse.
The middle of the screen is the window onto our FreeScape world.
At the moment there's just ground and sky.
Directly below this is a status bar.
Its figures tell us exactly where we are in our environment.
Next come two sets of icons.
Those on the left control our viewpoint and whether we walk or fly through our landscape.
The ones on the right move us around the environment and change our eye level so that we can see
and look up or down.
At the bottom of the screen, the major commands are duplicated from the menu bar.
If we want a full screen view of our world, we just click on the test button and the control
panel vanishes completely.
That's not very interesting at the moment, so let's start creating.
The basic building block is a cube, so let's see what we can do with it.
To place a cube in the landscape, we click on the create button at the bottom of the
screen.
This leads to another menu containing all the shapes which are available, our building
blocks.
Cube is at the top right hand corner.
When it first appears, the cube is hovering in mid-air as we can see if we walk around
it using the movement control buttons.
On 8-bit machines, objects first appear on the ground.
Clicking on the edit button, then selecting the relevant item from the menu, lets us move
it around.
As a shortcut, 16-bit owners can click on the object itself rather than using the menu.
Either way, the edit control panel appears at the bottom of the screen.
This contains buttons which will move an object, stretch it, shrink it, or turn it through
90 degrees.
If you make a mistake, don't worry, there's an undo button at the far right of the panel.
Using these controls, we can shrink the cube until it's only the size of a matchbox.
Then stretch it until it becomes a flagpole.
Even though it's grown out of the top of the screen, we can look up with the view button
to see that it's all there.
But for our simple building, we need a flat wall.
We could go through all those stages again to create a second wall, but a more convenient
and accurate technique is to use the copy function.
On 16-bit, we're given the option of where our new section will appear in relation to
the original.
The only restriction is that it can't appear inside another object.
We place it to the right, then use the edit commands to move it to one side to form an
alleyway.
On 8-bit, selections have to be made from the menu, and the new object appears in a
set position, but apart from that, the process is essentially the same.
Now we create a third section of wall above the first.
Edit it like this, and then use the turn and move commands to maneuver it into place.
We stretch it until it covers the alleyway to form a tunnel.
Coloring is achieved in a different manner in virtually all versions of 3D Construction
Kit, but these are the basic techniques.
As we can only paint one side of an object at a time, the first step is to select which
one.
We start with the left wall, and this takes us to our palette.
On the Amiga, we just click on any of the available colors.
Immediately, our selection is surrounded by a flashing box, and a larger color sample
appears to the far right of the palette.
On the Amiga and ST, we can simply click on the wall.
Instead of constantly having to move around to paint each side of the cube, 3D Construction
Kit provides a shortcut.
Each section of this panel represents one face of the selected cuboid.
We can click on this rather than the object itself.
This is the technique used by 8-bit versions and on the PC.
To cut down on processing time and speed up the program's operation, it's as well to leave
faces which will never be seen, such as the bottoms of walls, unpainted.
You can also use this invisible paint as a special effect to create a force field, for
example.
If you forget what color you've used, simply click on the section of wall, and the correct
tone will be selected on the palette.
On an 8-bit micro, such as the Spectrum, with its two-color world, the program uses various
shades.
Although we have to type in a number from the menu, the technique remains the same.
Among 16-bit versions, there are two handy tools on the left of the control panel to
help isolate individual elements of complex structures.
The first, void, with a flashing box.
The other makes everything except the chosen section vanish.
Now we'll add something with more detail.
We'll create a small building at the end of the tunnel, and then a door.
Once again we create a cube, and lower this into position.
For the roof of our house, we use a new shape, a pyramid.
We leave this in mid-air while we stretch the cube to adjust its dimensions.
To simplify making the pyramid the same size as the cube, we change our viewpoint to look
straight down at the top of it.
When we've stretched the pyramid sufficiently, we center its apex with the point commands
found at the extreme left of the edit panel.
We experiment until the roof is symmetrical.
Clicking on mode takes us back to our original viewpoint.
Now it's time to create yet another shape.
As well as the three-dimensional objects we've already encountered, there are two-dimensional
ones which can be used to add detail to buildings.
In this instance, we'll use the rectangle to make a door.
To make it look more like a hole in the wall, we'll color it black, and then slide it into
position.
However, when we try to walk through it, we collide with the wall.
At the moment, it's just a flat black shape on a solid cube.
To allow us to define the inside of the house, we now need to create a new area.
Selecting create area from the menu bar takes us back to an empty landscape, just like the
one we started with.
However, note that the status bar now tells us we're in area two.
This time, instead of placing buildings in an open landscape, we want to enclose the
area with four walls.
On all versions except the PC, we can use the global command, which contains commonly
used objects.
On a PC, we'd simply create each wall from scratch, using cubes.
If it feels too claustrophobic as we look around the new area, we can expand the size
of our room.
There's no need to match the inside of a building to its outside.
In fact, we could create a grand chamber inside a small hut.
We now have two areas, but no way to move between them other than to use the area command
on the toolkit's menu bar.
So let's go outside again.
Each area can have several entrances.
We have to select which one we'll use when we move from a different area.
We now need to tell the program to move into the new area when we collide with the door.
PC Construction Kit's conditions are one of its most powerful features.
They let us tell the program how to respond to the user's actions.
We'll establish a condition that takes us from area one to area two if we collide with
the door.
Though it may look a little complex at first, the conditional language is really very logical,
as you'll discover from the manual.
Now let's try to walk through the door.
This time, we're inside the room.
FreeScape users can also interact with environments by shooting, so let's make the top of the
tunnel vanish if we shoot it.
In 8-bit machines, the conditional language looks a little different, but works in essentially
the same fashion.
This technique could be used to reveal a secret passage in an adventure game, for example.
On 16-bit versions, we can also make features move using the animation command.
When you have finished designing your game, it is time to test it and add the final touches.
Now we can replace the development control panel with a more suitable border.
We can use any of those provided, or create our own with an art package.
Once we've chosen the screen, we have to tell the program the size of the view window.
We draw this out until it fills the empty space.
The final stage is to let the program know where the user's movement keys are.
We return to the main screen and select controls from the general menu.
We click on each direction in turn.
Going to the border, we then draw a box around the right arrow.
Clicking on this now moves us right, and we can still shoot the roof and wall of the tunnel.
That's just a brief introduction to the 3D construction kit.
For more details, read the manual, experiment with the kit game which we've included, but
most of all, use your imagination and have fun!
Thanks for watching!