3D Construction Kit - Domark/Incentive RRP œ39.99-49.99
        (Utility for PC (reviewed), ST and Amiga)

"Build your own virtual reality," it said on the box. I'm a sucker
for these long, complicated programs where you build things
(cities, railroad, worlds etc). I spend hours on them, have a lot
of fun but rarely end up with any final result which I could show
to people to prove that I'd actually been doing something, not
just messing about. Having seen Incentive's Freescape games
(Driller, Dark Side, Castle Master et al), I knew that it should
be possible to have an actual end product - it might not be any
good but it would exist!

First I had to get to grips with the package and it was a pretty
daunting thing to look at, weighing almost 1.5lbs. However, part
of the weight was made up by a video which contained a tutorial on
using the package - a brilliant idea that I wish more companies
would copy. It's a lot easier to understand things when you've
seen them being done than by just reading about them. However, the
cost of the video obviously bumps up the price considerably.
The Freescape system creates graphical adventures in which you,
the main character, can wander round various locations designed by
the programmer, solving problems as you go. The only limit to the
landscapes that can be included is the designer's imagination so
the box and tutorial give some examples ... build a space shuttle,
design your own house, construct a desert island or a coastline
complete with lighthouse. All the objects are built up from basic
building blocks of various shapes which can be stretched or
shrunk, raised or lowered, moved sideways, rotated and coloured.
If a house, for example, is the object you build, you can include
commands so that if the player walks into the doorway, he or she
will enter the room(s) inside where they can then investigate
items of furniture, open drawers, look inside them and generally
interact with things as they would in real life - provided the
programmer is proficient enough! You can even have animated
objects and can walk or fly round your masterpiece, or look at it
through different cameras which can be placed wherever you want.

The accompanying booklet is almost 70 pages long and rather dry,
consisting of a list of the various options with their functions
and the possible responses when you select them plus any actions
you can take. At the end, the language used to actually interact
with the environment, Freescape Command Language or FCL, is
explained with conditions and commands such as ACTIVATED?,
COLLIDED? and ENDGAME being explained. There are Area Conditions,
Object Conditions and General Conditions and they are divided into
classes such as Trigger Interrogators, Loop Commands and
Conditional Statements. It looked very intimidating so I decided
to just dive in and refer to the manual when I hit problems.

For my first experiment, I thought it best to try to build
something I knew well so I tried to build good old 9 Warwick Road.
The main body of the building wasn't any great problem and I
joined on the kitchen/bathroom extension without any problems
though the porch was a bit harder. As suggested in the video, I
made the roof from a pyramid, manipulated it to get the angle of
the eaves right, then lowered it onto the house. Of course, it
didn't fit exactly so I had to tweak the size of it, still
attempting to keep the shape right; a bit more tricky as I found
it almost impossible to get them to fit exactly. It might look the
right fit from one angle but change your position and you could
see gaps. They made it look so easy on the video!  Also several
times I accidentally changed my viewpoint and lost the house
altogether, clicking in vain on different icons, trying to get
back to where I'd been. I found this very easy to do and hard to
recover from.

After spending hours on the package, I had to confess that, though
I had some hiccups using it (and several bouts of hysterics), I'd
also had a great deal of fun, and 9 Warwick Road was certainly
recognisable if nowhere near finished. Like all these packages, in
order to get the most out of the 3D Construction Kit you need to
spend a lot of time on it and I'd suggest that you also join the
user group, run by Mandy Rodrigues. The newsletters produced by
the group cover hints and tips, letters and routines and show just
some of the things that are possible when you really get involved
with the package.
                                                Sue