GENESIS II

                  Reviewed by Graham Raven

Generate fantastic 3D worlds! Imagine being able to create a world
of your own .... etc, woop, fantastic, brilliant etc! And so went
the blurb. All of this and less was perfectly true as far as it
went, a whole new world of mountains, vegetation, water and
general terraformed landscape. Well it sounded good to me and so I
had a go!

This program can be downloaded freely from the Geomantic website
(see below) and it's also included on the current issue of PC
Utilities magazine's CD.  Now I have to admit that you can at
least in theory create stunning 3D landscapes .. providing you
have at least the faintest idea as to what you are doing. Ah!  The
quick witted amongst you might just have grasped a potential
problem here, but don't let me prejudice your view of this fine
program (not yet anyway).

This is a program which interested me a lot, I would very much
like to learn how to create 3D landscapes with the view in mind of
eventually converting my RPG project into a true 3D world. So what
better idea than to follow the quick tutorial in the magazine.

1) Install Genesis II! No probs here, even I could do this.

2) Install the two plugins called Fractal Landscape Generator and
Landscape Terraformer which are also on the magazine cover CD.
Hmm, methinks they lie! Neither of these plugins were in fact on
the cover CD, but as I was given the Geomantic website details I
was able to download them directly from there.

3) Click on Fractal Landscape Generator and 'enter some numbers'.
There are six boxes all signifying something or other, into which
you can 'enter numbers'. ie Grid size, Grid point spacing, Random
number seed, Roughness and Glaciation.

Your initial landscape will be based on these numbers - which
means possible different landscapes equal some random number
followed by 800 zeros (not quite infinity but thereabouts for all
normal people).  Possible SENSIBLE variations of landscape however
are equal to some random number followed by roughly 799 zeros!

4) Do a quick render. Now call me stupid if you must, but I kind
of imagined that clicking the word 'RENDER' on the tool bar might
just be the thing to do here!  Regrettably the word 'faded out' on
the tool bar as soon as I entered my random numbers. Clicking
icons at random eventually caused the word to re-appear and lo, I
discovered that my random numbers had created mountains so high
that they peaked somewhere above the ceiling in the bedroom, with
no bottoms (they floated in mid air) and of the same colour and
texture as water!

5) Now click on Landscape Terraformer. What? With floating
mountains two hundred miles high? I decided to back track, not
knowing whether back-tracking was possible or not, or how to do
it. This quickly degenerated into 'click anything at random' mode.
Most things I clicked did nothing, but one of them did and I have
to admit freely that now I had not the slightest idea just what it
was doing, but it sure was doing it and refused to respond to any
input of mine whilst it was busy.

Well, I waited whilst it did its thing and it carried on doing it.
Ten minutes later it was still busy and I decided to abort the
whole mission and read a book instead. Ah but it was busy and it
wasn't going to let me cut it off in its prime. I tried the usual
things like Esc and Quit, and finally pulled the plug on the
computer. When I say you will shut down, you WILL SHUT DOWN! (I am
master of this machine - not Bill Gates - like it or not!)

To be fair, this program is pretty good and it can make some
stunning results, as shown in the magazine.  However, the mini
tutorial in the magazine was fairly hopeless - I wanted guiding
through the process of making something presentable, and it was
largely aimed at me learning by random clicking. Also the help
file could have benefited from a simply step by step guide on how
to use the program for beginners. (eg Duh, press this button
first, okay, now try this button, etc!) That would have stopped me
giving up in disgust.

You can get Genesis II as a free download from - Geomantics -
http://www.geomantics.com

Rating: Hey Woo! (if you are already an expert with the program)

Abandon all hope (if you are a beginner)












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