CYBERSPACE SOURCES - BY PHANTOM - A NOSTALGIA DEMOCODER

 

-What the...

At this moment you are the proud owner of a copy of phantom's
cyberspace-sources. With these sources you can experiment with
the latest in P.D. virtual-reality.

These sources, when properly compiled, will run on any AT,
but they will be too slow on anything less than a 386DX/33.
On some very fast machines the program might be too fast.
In that case, borrow your neighbours' computer. (They say that
your neighbours' computer should ALWAYS be slower than yours)
To run these sources, please compile demo3d.pas and makedata.pas.

To obtain a cool sample WAD file, just run the makedata-program.
In the current directory a cool file will appear, quite big actually.
This is a data file, with the texture data in it, and a small map.

Now start Turbo-Pascal 7.0, don't do any checking (especially no
stack-checking or overflow checking), don't use debug symbols and
all the slow shit, just compile the program. During this process,
a special graphics unit (VGA256.PAS) will be compiled, this gives
you the great VGA256.TPU file. Of course you may use this also in
your own program.

I said also. Sorry, but I wouldn't like it if you use ANY of my
routines in commercial stuff or shareware-programs.
Neither would it be any fun if my cyberspace would magically
appear in a dazzling new demo.

At this stage, you have probably taken a close look at the running
program. So now you know what cyberspace is.


Nostalgia? What the...

Nostalgia is the newest Dutch demogroup in Holland (A bit redundant,
that 'Holland', isn't it?). It consists of four successfull screen
and speaker artists. We have THREE coders: Suave, JAL, and me,
The Phantom.
Yes, I know there are quite some Phantoms, but hey, they can't really
compete in the demoscene, so let THEY change their name.
If any 'phantom' can out-perform me, I will change my name.
Just for your information: We won the BiZARRE!'94 compo in Nijmegen,
Holland. The first day of the compo (saturday) was the first day that
I met the other guys. So you can image that we had some rough 24 hours
to get our demo working! Due to this, we where not completely satisfied
with the result. We won, but we didn't release it.
At the time you read this, a highly improved version of ECHOES of the
past is released, and now available on the Internet. If you have a GUS
you will hear the great music from our musician, The REW. He's one of
the finest in Holland, and can certainly compete with the world's
leading musicians. You don't believe it? Get the demo!


Sources? What the...

Because I think the current level in public domain-games is rather
low, these sources are hereby placed in the public domain.
As  said, don't use it for shareware without my permission!
If you would like to use Cyberspace, you will have to be a fairly
good programmer, since some very important bits are missing.
My routine can not display sprites at the moment, making it rather
useless for games.

Of course, this can be implemented. If you can do this,
I think you are qualified to use the sources. If you can't do this,
the final game would have been shit anyway. If you can prove that
you can do a good game, but can't program the sprites, contact me.

Maybe you would like some explanation on the sources.
Here it comes.
- The floor is a rotated and tilted bitmap.
  This bitmap consists of little bitmaps, the little bitmaps
  are 32x32 pixels. You can think of the floor as a giant
  chess-board. On screen you see approx. 7 squares on the
  base-line, and more on the other lines.
  Every square has a number (0..255), because it's directly
  peeked from the map-memory. This number is the bitmap-index.
  So, the cool bitmaps that where defined in MakeData are
  used here.
  Because these tiles are rather big, and the world can consist
  of 128x256 tiles, the maximum size of the world is big enough
  for the average game. In the demo only one half of the
  maximum-size is used. Of course, you could have more than one map.
  So, the floor is easy. Now the ceiling.
- All the tile-edge-coords are mirrored from the floor. So an x-pos
  in a tile on the floor is equal to an x-coord in a tile on the
  ceiling. All coord-calculations have to be done only once.
  So, the ceiling is not so hard either. Now the walls.
- Every time the algorithm wants to draw a color-0 spot on the floor,
  a wall is drawn instead. So, a black square on the floor (assuming
  that color 0 is black) will become a massive block of wall on-screen.
  Whenever a bar is drawn from the floor to the mirrored coord on the
  ceiling, that x-pos is blocked. Please note that we are drawing from
  the bottom of the screen towards the middle, so, we don't first draw
  the fartest [ :) ] objects, but the nearest!
  When an x-pos is blocked, all walls and floors behind it are not even
  calculated any more.
- As you can see, the walls are not drawn with one color. This is done
  by taking the value of the ceiling-tile (which you can't see because
  there's a wall), and find a nice pattern in a pattern-table. Because
  I draw one bar at a time, I can only assign colors to horizontal
  lines on a wall, I can't do complete texture-mapping.

So, this draws my world. Things are rather fast because I don't use
screenswapping; I just overwrite the whole image. On slow computers
this looks ugly, on all other systems you won't notice, and it spares
me a clear-screen command.

That's it, I think the average programmer will be able to create
his own world with this information. If there are questions,
let me know.
Please let me know if you improve my world. I would like to work on
a couple of things:
- Sprites, as I mentioned before
- More speed, using 386 registers, especially segment-registers
- Lower walls (variable hight)
- Better light-to-dark

I already have routines to tilt the screen. This looks stunning,
but it's not quite perfected yet. Let me know if you're interested,
I'll send you a demo.

Well, end of text, to contact me just send some E-mail to:

ADSJBI@SKFERC.NL

That's the E-mail address of:

Jacco Bikker ('The Phantom')
Gestellaan 44
3431 GN  Nieuwegein
Holland
Phone (in Holland) 03402-33309

See you, and mail me! I need four mails monday!
(I wanna magnum (insiders))