Best of Mega Games for DOS

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DOC2COM (Gerald DePyper) | 1994-03-29 | 20.5 KB | 386 lines

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═ ║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║ ╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ┬─┬── ┬─┬ ┬ ┬ ┌─┬─────┐ ┬─┬─────┐ ┬─┬── ──┬─┬─────┐ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ┬┬ ┬ ┌┬──┐ ┬┬ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├───┬─┘ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ││ │ ││ ││ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ┴─┴─────┘ └┴──┘ └┴──┘ ┴┴ └─┴───┴───┘ └─┴─────┘ ┴─┴ ┴── ┴─┴─────┘ ──┴─┴─────┘ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔═╗╔ ║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║║ ═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═╝╚═ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── LuciWORLD Copyright 1994 Lucida Group All Rights Reserved GTDR LuciWORLD is a trademark of Lucida Group. The Reality Engine is a trademark of Lucida Group. Please forgive any typos in this documentation as time did not permit us to proofread as well as we would have liked :) ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── First. . . . ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── We have something very important that you all should read. Now. CHILDREN.MOD [Children of Science] was authored by Jester of Sanity. We have, as the world would say, "ripped" this MOD not only because of the excellence of the music quality, but also because we strongly agree with the message contained within this song. Jester of Sanity wishes (commented the MOD) to dedicate Children of Science to, "Panther of Sanity because he seems 2 be a real scientific kid." Having grown up on the brink of the "information age" and the paving of the "information highway," we feel that a song of this nature is necessary to have in a technological demo such as ours, and are not only honored to be blessed with its presence, but are extremely proud that _someone_ out there really sees what is going on in today's _global_ society. We here at Lucida feel that the world is changing at too rapid a pace to be kept up with! We welcome these notions of change, and this one song represents our inner thoughts better than a song we could have authored ourselves. We simply wish to thank Jester of Sanity in a most public fashion and not try to deprive him of his due credit. We are not just a bunch of "lamer" rippers. We just developed an immediate appreciation of this particular song. Jester of Sanity is in no way affiliated with Lucida Group, and does not know we are using his song in our demo because we could not contact him before the release date of the demo. We only made one very minor modification to the song so that it would loop more smoothly as its runtime is less than that of our demo. We received your song, Jester, on a CD-ROM that had Modules on it as well as a lot of other material. Again, thank you, Jester of Sanity. Please feel free to contact us if you get a hold of our demo. We will continue to try to contact you. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Greetingz! ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Hello, world, from Lucida Group. By now, you have probably played Battle Beyond and Mission 9 from us, and couldn't help but notice that they were top-view games. Well, that is about to change with our new toy, "The Reality Engine!" Yes, Linc has been *very* busy creating this new engine to drive our 3D games -- coming soon. . . . ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Anyway, who/what is Lucida? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Linc -- Head Coder/Project Coordinator/PR (Real Name: Robert J. Colbert) Mantis -- Coder/Grafix/Muzik/Project Design (Real Name: Steve Heintz) Crypt Keeper -- Grafix Artist (Real Name: Christopher R. Burnham) ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── What did I just download? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── You just downloaded a small piece of software that demonstrates some of the capabilities of our Reality Engine. You will see some 3D animation of wireframe, solid, and our new "Dot Frame" objects. You will see them twist, bend and display WAVES. All at speeds approaching sonic. This demo was not written in a "competitive" nature. It was written for two reasons: (1) To say hello to everyone in a friendly manner; (2) To show you all what we're up to! _If_ this demo happens to make its way to Assembly '94, we would like for it to be judged, but that's not why we've written it. We have been working on The Reality Engine for over two years! Linc started work on the project when he was 18 -- he's 21 now. Comprised of a rich mixture of code in both C and Assembly, this engine handles vector balls, wireframes (soon to be solids), texture maps (not presented in the demo), and a lot of math at the calculus level. We can only hope that you can understand and comprehend the size of such a project -- and we further hope you have come to appreciate the speed of this code, even when paired with a slow four-channel digital music player (MOD-OBJ)! ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Cool. How do I run it? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Well, get out of this text viewer, and into DOS! Boot your machine squeaky clean (no memory managers or TSR's, ESPECIALLY EMM386!!) -- get to the directory that you put this demo in, and type LUCIWRLD and press [ENTER]. That's it. After loading some necessary data into RAM (provided you have enough free), the demo will display a prompt, "Music:" with the current selection immediately following (default "Off"). To change your selection, press the spacebar. The selections are as follows (in order). . . . · Off · PC Speaker (ack) · Sound Blaster Quality - Low (286 / Slow 386) · Sound Blaster Quality - Normal (386 / Slow 486) · Sound Blaster Quality - High (486 / Pentium?) When the correct selection is displayed, press ENTER to move on. You will be asked if you would like the demo to loop. This is an infinite loop that can only be exitied by pressing Alt + Esc (during an animation part), and runs from the very first pixel of the demo to the very last, over and over and over and over and over and over -- you get the idea. It was built into the demo for store display purposes. You may, however, decide you'd like to use our demo as a screen saver or equivalent and want it to run until _you_ decide it should stop. [Look ma, no hands!!] Sit back in that extra-nice reclining chair of yours, turn all the lights off in the room at night, turn the volume WAY UP on your speakers and enjoy the show. Your going to see some old techniques of ours (borders, scrolling backgrounds, etc.), and you're going to see some 3D animation. Toward the end of the demo, we're introducing some of Crypt Keeper's new artwork (newest member of Lucida). ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Demo control. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Although we have designed this demo to run 100% by itself after you get it set up, you do have some "runtime" options: · Pressing any key will skip to the next part. · Pressing Alt + Esc during an animation will abort to DOS. While the demo is running, you may skip to the next part by pressing any key. You can also "abort" the demo by pressing Alt + Esc at any time *during an animation*. Still screen sections of the demo do not respond to Alt + Esc. If you choose to "abort" the demo, you will not be given the statistics; you have to let the whole demo run (without looping) in order to get the statistics (frames/sec, run time, etc.). ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Well, I watched it, and it's SUPER COOL!! How can I contact Lucida to let you know what I think? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Well, you have a variety of options. You can: Send us surface mail at: Lucida Group 32 Ohio Street McKees Rocks, PA 15136 Send us Email at: · Polaris 2000 BBS SysOp: Dreamweaver (412)457-3197 [Pittsburgh, PA USA] · File Exchange BBS SysOp: Nightowl (412)884-9132 [Pittsburgh, PA USA] Tell the sysop of the board you call that you're there to speak with Lucida Group. They'll treat ya nicely. To minimize long distance charges, prepare an ASCII text document without logging on and upload it to us. We'll be sure to send you a reply by US Mail if you request it (just give us an address!). That way, you only need to call one of the above boards once to contact us, or you could simply mail us a letter at our Snail Mail address extra above :) NOTE: We read our email daily, usually after about 11:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. You can expect a direct reply from _us_, not a representative. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Allright, so what can I expect from you guys in the future? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [Lucida as a whole] Well, this is difficult to say. We hadn't really planned on finishing the Reality Engine so soon. Most of The Reality Engine has been coded in Assembly, with math extensions in C++. It's not that easy of a task to manage by any standard. It is, nonetheless, completed and bug-free! We are very happy about this, and proud of our new product. We had started a new top-view game, but that's going to change. The whole game is going to change. We're giving it a temporary name of, "Freefall." This new game will take you to a weightless, parallel universe where nothing seems real. Anything could be real, and your job is to find objects that are real. This is going to be the most wonderful virtual reality game to be released on the PC. We are currently working out several quirks of using a standard VGA card in 360w x 480h x 256c mode. This will make for excellent quality grafix and super resolution that most of you haven't even seen your computer produce -- yet. The problems are due to the "squashed" aspect ratio. Maintaining believable objects with such a squashed ratio is very difficult, but we're doing it here at Lucida! Speed is another problem with this most heavily interlaced graphics mode. Only our 486 customers will be able to access this graphics mode. We are also planning a TSR screen saver for DOS that uses the Reality Engine. It, too, will use digital music. It, too, as well as this demo, will be freeware!! Look for it sometime in mid 1994. [Linc] After <much> coding, Linc plans to crawl into a little dark corner and shiver for a while. He'll be fine in about a week, and work will resume on all projects. Special thanks must be given to all the local pizza shops in my immediate area that deliver! As a non- stop coder, nourishment becomes a luxury -- and so does delivery at 1 a.m. Thanx guyz/gurlz!! [Mantis] Mantis will be working on a role playing game for a while. We'll letcha know when it's nearing completion. He's also helping with the game design of Freefall, the first _game_ from Lucida which will use the Reality Engine. He is also rather busy with a personal life. [Crypt Keeper] Crypt Keeper is a bit unpredictable. He'll probably be drawing a lot of new stuff for the games, but he also does some private stuff as well. We wish to publicly welcome him to the group, and we're telling you all to look for his private art collection. He is one of the most talented digital artists we have ever met. If only he did _sound_!! <grin>. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── So what's left? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── It will be quite a while before you see another Lucida release. We are going to dedicate our time exclusively to the development of the games mentioned above. We can tell you, however, that this _will_ be among the best shareware you'll see for a long time. Thank you very much for checking out our new demo, and look for more great products from Lucida in the future. This group is growing. We are producing more and more each day we manage to wake up (or not sleep, as the case goes <grin>). See ya in the future! ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ========[Growing]======== Lucida Distribution Network =========[Growing]======= ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Official Lucida Distribution Sites (where to get verified files from us): [In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] · Polaris 2000 BBS (412) 457-3197 Sysop: Dreamweaver · The File Exchange BBS (412) 884-9132 Sysop: Nightowl [In Terre Haute, Indiana] · The Late Nite BBS (812) 234-0460 Sysop: Money Man We are working on getting more distribution sites. If you are a sysop of a BBS, and would like to become an official Lucida Distribution Site, please feel free to print and fill out the file DISTAPP1.TXT. We'll send you the complete shareware versions of our two games, and you are guaranteed to receive our future releases as soon as they are distributed, direct upload from us -- guaranteed virus free! If you are an individual who calls a BBS regularly, please encourage your SysOp to become an Official Lucida Distribution Site. This will enable you to receive our files directly from us -- all in one piece -- all virus free. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Special Thanks to: ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Creating a demo such as the one you're about to see/have just seen takes a lot of time, effort, skill, determination and support. As well as having to study computers beyond just the classroom, you just have to love doing this. Please don't send us email or otherwise contact us to ask, "so can I have the source code?" We'll answer you now -- no. We try to help as many people as we can with figuring out problems they might be having, and are proud of being able to do so. We will not, however, simply hand you the solutions! They weren't, "handed," to us. A demo also can't, "just be done." Several products have been used to aid in the creation of our demo, and quite frankly, LuciWORLD just wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for: · Borland. This demo was created using Turbo C++ v3.0 for DOS and the Turbo Assembler. Obviously, no compiler/assembler, no demo. Lucida Group uses Borland Programming Language products exclusively. · The POV team. Thanks for creating such an excellent public domain ray tracer. Everyting in the Vector Balls section of this demo only looks _so_ good because you guys are _experts_!!! Our title screens were also created using the POV ray tracer. · Autodesk. The Autodesk Animator v1.0 built-in paint facility was used EXTENSIVELY during the creation of this demo. · Mathematica Incorporated. TEMPRA GIF is not just a tool, it is a complete workbench! Thanks for all the great color fades and pixel-popping, eye boggling detail. · Alchemy Mindworks, Inc. If Graphics Workshop for DOS didn't exist, we'd just curl up and die. Your program is excellent, and we're still looking for that book! · Media Vision. Your Developer's Toolkit helps us understand more and more each day. · Mark J. Cox. As the creator of MOD-OBJ, this demo wouldn't sound quite so good without you. · Our customers! If it weren't for you, we'd have no reason at all for writing these programs. 'Nuff said. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Afterthoughts. . . . ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── If you would like to start the demo at a certain "part", here's how: Part Name │ DOS Command ────────────────────────────────├──────────── Space Trip Intro with scrolly │ LUCIWRLD 1 Flying Carpet / Magic Tunnel │ LUCIWRLD 2 Vector Ball plane with waves │ LUCIWRLD 3 Vectorball Lucida Logo │ LUCIWRLD 4 Glitter Cube │ LUCIWRLD 5 Wireframe Cube & Pyramid │ LUCIWRLD 6 Crypt Keeper's Art Gallery │ LUCIWRLD 7 Final Vectorball Credits/Greetz │ LUCIWRLD 8