THE THIRD DIMENSION Letters ------- Dear Tony You've done it again, yet another great issue of our diskmag! In fact so great (and big) that i had to leave out a lot of sound files and beautiful pictures. I am enjoying walking through the themepark but i'm still missing the ride of my life! When are you going to program the roller coaster ride? Thanks for the tutorial on flymodes and cameras. The datafile was also very informative. It is fantastic that you have your own homepage now on the Internet. It looks really great and all the links are quite interesting. And another great thing is having the contents of our diskmag online too. Quite an improvement i believe. The other Third Dimension homepage has improved quite a lot too and can also work as a mirror site of yours, although it contains some other links which are interesting again for others with different interests. All in all, a lot of changes this month and all for the better. All the best, Mieke :-) Dear Mieke Well thankyou Mieke! it is thanks to yours and others contributions that the diskmag is such a success. Being online, thanks to John Clarke, has widened the circulation even further. Tony :) ---------------------------------- Dear Tony On the disk are some snapshots taken from the Pub world and a quite remarkable petrol tanker, all running in the PC version of the Visualiser for Superscape. Watch the resolutions - most are 640x480 but one is at 1024x768 just for fun! There are also three grabs of a car with some very nifty highlight movements (see the white 'shine' which moves along the wings - great to see in realtime!) and one more of the stonehenge gifs showing the information window. I've read various reviews (one of whjich is enclosed!) about the Stonehenge world, and apparently with the VISCAPE add-on for Netscape (a PC internet browser) you can view the stones at various times during their history - from when Stonehenge was brand new, to the present. This doesn't work with the DOS version of the viewer, you only get the present day view - nor do you get the scrolling side windows with the text in them! I did take a look at downloading the VISCAPE add-on but it is a 1.8mb file and every attempt I have made so far takes so long that I have given up before getting beyond 100k!!! One day when the connection is fast and at cheap-rate! Any way, there you go. Something to keep you busy now the nights are drawing in (!!!) All the best, Nigel. Thanks Nigel Hopefully Mieke can squeeze these onto this months disk for everyone to look at. The quality is great and makes me wish that Superscape was released at an affordable price and produced on many formats. Tony. ---------------------------------- Hi Mandy, What a surprise to hear from you again in our diskmag. Lovely! Glad to read that everything at your end is fine and that you enjoy some nice wheather at last. I know the feeling sucking icecubes from experience, I can even bite in an icecream having my mouth full in one go (and a headache too). But apples are another thing. I have to wear glasses now, both for distance and nearby. Ah yes, these things happen when you're getting older. But I'm still enjoying everything computer-related. Especially the Internet is great and Tony and I e-mail a lot. This e-mail is the best invention of all! You can even attach large files to it. We can now exchange the contents of our diskmag very quickly. I remember you tinkered with a modem once. No ideas to go on the Internet yourself? I'm still hoping to see a 3DKit game of you some day. I remember you promised us something like that in the past..... Do you still play so many computer games? Anyway, hope to see something written by you again and I wish you and yours all the best. Mieke --------------------------------------------- Dear Tony Thanks for the diskmag again. It is so great and always interesting each month. I really enjoyed the Imagine 3D tutorial and also the Real3D tutorial too. I really enjoy all of the 3D kit items but it is nice to see other programs featured too. Keep up the excellent work and thanks goes out to you and your team. David Leadbetter. Thanks David........Tony. -------------------------------------------- Dear Tony Thanks for the letter and disk. I have enclosed the latest version of Project Shield. I have slightly modified the startup as Amiga Format omitted my name and address in their review of my game. Cheers! Chris Millin Thanks for the disk Chris! You will find a review of it in the Reviews.txt file on disk and members can obtain a copy from the Third Dimension PD Library. Thanks Tony! -------------------------------------------- Dear Nigel Thanks for your message. Yes, PC Format is available in Holland and I have followed their tutorials of Imagine also up till now. I think their magazine has gone better since they added their "Technique" pages. However, if you're only interested in one thing the mag is quite expensive. If you're interested in more though you don't seem ever to have enough time to spit through their monthly attached CDRom. Best wishes, Mieke --------------------------------------------- Hi Tony, There are a few problems with Third Dimension #27, all of which I've fixed myself. You've been saving the text files on your Amiga! So how do I know? Because the text is unreadable from an Atari Desktop. It would also be unreadable on a PC,although most text editors and word processors (on the Atari at least) invisibly convert it into the right format for you. The Amiga and Unix (I think the Mac does it too) save ASCII files with different end of line markers so everything appears to be on the same line when viewed on an Atari (or PC). The cure is to use a utility called Blinex (I can send you a copy) to convert the file or re-save it from an ST WP. I've already converted all the files on #27. As I said earlier, nobody would ever come across this unless they tried to view the text files from the Desktop. One last point, the Quiz file could not be loaded at all! This is because it was saved as QUIZ ASC (i.e. with a space rather than a dot between the name and the extension). Using a sector editor to rename it fixed the problem. Don't take me the wrong way, I'm not complaing, just pointing out a few incompatibilities between ASCII file formats and file naming conventions on different platforms. Regards Steve Delaney ( Floppyshop Atari PD Library ) Thanks for the above letter Steve. I have replied to you via e-mail on this subject. The trouble is that I no longer have an Atari so I use the Amiga to produce the Atari version. I could really do with an Atari user to volunteer to come up with a simple menu system and to take care of the Atari disk structure. Any offers anyone? In the meantime I will try to avoid as many of these problems in future Atari versions. Tony ---------------------------------------------- Dear Tony Thanks for another great issue. I liked the Real3d bit and also the camera article. I have a small problem that perhaps you could sort out for me. How on earth do I get airborne. I seem to be able to move around on the ground but can't find how to get in the air. This is probably easy for you experts to do but quite hard for a beginner like myself to do. Josh Aiden. Dear Joshua Thanks for the compliments. To get airborne go to the General menu and then the Mode then Vehicle menu. Next select Fly1 or Fly2 mode and you should then be able to fly. Tony. -----------------------------------------------