READER'S LETTERS ------------------ Yes, we've actually heard from some of you! First up is Jeremy Ford from GROUND ZERO PD in Bristol, England. --------------------------------- Jeremy Ford Ground Zero PD Dear Simon, Thanks very much for the STAR TREK magazine. I liked the intro to the disk and the well written and interesting articles, the only thing I didn't fancy was the text viewer and the way the menu works. I use PPmore to view my text files as well but for a disk magazine I prefer Muchmore which has a totally smooth text scroller, plus the ability to use coloured text (if you have a word processor that can print coloured fonts). Muchmore also does not have a border which also gives a more polished look. If you have seen other disk based magazines, they usually use their own customized menus, which really gives them a superb overall presentation regardless of the standard of the articles. I am familar with your menu method, it works but can sometimes become fiddly if you click on the picture, you then have to pull down the picture a bit and click on the CLI screen (you probably know what I mean). There's no need to use the mouse but I sometimes click it for no reason. I couldn't do any better than yours, but you do have access to some coders from POWER HOUSE which you might be able to pursuade to create a menu especially for your magazine. I really do believe that a good looking custom menu would really give the magazine a very professional look to the professional text you already have. Good presentation is a must for a successful disk magazine, as that's the first thing anybody sees. You've got the intro, the text, the graphics, and music done very well, all you need now in my opinion is a better menu interface. Be seeing ya. Jeremy. Wow! Well, thanks for your comments, Jeremy. I thought they at least deserved answering in full, so here goes..... As I said in Issue 1, I DON'T care about the presentation as THE FINAL FRONTIER isn't a "NORMAL" disk magazine. We are the ONLY magazine on disk to cater for STAR TREK, and as such we don't really have to compete with anyone else in terms of presentation. As you said, the first thing you notice with most disk mags is the presentation, but if you really read most of them, the articles don't really vary that much from magazine to magazine. The most important thing in THE FINAL FRONTIER, or in any magazine for that matter, is the text, and I'm glad you liked it! With saying that, in both of the reviews I have seen in major Amiga mags, they both praised THE FINAL FRONTIER for it's presentation, so I must have done something right! I chose to used PPMore for two reasons. First, it is compatible with text files cruched with PowerPacker (never!) and secondly, there is a lot of user control over the text displayed. There are also options such as being able to move to specific lines, searching for text strings etc. Most of these features are missing on all its rivals - MuchMore has them, but they all need to use the keyboard where as PPMore has a control panel at the bottom. I'm not too keen on having the text in different colours and it makes my job a lot harder (I get articles on paper, on PC disks, plus a few on Amiga disks and it would take AGES to add colour to all of them! I also write a fair number of my own articles on a PC then transfer them to the Amiga.). The main reason is the PowerPacker compatibility as I want to have as much text on each disk as possible. Issue 1 had over 350K of text, something I couldn't have done if we didn't use PowerPacker. However, as a one-off trial, I'm using the new PowerPacker edition of MuchMore - MuchMore_PP and I'll see what response I get (if any). We will be using our own custom text-viewer, but I don't know when! If you remember, that's why I used the starfield routine in the background to try and enhance the somewhat basic presentation. However, someone has suggested to me to have simple artwork as backdrops to the text, and if I get enough artists offering work to me, I may try that as well. (Maybe when we use our custom text viewer in Issue 3.) I know about the problem with the menus, but that's what you get for using that method (an IFF-Viewer plus using customised Keymaps). However, I think you'll agree that that it is better to have a little occasional niggle like that than to have a text-only CLI-based menu!! Again, we've changed for this issue and we are using our own custom loader/menu. This means that there will be NO problems like the one you mentioned. We have far more flexibility in our menu system now and we can have menus that still look the same, or even menus looking like the selectors often found on demo-packs. Also, with our new system, we only need to have one menu file on each disk as one program contains ALL the menus for the whole disk! However, we WON'T use a menu/text-viewer system like most other disk-mags as they are too inflexible. There are no disk mags around that use these systems that can handle HAM, Overscan, Interlaced art, load and run 700K+ animations, demos etc. We will use our own custom text-viewer plus our own loader - this keeps the compatibility high and the scope of contents up! I hope you followed all that!! With saying that, we may modify our loader to include a text viewer as long as we don't lose the flexibility of the system. This way, we will have the best menu/text system of ANY magazine! I'm glad you thought everything else was fine! I spent 12 months writing and re-writing most of the articles and the art/music came from some of the best guys around. Thanks for your kind comments. (The cheque will be in the post!) Simon Plumbe --------------------------------- Alex Kerr, Downton, Wiltshire, ENGLAND Hi again Simon, Thanks very much for the 1st issue of The Final Frontier - it's excellent (more on that in a moment). I also recieved your 100% version a few weeks ago - I'm not sure exactly what improvements you made, obviously, but I am sure that they were worth it, also I've found a couple of "bugs" of my own which weren't corrected in the 100% version (don't worry!). The first issue of FF was really impressive, I wasn't sure quite how you'd present everything but it's turned out pretty professionally I reckon (by demo standards etc.). Of course, you could improve it but that can be said about most things. Keep the layout as you have done in terms of how things are accessed i.e. all similar items under one submenu as this works well and keeps the style uncluttered. Graphics and sound were great; especially the stuff from Tobias - you're lucky to have him working on the mag, I think he'll help it to be taken seriously by the paper mag PD reviewers. Of course, he isn't the "backbone" of FF (you are!) but his reputation is widespread. Echo of L.S.D. is another person who produces excellent stuff - I think you've made a good start with a strong team but to be successful we're going to need good advertising (i.e. in PD reviews of popular Amiga mags) even though FF is only PD. I'm spreading it to several of the main PD companies - maybe you can handle abroad (i.e. through Tobias etc.)??? Since writing the above, I've just heard about the death of Gene Roddenberry. I think it'll take a while to sink in in the Star Trek community. A lot of people are going to miss this guy. Of course, he was the guiding light for everything that was Star Trek and he certainly deserves a television tribute of some kind. I hope that Paramount do one. Let's hope his dream lives on long after his death.... Anyway, back to FF. I checked it out completely and I only found three things that I thought you'd want to hear about in the way of `bugs'. Firstly, two or three times while reading articles I hit the close gadget on ppmore and received a software error requester (pleasant suprise?!?!). This was inbetween doing other things like listening to the music, viewing pictures etc. Maybe you could change to a different version number or even switch to using MuchmorePoPa, a more classy utility but of course then you wouldn't see T.R.'s 3dstars in the background! Secondly, (just a suggestion) where you've got those diagrams of the Enterprise as the backdrops to some of the submenus, I reckon you should change the palette colours slightly so that the diagram stands out a bit more because it was damn hard to make out (on my colour TV anyway!). And thirdly, and this is one I think you should sort out, after you've viewed any of the pieces of art the user presses the left mouse button, right? Well, this now selects the menu picture as the current active window and when the user tries to hit one of the F keys to quit (for instance) it doesn't get them anywhere because the text isn't going to the CLI window!! Uh-oh! OK, it was easy for me (you just switch screens and reselect the CLI window) but is a novice going to know this?!?! I expect someone else told you about these errors, but just in case...! Write when you've got time and I'm looking forward to seeing The Final Frontier Issue 2! Bye. Alex I'm glad you liked Issue 1 (this is going to cost me a fortune in bribes!). Again, I'll try and answer a few of your points. First, with the menu system, I deliberately created a series of sub-menus to make things easier for the readers (both of them!) to find what articles they wanted to read. As you'll see with this issue, I've gone a stage further by adding a few new menus, making things easier still. As you've probably seen, THE FINAL FRONTIER has been reviewed by a few mags now, and it was just the publicity we needed. The reviews were favourable, although only one of them actually mentioned Tobias and none of them mentioned the music or the animation!! This simply stresses my earlier point that it is the text that is important and not the "extras" such as music or graphics. It is starting to distribute itself quite well with several PD libraries spreading it, along with it's distribution through the PD network! I even know that at least two of the PD libraries distributing it have actually sold copies overseas! I can't agree with you more about Gene. At least Paramount are doing the decent thing and continuing with Trek. From what I have heard, there IS a tribute that Paramount have produced, but we will probably never get to see it (officially, that is!). Finally, the "bugs"! I've never had any problems with the disk crashing at all, and I would probably put this down to the fact that you must have moved from art to articles too quickly, not giving the Amiga sufficient time to clear the art from memory. No one else has commented on this happening. It can't have been anything to do with PPMore, as I was using the latest edition (V1.7) although as you can see, I've changed from that to using MuchMore to improve the presentation. The diagrams for the menus? Well, I hate to disappoint you, but it wasn't the Enterprise, it was the Excelsior (and you call yourself a Trekker!)! But seriously, the art was checked on a couple of TV's and a monitor and again I had no other complaints. The whole point was that it was a background picture and it wasn't supposed to draw attention away from the menu, merely to brighten things up! It was a choice of that, or a plain black screen! I've already answered your point about the menus in my reply to Jeremy's letter, and as you can see, the problem has been rectified. Thanks for your comments anyway, Simon Plumbe --------------------------------- Send your letters about the mag, or anything to do with TREK or TNG to: The Final Frontier - Letters c/o Simon Plumbe 14 Rousdon Grove Great Barr Birmingham B43 5HN ENGLAND Best letter each issue wins a prize from Issue 3 onwards so get writing!