PLEASE RENAME THIS DISK "3DSnow"

Hello user, here are a few programs I have written using Blitz II

There are two main programs:

SNOW: This program may be used to generate 3D perspective snow for bitmap
animations click on executable icon to load. When it has loaded you will be
presented with an input window (sorry no gadgets). There are a number of
settings which must be entered.

1) Number of flakes: This adjusts the number of flakes.

2) xwind: The amount of wind blowing across the xaxis in pixels per frame. A
minus number means snow blows from right to left.

3) zwind: determins how much the wind blows towards and away from you. It can
also be used to give the impression of flying or driving into a snow storm.

4) fall speed: determins how fast snow falls in pixels/sec

5) Ground height: when a snowflake reaches this level it is humainly destroyed.
0 is the middle of the screen and the larger the number the lower the snow
flakes will die. When the last snow flake reaches the ground the animation
will be played back. This can be used to adjust the to make sure no snow pass
through the ground in your anim.

6) Flake spacing: To avoid the snow falling in sheets each flake starts to
fall from slightly highier than the last this displacement is the flake
spacing in pixels. The less flakes you have the highier y-spacing required.

7) y-randomness: The amount of vairatio in how much a flake falls each frame.
This helps flakes spread out. Try making this 0, with a spacing of 0.01 and
5000 flakes.

8)Save to ram: Save the 25 bitmaps to ramdisk so you can load into dpaint and
make anim.



Wave generator:

This program loads in the brush named at the begining of the program and maps
is on to some undulating 3D sine waves to give a water or lava flow effect.

DEMO: This is a combination of water and snow effects.

As you can see most of these programs lack GUI's so please feel free to add
your own. You may also update the programs if you wish. If you do update this
program please send a copy to me.

Features you may want to add:

1) Proper 3D rendered snow flakes ie spherical with nice shading rather than
the three randomly placed pixels I am using at the moment.

2) Tidy up the code it is a mess.

3) Correct the spellings in the docs.

4) Make the docs more readable as I am to busy.

5) Add more controls to the snow.

6) Add rain option.


Is there any one out there thinking of making a modular 3D language. Imagine 3
is just so tedious. If there are any libary programmers out there please could
you add some 3D commands to Blitz such a Sphere, Spline, Cone, Torus, render,
light......etc. Why does Imagine 3 always crash?. Why does it corrupt my hard
drive when I load and save objects? Why do transparency maps always screw up?
Why do distributers never do anything when I ring? When will Blitz 3 be out?

Any comments please send them tothe address below:



Philip Holden
GREENSCOMBE BARN
LUCKETT
CALLINGTON
CORNWALL

PL178LF

(if you do alter the docs to this please leave my address in.)