Saturday, August 18, 2012

E3 and XDimension (1996)

Just after writing E, I thought I would write a 3D version of the same as a school project in Secondary IV, to learn more about 3D.  This was both a very interesting and bad idea; I learned a lot, but I was forced by my teacher to write an auto-tutorial mode stepping the user through most of the available functionality, which drastically cut down on the amount of time I had to spend adding to said functionality.

Years later I still think this project would have had much more educational value if I had not been forced to write this tutorial mode, which is a sort of stone age equivalent to today's 3D modelling tutorial videos on YouTube.  However, the tutorial mode proved quite handy when recording a video of the application.  I doubled the play speed to make the video less tiresome, though it's still pretty bland.  Keep in mind everything is happening by itself here; I'm just banging spacebar to skip through the dialogs.

E3 ran on an assembly-language engine I had dubbed XDimension, which basically only supported wireframe rendering.  It wasn't much, but hey for a 15 year-old with little no linear algebra notions and only a few short HOWTO.TXT-style references available from BBSes, it wasn't too bad.  (I'm not sure whether our family had dialup internet access yet at that point, but in any case I still hadn't latched onto the web as much of a resource.)

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