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From: carlos@io.UUCP (Carlos Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Aegis Videoscape 3D
Message-ID: <344@io.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Jul-87 18:42:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: io.344
Posted: Fri Jul 24 18:42:19 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jul-87 16:50:23 EDT
Reply-To: carlos (Carlos Smith)
Distribution: world
Organization: Interleaf, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 70
Keywords: Guru city

With great eagerness and anticipation I went to my local Amiga dealer to 
check out and hopefully purchase Videoscape 3D. I am very into 3D and have
been looking forward to the appearance of 3D editors and animators for some
time. In other words, my plastic was melting in my wallet.

I am gravely disappointed. First, I should temper this report by stating that
all of our attempts to use it were on one machine (A1000), with 2Meg expansion
memory (Starboard). It is POSSIBLE there is something wrong with the machine,
even though it is one of the machines this store does and has been using to
demo all their software. This store is also an Amiga and 64 store ONLY, and
they know the machine.

Anyway, I wanted to run it through its paces before buying it. I examined the
manual, and then tried to load an object, its motion path, and the camera
motion, and then preview the animation. After 3 crashes when the camera motion
requester came up, we decided that the disk we were using must be bad (it was
stamped "Demo"). So we opened a fresh box and tried that. We loaded a simple
object and its motion path (paperairplane and flypaperairplane) that appeared
on the objects disk provided, and what appeared to be the corresponding camera
motions (viewpaperairplane). Then, begin animation, which, according to the
manual should preview the animation a frame at a time. Nothing appeared on the
screen, though it beeped, apparently to indicate the frame was finished. OK,
with a 3D system it is easy to get a view angle wrong and have the object 
behind you or something. No problem with that possibility. Even though these
appeared to be setup as examples for animation. What is unforgivable is that
it GURUed every time we either aborted the animation (using "abort animation")
or let it finish (using "next frame" to the end). Nothing ever appeared on 
the screen after we began animation except red alerts. I spent about 2 hours
in the store, with 2 of the store people trying to get it to work. I read 
much of the manual trying to find out what we did wrong. I WANTED it to work.
But I and the store people gave up in disgust. It is easy to get things wrong
or misunderstand, but you should get error reports or blank screens, not
GURU's. By the way, it shouldn't be the fast ram, the package and manual state
that you NEED an extra meg to store animations, and 2 more to do higher res.

Needless to say, I didn't shell out the $200. I am happy as H**l that I tried
it first. My own conclusion is that this package, like too many Amiga
programs, was never QA'ed by the publisher before shipping. Again, conceding
the possibility that we did something wrong, it shouldn't just CRASH all the 
time. Quality software doesn't do that. It will tell you that you F**ked up.
We did what any user would do upon coming home with the package. We then 
rebooted, pored over the manual and tried again. And again... It appears 
to me that Aegis never had anyone without previous exposure to the program
try it fresh out of the box with the provided documentation only.

So, I recommend that anyone interested in this package TRY before you BUY. If
you get it to work, more power to you and PLEASE post something here, saying
you got it to work and if you have any idea what we did wrong mention it. I do
not want to blast the product or company without more evidence. I am only 
trying to protect potential buyers.

For a quick description of the program - it is NOT very visual, as far as we
got, and reading about the modeling capabilities. Camera motion is specified
ONLY via an ASCII file. All objects and motion paths are stored as ASCII files
(which are well defined - this is good for those who wish to write their own
utilities), and some utilities to help define objects through question and
answer (number of sides? height? Y height? Radius?). Also provided is a
version of Rot that originally appeared on Fish disk 71. This seems to be the
only visual graphic interface provided. It is a VERY simple 3D editor, and it
is excellent for free on a Fish disk, but is not what you would expect as the
only graphic editor in a $200 3D animation program.

I apologize for the length of this posting, but I wanted to warn people to
carefully check out this well-hyped, long-awaited, expensive and as it appears
to me, flawed program. Any opinions contrary to or confirming my experiences
are gladly welcomed.
-- 
			Carlos Smith
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