Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!umb!ileaf!io!carlos 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 uucp:...!harvard!umb!ileaf!carlos Bix: carlosmith