I had a very long game of Pacmania not 20 minutes ago.

I've had some commercial work thrown my way, and since they're paying, it's more worthwhile me doing it.

I have had all the names registered with RISC OS allocations (which includes FahZhi [with its file type]). !Equinox hadn't been registered, which was a bit of a surprise.

Once the commercial work's completed, I'll be able to do some more work on it. One of the things I've been working on was with CDFS, and I'll probably make the music CD based - now I know how that works.

I've also been playing with Lightwave [http://www.newtek.com] (which I've been creating the ships in). After all, I've spent £900 on it, so I really need to learn how to use it! I'd like to have some animations in the game as well...

When I started Equinox, it was designed to be multi-platform (RISC OS, Windows and Linux), as well as multi-resolution. However, I've decided that that is too much hassle for the time being.

Initially, I was also using POVRay too. I was using POVRay under Windows, exporting as TGA files to FreeBSD, where I had a conversion/scaling program that converted the images into my sprite format.

When I got Lightwave, I 'ported the convertor to Windows (I don't only do RISC OS; although I prefer it), along with a graphical front end so I could just point it at the directory containing the TGAs (Lightwave exports TGA too), tell it what size, and it saves the file. This then gets popped onto my Samba server, where I can read it (or used to, until I got Adjust).

The beauty of Lightwave is that it's frigging cool, fast, and the editor is much easier to use than working out CSG in POVRay (although CSG does have its advantages).

The stuff I've been doing recently is animation. My brother pointed me at a web site that had demos of Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds film that's due to come out in 2008ish. There were some effects there that I told him were easy to create in Lightwave, so I showed him.

The last bits of animation I did were http://freebsd.tribbeck.com/WOTW/walkandfire3.mpg [24M MPEG1] - the walking was a bit prototypey, and the lens flare appears in front of the martian (I think I ticked the wrong box). However, the heat-ray and the smoke were fairly good, I thought.

After that, I did http://freebsd.tribbeck.com/WOTW/quickwalk.mpg [52M MPEG2] - where the walking is mathematically computed. It gets a bit jerky where the martian dips its head - I think the inverse kinematics has a bit of a headache working out what it's meant to be doing...

Once the commercial work's completed, I'll be able to do some more work on it.

One of the things I've been working on was with CDFS, and I'll probably make the music CD based - now I know how that works.

I thought you were creating a playroutine for FahZhi files, to play Equinox's music.

I was - but that was before I was asked to write a CDFS driver, and from doing that, I worked out how CDFS works (and, more importantly, how to control it).

The player may still be used - for people who don't want to have CD sound (or don't have a drive/audio cable).

Those animations look quite imperssive. Does it take long to make them?

(Glad someone downloaded them!)

Since the first one uses HyperVoxels (basically objects that have no defineable shape), it took about 12 hours to render on a P4 2.6HT machine. The second one has more frames, and took about the same amount of time (I can't remember exactly). Luckily Lightwave has an OpenGL near real-time view of the animation if you want to check that it's working fine.

As to how long it took to create the model - the basic one was about 3 hours, and then perhaps another 2 perfecting it (there are other animations I haven't shown). Animating it took quite a while, because it was something I'd not done before.

There is a later one that no-one has seen yet, where I've used Lightwave's concept of "actors", and given them instructions (you define their animations, but the instructions tell them what to do). So, I had two martians, both walking. Then one stops and falls over (as if it's been shot). Unfortunately, the walking wasn't good enough and I didn't realise until I'd rendered 1600 frames...

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the trees in the first one are crap - I had half an hour to find a tree model and incorporate it before I went to work.

In fact, there may not even be a PC version.

I thought you were creating a playroutine for FahZhi files, to play Equinox's music.

I was - but that was before I was asked to write a CDFS driver, and from doing that, I worked out how CDFS works (and, more importantly, how to control it).

The player may still be used - for people who don't want to have CD sound (or don't have a drive/audio cable).

(Glad someone downloaded them!)

I've been interested in 3D modeling since I saw Toy Story. I was going to get TopModel but Cerilica announced they were going to re-release it and never did. It's a shame there's really no new software in that area for RISC OS nowadays.

Doing 3D stuff on RISC OS got me into my job now (which evolved into something that isn't RISC OS or 3D related at all). I started doing 3D models in around '86 on the BBC micro (even got as far as doing a version of Lander in 3D [although not filled in]).

Unfortunately, ray tracing needs fast floating point (to be realistic).

With regards to TopModel, I used ot use it a lot and then converted stuff to render on the PC - e.g. for the TEK graphics. It's a shame it still isn't available (I presume it isn't).