Zex update


A little bit of nostalgia on my part.

Last night we produced version 0.98.1 of Zex - this we hope is our final internal alpha release. On Friday Rob and myself will decide whether to go into beta this weekend or whether it needs to cook for a little longer.

Anyway, I realised tonight that this is rather an historic occasion!

Very few people are going to understand this, but Fantasm was an assembler put together to build our 3D engine on the Mac (at the time only MPW was available and it cost a $1000). Fantasm was called Fantasm because it was the 'FANtasy' ASeMbler. Fantasy was our 3d engine (written originally on the Atari ST™ in 68K with HiSoft's Devpac™).

And it's just dawned on me that Zex is the first thing ever to get completed using many parts of the original Fantasy engine - check out the following header from FPOLY4.cpp

/***********************************************************************
* FANTASY POLYGON DRAWER
* VERSION: M003.004
* PROGRAMMER: ROBERT PROBIN
* LAST MODIFIED: 29/10/98
* PREVIOUS LAST MODIFIED: 26/09/94
* UPDATES:
* V10: FROM ROB AS PLANE PRINT DATE 3/4/92
* M001.000 MODIFIED BY S.B. TO INTERFACE WITH PAINTIT.
* NEEDS I/P ARRAY AS X/Y.W IN DRAW_XY, WITH COORD COUNT IN
* NUMBER_LINES AND THE COLOUR OF THE POLY IN POLY_COL.
* M001.001 MODIFIED CLIPPING TO WORK OF POLY ABOVE SCREEN, OR POLY
* ONLY 1 LINE HIGH.
* M003.003 Turboing again, after the massive window clipping thing.
* SUMMARY: A lot of changes, mainly to do with the way the
* line drawer works. See notes below.
* 4th Dec 93 RP

Yes folks, we are about to publish a game with code dating back to 1992 in it! (This probably means me and Rob have been working together since at least '92 - and I thought it was '94!)

Anyway, there's a little tear in my eye tonight as I toddle off to bed.

(For the interested one of the first objects ever rendered by Fantasy was a Windmill)

Posted: Tue - January 10, 2006 at 01:30 AM          

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