Thanks for this! I have the 3D Construction Kit for the ZX Spectrum, but never made anything more than a few experimental objects.

Great thread!

There's a couple other versions of 3D House floating around.

also ugh gary acord

I think I've played 3D House... I know I've played one of those 3D Construction Kit games in the past, I just can't remember which. :P

If you're interested in the 3D Construction Kit you may also be interested in the Freescape engine which powers it. Castle Master is one of the Freescape games which came before and I had covered it in Episode 140 of my web show last year. :B

Kerr Avon wrote:

Thanks for this! I have the 3D Construction Kit for the ZX Spectrum, but never made anything more than a few experimental objects.

Cool! I'm always impressed that they managed to get not just the 3D engine, but also the game creation system working on computers like the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64.

leileilol wrote:

also ugh gary acord

Indeed. Though these didn't seem to be anywhere as trashy and stolen as his later work appears to be, so I didn't mind including them.

Gemini000 wrote:

If you're interested in the 3D Construction Kit you may also be interested in the Freescape engine which powers it. Castle Master is one of the Freescape games which came before and I had covered it in Episode 140 of my web show last year. :B

And donated by me! 😁 I do wonder how closely 3D Construction Kit resembles the tools Incentive developed to create their Freescape games. In theory, you could make a game nearly identical to Castle Master with it. You couldn't do the mountains on the horizon, you'd probably use the built-in "zapper" feature instead of throwing rocks, standing and crawling would work differently, and the response of keyboard controls would be inferior, but that's every significant difference I can think of. None of these listed games which I've played are anywhere close to Castle Master in quality, though.

I always wondered why they didn't make the game files machine-independent and just port the game engine to various systems. Then you could trade game files between different versions of the program.

I had an Amiga and the only 3D Construction Kit game I remember being halfway decent (out of the ones I played) was one where you explored the wreck of the Titanic. It seemed fairly well done and I was really getting into it until I hit a bug that allowed me to leave the confines of the ship and fly around outside it.

RadioPoultry wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

If you're interested in the 3D Construction Kit you may also be interested in the Freescape engine which powers it. Castle Master is one of the Freescape games which came before and I had covered it in Episode 140 of my web show last year. :B

And donated by me! :D

Oh yeah... duh. XD

I'm terrible with names so it completely skipped my mind that you were the one who sent that in since I was remembering your actual name and not your internet moniker! :B

RadioPoultry wrote:

I do wonder how closely 3D Construction Kit resembles the tools Incentive developed to create their Freescape games. In theory, you could make a game nearly identical to Castle Master with it. You couldn't do the mountains on the horizon, you'd probably use the built-in "zapper" feature instead of throwing rocks, standing and crawling would work differently, and the response of keyboard controls would be inferior, but that's every significant difference I can think of. None of these listed games which I've played are anywhere close to Castle Master in quality, though.

Similarities for sure. I think if you wanted to make a game like Castle Master with the 3D Construction Kit you'd have to go one step beyond and find a way to implement your own code into the engine. No idea if they actually had source code to purchase or not.

Also that "zapper" is very much like what was in Elite and LineWars. :B

I encountered DGeneration *after* Virtual Reality Studio and I was a little wierded out by it sharing the same adlib sound effects at the time (94).

then there was also Wild Science Arcade with many of the same sounds

The software comes with a pretty cool sound effects editor. Three editors in one, really. There are separate editors for PC speaker, AdLib... and Roland. I'm kind of surprised by that last one. This is one of the reasons it's good to have a legitimate copy of old software: the most easily accessible "abandonware" copies floating around on the web are missing the files from the second installation disk, which includes the sound editor and all the pre-built worlds and objects.

Here's a picture of the box and contents. Makes me wish I had a VCR to watch the introduction video, but it's available online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JF75oZVoQ, so no big deal. The manual is lacking in a lot of ways, but it's absolutely essential for doing any programming. No one seems to have put that online yet. The earlier version's manual is online, but 2.0 added a lot more commands.

Finally got around to making my own VRS2 game. It is called...

GHOST of WUMPUS

You can download it here.

As you may have guessed, it's based on "Hunt the Wumpus" by Gregory Yob. Here's a gameplay video of my version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz9XJWxB_E0

The first challenge was to create a system for the scrolling text you see on the left. There wasn't a lot of space on screen for both text and the 3D view, and I'm only allowed 1000 characters total for all my strings, so the terse style of "Wumpus" was appropriate.

I completely reworked the controls from the VRS2 default. VRS1 had better keyboard handling than VRS2 (I suppose they had their reasons for changing it), but I've tried compensate as bet I can. One of the biggest improvements I made was that it now checks the system timer every second to see how much you (and the rest of the world) should be moving every frame. As a result, you can now play the game on a much faster computer than VRS was made for. (And get some smooth animation!) Also, you can't force your way through corners now (which I recently discovered you can do on pretty much every VRS program ever). I don't think these changes would have been possible without Incentive's fortunate decision to add COS and SIN functions to this version.

Something I only noticed yesterday and had to fix was that random numbers are seeded the same way every time you quit and start the program over. (There's no way to select the seed.) My solution was to continually pick random numbers at the very beginning until a second ticks off on the system timer.

I kinda would have liked to have added more detail to the game, but I was already running low on the little bit of memory I'm allowed to use for that purpose. (Less than 3 kilobytes left of about 60 to start with.) I think there are ways around this, but I feel like this was a pretty good place to stop.

In other news, a couple months ago I found a boxed copy of the original Virtual Reality Studio at a Goodwill Outlet (along with a bunch of other old software). I thought this was miraculous. How many people in my area ever used VRS, let alone still had a copy to donate? And that I should find it during the few hours that it would be there... (Goodwill Outlet cycles through its merchandise every day). I think that's part of what inspired me to work on this.

leileilol wrote:

also ugh gary acord

You had to know he'd show up. 🤣

I once had a boxed copy of this. Probably the first piece of software I actually remember buying as opposed to pirating... I must've been around 12. IIRC I played around with it for a day or two and decided it was crap.

VileRancour wrote:

leileilol wrote:

also ugh gary acord

You had to know he'd show up. 🤣

I just discovered a few days ago that Gary Acord's "3D Land" game is actually stolen from a AOL user named VirtualGem. He just took the source materials that VirtualGem released for a world called "Gem1", haphazardly threw in a few objects, added a new border (which mixed-up the color palette completely), and somehow in his fiddling broke the listings for mouse and joystick support.

Gah. I'll include the original Gem1 in the next volume of old VRS games I upload.

I don't know if Acord's "Zapper" is original or not, but fool me once...

I updated Ghost of Wumpus last year (mostly adjustments to the controls and to how doorways work), but I never got around to uploading it. Here it is now.

Download the newest version here!

I think I'll edit the original post to include this game as well.

RadioPoultry wrote:

I just discovered a few days ago that Gary Acord's "3D Land" game is actually stolen from a AOL user named VirtualGem. He just t […]
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VileRancour wrote:

leileilol wrote:

also ugh gary acord

You had to know he'd show up. 🤣

I just discovered a few days ago that Gary Acord's "3D Land" game is actually stolen from a AOL user named VirtualGem. He just took the source materials that VirtualGem released for a world called "Gem1", haphazardly threw in a few objects, added a new border (which mixed-up the color palette completely), and somehow in his fiddling broke the listings for mouse and joystick support.

Gah. I'll include the original Gem1 in the next volume of old VRS games I upload.

I don't know if Acord's "Zapper" is original or not, but fool me once...

Nice VGA color. Sure, it has no textures, but it looks neat and clean. 😀