The 3D Construction Kit is a new interactive version of the famous Freescape 3D modelling system from Domark/Incentive. Freescape was Incentive's contribution to the 3D game era, with famous games like Driller and Castle Master. Now Domark/Incentive have put Freescape II at your disposal so you can create 3D games for yourself.

But the 3D Construciton Kit is being sold as more a virtual reality system than merely a game creator. And to be fair it is more than this. The system allows you to make not only games but other more useful things - which is not to say that games aren't worthwhile, just that there are other uses for a 3D system.

Virtual reality has become something of a buzzword over the past year, and it has long been clear that for any product to be hot in '91 it would have to feature this concept. So the 3D Construction Kit, or 3D Kit as it is know, is heavily flagged as a virtual reality system.

This is stretching the truth a bit, as there is no provision yet for a pair of 3D goggles to make the view of your world truly "virtual". But having said that, it's a very fast, flexible and highly usable 3D system.

3D Kit in use
Creating your own shapes and putting them together is simplicity itself, and the process is made vastly easier by virtue of the fact that shapes cannot pass through each other at any point. So fitting the pieces of an object together is easy - you just slide the bits together until the stop.

Object creation is done with primitives, like cubes, pyramids and rectangles. A group of buttons on the mains screen is used to select the most frequently used options: Select, Copy, Create, Edit, Test, Reset, Condition, Delete, Attribute and colour.

Select lets you select an object you've created, either by choosing it from the menu or clicking on an icon. Reset clears everything, leaving you with a blank sheet of paper, as it were. Create allows you to choose from a variety of primitives, and the Edit function lets you alter the primitive objects and move them around.

Colour lets you select the colour of all the faces of an object. Each colour you select from the men can be attached to a face, so you have to choose the right shades to complement the shading on the object or it looks funny. There's no light source shading here, - you have to do it all yourself.

Condition and Attribute are game-related functions, and using these you can set what happens when you manipulate an object in a game. Copy is a powerful feature. If you've created a perfect shape, you can dupe it for moving around. Walls, for example, are easy to create but hard to repeat, so copying them is the only way to get them all the same.

All the tools are easy to use and very little space has been wasted on the buttons. There are more complex choices on the menu bar, but most of the frequently used features of the program are on these buttons, meaning that they are always to hand.

Uses for the system
One of the first uses for the 3D Kit is the creation of environments which you can walk around. This is the virtual reality side of the system and enables you to make rooms and buildings. As with the games you create with the program, you can create a stand-alone version of your objects for other people to walk around.

3D games are also easy to do, although you'll need to have a scenario worked out before you can create a game. It doesn't pay to try to bolt a game together from scratch with the program in front of you.

Different rooms can be made and the whole thing customised by creating a control screen using Dpaint or other graphics package and passing them into the program. Having done that you can tell the program where to find the control buttons and which part of the screen is the view window, and then you're away.

The final use for the program is object rendering. You create a complex object and rotate it to see how it shapes up to your idea. The example given is that of the space shuttle, and this is an easy example. You can't get much detail into the thing, but rough shapes are easy. As far as the creation of complex objects go, you may be better off with a full-blown rendering program like Real 3D v1.3.

Summing up
On the pro side you have to admit that 3D kit is an excellent piece of programming and is very easy to use. The objects are created quickly, and even a complete beginner can be up and running in a matter of moments. You can make shapes, whiz them around the screen and bolt them together with ease.

The manual is a thickish wad of tightly printed instructions for the various controls, and hints and tips for the creation of objects.

But there are a few drawbacks to all this wonderment. All things considered, 3D Kit makes a fair attempt at being all things to all men. But as a 3D design tool it is coarse and not very colourful, and you can't transport the 3D figures you make into any other format.

It is, however, very fast and allows you maximum freedom in the creation and placement of your obejcts. But where it really excels is in the creation of 3D Freescape-type games. Actually there's no "type" about it, they are real Freescape games! And using the DIY borders you can create exotic variations of this very popular theme in a standalone form.

So is it virtual reality? Well, yes and no. You never really feel like you are there in the flesh, and the 3D effect is a trifle wide-angled in most cases, giving you the impression that you have the angle of view of a fish.

But despite these technical reservations, 3D Kit is very enjoyable to use, and one of the most absorbing programs just to goof around with that I've seen for a long time. Now all it needs is an interface to X-Specs or a pair of eye-phones and then you'd really be talking!

With the arrival of Virtual Reality systems somewhat of a revival of interest in 3D programs has taken place. But what about the enthusiastic novice who does not want to wade through stacks of books on coding and has not the time to start learning complex geometry theories? Well now anyone with a bit of imagination and the advanced technical knowledge of either Lego or Stickle Bricks can produce their own 3D adventures.

Incentive have produced an easy-to-use design package based around their Freescape system. Freescape first found fame with its appearance in games such as Driller, Dark Side, Total Eclipse and more recently Castle Master, but now anyone can utilise the system to develop new 3D games to their own specifications.

3D Construction Kit provides the novice with a series of easy to use building blocks and controls to build and animate entire three-dimensional Freescape environments.

Building Rome in a day
The package comes with a single disk containing the editing program, an example game - produced with the it - and a detailed and an extensive manual. The manual starts by explaining just the thing people starting 3D need - how to make a cube and colour it in! For all those bibliophobes that do not fancy ploughing through the manual to start producing 3D works of art, do not worry! The package also contains a short tutorial video to help lead you through the basics of the system: just so you do not get a sudden bout of technofear when the control screen appears!

To speed up the process of producing objects, the commonly used options are also found on the control panel at the bottom of the screen. This is where the majority of the work is carried out. From here you can move around the area, construct objects and put them into place.

Building an object could not be easier. Just select 'create' from the panel to call up a menu of shapes, then click on the one you want. Next go to the 'edit' panel and you can change the size of the object, move it anywhere in the area, shift the corners to produce a new shape and finally colour it how you want. Pull up more shapes and you can stick them together to build anything you want! It is much the same as using a pliable set of kiddies' building blocks - you grab your block, push and pull it into shape and plonk it where you want it.

So what happens if...
Once you have built and coloured your object, you can assign attributes and conditions to it to bring it to life. This is where the Freescape Command Language (FCL) comes in. No, do not panic! You do not have to write a full-blown program to create your game. FCL is only used to tell the program what you want to happen when certain conditions occur.

For example, say you have built yourself a nice house in your environment. You can then select the door and by using FCL, it is possible to tell the program to jump to another area if the player collides with it. By moving to another area in the designer, you can construct the interior of the house, ready for when you start walking around your new environment. The program even contains a standard room consisting of, naturally, four walls, a ceiling and a floor. By calling up this set of 'globals', you do not even have to mess around building the boundaries of your interior scene - they are there already, waiting to be furnished.

When you start getting more adventurous, you can use FCL to detect whether you shoot or manipulate objects, make shapes move or disappear, add to your inventory or even swing doors open.

If this still sounds too complex for you, do not worry. Once you start doodling it becomes very easy to look up the required method in the manual and incorporate it into your 3D scene. To give you and idea of just how easy the system is to use, within half-an-hour of loading the program we had constructed a rather pretty little church, made the door open when it was shot at and created the interior of the church, complete with altar and glowing crucifix!

Move it, boy!
You can also use FCL to set up simple animation sequences to bring your shapes to life. All you need to do is set the object's attributes so that it is moveable then edit the conditions. Now by using the 'loop' and 'move' commands you can send it whizzing around the scenery. With a little practice you can soon produce seemingly complex animated scenes with ease.

Once you have built your 3D world and put together your game conditions, all that is needed for the final touch is a pretty control panel. These can be any 320x200, 16-colour IFF screen, so you can create a panel in your favourite art package and sling it straight into your game. Just select 'load border' from the 'file' menu to load it up, select 'set view' from the general' menu and drag a box out to set the size of the view window. That is it! A finished game screen. By accessing the 'controls' option you can assign keys for all the controls and use the pointer to mark out the active area on the panel for each control, so you can put the controls just about wherever you want.

Easy as one, two, three
3D Construction Kit is without doubt a powerful and flexible system. But unlike many other construction systems, building 3D objects with 3D Construction Kit really is as easy as plonking shapes together and pulling them about to produce a finished scene. It will take a little time and some experimenting to produce a full game, but the system's ease-of-use means that the learning curve is shorter than virtually all other game-construction systems.

The manual, coupled with the tutorial video, explains every option and command in surprising detail. A few more examples would have been helpful, but the lack of them is not much of a hindrance, since an insight into the more advanced features can be gleaned by loading up the Kit Game and pulling the various sections apart to see how they work. This provides you with both a live set of examples on various techniques and a set of 'library' routines to use in your very own environments.

A weekend spent investigating the Kit Game and following the video should put you along the right track. After that a little more dabbling could be all that it takes before you are well into producing a 3D adventure of your own!

The 3D Construction Kit is probably the most user-friendly game design ever produced on the Amiga. Anyone interested in 3D adventure games and a spark of imagination should check it out immediately, since it is just the thing to allow them to put everything they ever wanted from the genre into their own game.
One point, though, now that the Kit is available programmers are going to have to work that little bit harder to some pretty nifty coding and designing to come up with new and challenging games. Otherwise people will start to say, "Oh yeah, but I could have done that with 3D Construction Kit!"

If you're acquainted with Incentive's series of 3D games, which started with Driller, Total Eclipse and Castle Master and shows no sign of coming to an end, you'll be familiar with their Freescape graphics system. Good, isn't it? And wouldn't it be nice if you could have a crack at designing your own Freescape games, but without having to worry about all the mechanics behind 3D filled polygons? Well now you can!

3D Construction Kit is basically the package Incentive used to churn out ( if that's the right word) all the games listed above, with a few bells and whistles tacked on to turn it into a commercial product. (There's even a 'free' sample game in here so you can see roughly the sort of thing that you're aiming at).

It contains everything you'll need to design 3D objects, colour them in, move them around a bit and eventually turn them into a fully playable game which can be severed from the main package and given/sold to whoever you like (as long as you give the Kit a mention in it somewhere). The only limit, as the free tutorial video stresses, is your imagination. (It also keeps going on about 'a world inside your computer', and is best taped over as soon as possible).

After loading the software you're presented with a huge, empty box called an 'area'. By clicking on the appropriate icons you'll be able to slowly fill it with buildings, furniture, baddies or whatever you fancy to create your 'world'.

This is actually quite a laborious process - don't let any tutorial video tell you otherwise - but pretty soon you'll have quite a convincing landscape which you can explore to your heart's content. But that isn't the end of the story. You'll probably want to bung in a few more 'areas', eh?

Well, let's pretend that your first area (Area 1) contains a building. It's probably got a door on the front, hasn't it? The trouble is, when you walk into the door it makes a sort of 'clunk' sound and you bounce off. You could always pretend that the door's locked or something, but your audience will expect more. So instead create a new, empty, area (Area 2) and then attach a command to the door in Area 1 so that when you walk into it it'll whisk you to Area 2.

You can then bung lots of furniture and stuff into Area 2 and turn it into a room - a hallway, say. And you can then have lots more areas leading off from it. You could also have spooky doors that take you into one room when you go through them in one direction, and a completely different room when you go back in the other direction. Or you could have a weird 'Tardis' effect where you go into a tiny building and inside are lots of huge rooms. We're getting back onto this 'only limit is your imagination' sort of business again.

Once you've set up your world you'll probably want to turn it into a game. Facilities are included to enable objects to be shot or collected. You can animate things so they move around. You can even add sound effects, timers, energy levels and scoring systems. The trouble is that to achieve all this you'll have to delve into the Freescape Command Language, which is a far cry from the cushy icons and things you'll have used up to now. A lot of work will have to be put in on this, and a bit of programming experience would help a great deal. It's very flexible, though, so once you've worked out what's going on it should theoretically be possible to program just about anything.

3D Construction Kit isn't perfect. The 3D graphics engine used to display everything isn't the most sophisticated system in the world - Cybercon 3 would dip it in Flash and wipe the floor with it - so things can slow down a fair amount if there's a lot on-screen. We're talking about one frame per second for the 'house' detailed below. And the manual doesn't attempt to explain any of the terms it uses, so once again your imagination is called upon to do much of the work.

Finally, and perhaps most ominously, there's the price. It's a lot to pay for anything, even something as complex as this, so you'll have to think pretty hard before reaching into your pocket.

These reservations aside, 3D Construction Kit is a pretty potent piece of software. Anyone with a reasonably large brain should be able to construct a marketable game without too much trouble at all. People with slightly smaller brains will have plenty of fun constructing things and then exploring them. And people with really tiny brains could just sit and watch the video. There's something for everyone, really. If you're into it, it's an investment that'll really pay off in terms of enjoyment per pound, and which may even make you a bit of cash on the side.

3D is both a programmer's friend and enemy. There's no doubting the popularity of 3D games, but until now there has been no simple way of programming this style of game.

From their Aldermaston base, Incentive have pooled their extra-dimensional talents to create a games designer the likes of which has never been seen before.

For your fifty quid you get an impressively proportioned box containing a weighty and detailed manual, the program disk along with a specially written game and an extremely useful tutorial video which guides you through your first steps with the kit.

On loading you're greeted with an intro screen followed by the main menu. The most striking feature is the amount of arrow icons - there are dozens of them. After a brief journey through the manual the relevant features become apparent and the controls become less daunting.

Creating shapes is easy. Clicking on the create icon calls up a menu of available shapes, bot two and three dimensional. At first the choice seems limited: a square, a pentagon, a hexagon and a pyramid on the 3D palette, with similar shapes on the 2D one - but these can be stretched, compressed or have their angles altered in the case of a pyramid or triangle.

Objects can't move through each other. This allows you to butt shapes up against each other so you don't get any gaps, but it also causes a few problems. Dropping a rectangle through the roof of a house is the logical way to make a chimney but you can't do that; use a triangle with a square on top instead.

Colouring objects is almost as simple as creating them. The game works in sixteen colour mode, and each colour comes with half-a-dozen shades. A diagram at the side of the screen shows the 'unseen' sides of the polygons.

Creating static objects is easy, making them do something is a completely different ball game. The kit contains its own programming language which is used to control individual objects. The commands are designed to be simple enough that people with no programming experience can understand them, and the manual contains comprehensive instructions dealing with all of the games commands.

Animating objects is the most complicated part. The commands are straightforward, but a pen and paper still come in handy for planning out more complicated designs.

Custom control panels can be designed, using almost any art package the ported in as IFF files. By selecting the appropriate command you can then trace round areas of the panel and turn them into icons. Sampled sounds can also be imported, although this soaks up memo.

Linking everything together is easy. An exit has to be designated along with instructions telling the computer where to dump the player should he reach this point. Alternatively you could have one huge room containing the whole game environment.

There's hardly any limit to what you can create. Each screen can hold up to 256 shapes, and the kit can accommodate a total of 256 screens. This might not seem too many, but when you think the previous Freescape games only had a hundred screens you soon realise the size of the the area you have to work in. This means you can create anything from a virtual reality game of naughts and crosses to Cybercon III's sequel.

Once your creation is finished you can turn it into a self running auto-boot program by selecting the make-command. This eliminates all the messy fussy around trying to create an automatically running program.

3D Construction Kit is amazing. It's easy to use and the results are stunning, this ranks alongside Amos as a landmark product in home computing.

We at ZERO were so taken by Domark's 3D Construction Kit advert, that we decided to present our review in the same style. (Although it's not really a game, but more like a utility package combining 3D graphics with a bit of animation).
As anyone who's read the advert will tell you, it's also possible to create your 'very own complete Freescape Adventures'- so there's 'more besides'. It's a very expensive 'more besides' though, as the Amiga version weighs in at a hefty 50 quid. Take it away Jean Claude...

First of all, I put together the main body of my steed, made from two blocks joined together, one placed above the other.

Next I stretched a pyramid, I want my thoroughbred to look beautifully stream lined, so now I'm ready to give my horse a lovely slender neck...

...Complete with a flowing golden mane (which will billow in the wind like a satin veil as she sails past the winning post).

Adding the head was easy. I even made some little eyes and nostrils for her - they only took nine hours to complete.

Then onto the really important parts. The legs and tail. Having stretched four blocks I was there. Yup, this is my race-winning dream thoroughbred alright..

First of all I created the main platform, made up of eight flattened blocks - with a hole in the middle just about large enough to drop a dining-table through.

Next I worked on the upright bar. This had to be strong. (I didn't want any criminals to get away with their lives simple because they were grossly obese.

Then it was time for the all important cross-bar, which, like the upright bar, had to be able to take a lot of weight - not just once, but several times a day.

A gallows wouldn't be a gallows without four sturdy supports at the base. The handy pull-down menus helped me make short work of these.

And finally... the rope. Now I can string 'emup in style. And it's all thanks to Incentive. I wouldn't have believed it possible. But it is!

Via the user-friendly interface, I first created a vehicle to carry us on our journey. A New-Age Ark. A purple Love ship. Join me. Kiss my legs (Uh-oh. Ed).

Here we are in the world of the Godhead, where big is small and small is big. Where Yin is Yang and Yang is Yin. Where everything is purple.

Wait... Wait.. I'm getting a message from the Godhead. Oh. Apparently I'm showing you too much and we must return to earth immediately.

There are flashing lights inside my head. I must kill a virgin at dawn and pour her blood onto a tree-stump! (That's enough of that. Ed).

So there you have it. You can recreate any Freescape game with this package, create one of your own, or simply doodle about - using it as a 3D art program. You'll know immediately, if this is your cup of tea and you'll know immediately if it's not, so we're not even going to give it a score at all. Maybe David Icke should have the last word instead: "The cyclic nature of the universe demands that we should all don purple trousers and..." (Oh shut up. Ed.)