| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ SOFTOGRAPHIE ★ SANDY WHITE ★ |
| Sandy White | Games - Auteurs |
Travels with my ant David Kelly talks to Sandy White, author of 3D Ant Attack (Published by Popular Computing Weekly in 1983)) Top-flight games programs never come out of thin air. And Soft Solid 3D Ant Attack by Edinburgh sculptor Sandy White is no exception. He bought his first computer — a Mk14 — as long ago as 1979. At that time Sandy was at Edinburgh art college and he bought it with a view to controlling mechanical sculptings and simple robots. "I've always been fascinated by such things." he says. When he was about 12 he built a completely mechanical arcade game — you had to control the movement of a steel ball, guiding it to the centre of a plywood maze to win a prize. At about the same time as he bought the Mk14, he started his four-year course in sculpture. "It started out as a standard course," he explains., "They sent you off into clay and plaster. But I sort of digressed. I started sneaking bits of electronics into college, connecting up motors to my sculptures to make them move." At first the designs were quite simple but Sandy soon started writing machine code routines on the Mk14 — the computer only understands machine code — to produce sequences of movements and lights. "The Mk14 didn't last long," says Sandy. "I canibalised it to build a special project. Then I got a Softie, an Eprom Hex monitor — again machine code only. After that, somebody lent me an Acorn Atom." 3D Ant Attack is the first game Sandy has written, but it didn't start out as a game. He first got interested in three-dimensional graphics. He says, "I just love the computer graphics you see in tv commercials. "When I started on the Atom, the only thing you can do from Basic is line-drawing graphics and. even then, it takes a long time to up-date each image, making animation difficult. "I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get it to draw faster and maybe shade in the line-graphics shapes. At that time I did a lot of experimenting with the algorithms needed for three-dimensional representation." But Sandy had to return the Atom to its owner, which meant looking around for another machine. He decided on the Spectrum and immediately had to start learning Z80 machine code to replace the 6502 code he had learnt for the Atom. In February this year he took delivery of his 48K Spectrum. "It turned out that the Z80 was much better suited for my particular needs than the 6502 — some of the registers are 16-bit and the block search instructions run a lot faster on the Z80. Once I got used to it, the Z80 was quite an enlightenment." Having looked and worked at 3D representation in detail on the Spectrum. Sandy chose to write a game: "I'd been looking at other Spectrum games. 3D Janx by John Ritman is drawn out in lines and although it is true 3D, it is slow to up-date the screen. Also, at that time there were a lot of games which claimed to be 3D but weren't. "I went through a lot of ideas before coming up with 3D Ant Attack. The final idea just evolved."' Sandy was looking for something which made full use of his 3D techniques. He was also determined to write a game to be played either by boys or girls. "There are a lot of sexist games around and I wanted one which made no assumptions that the player was male." In 3D Ant Attack the player is able to choose his or her sex at the start of the game. The final version of the game features a remarkable representation of 3D. The character you control is able to walk round and hide behind buildings. It is even possible to climb onto some of the constructions in the city to avoid being attacked by the extremely ferocious giant ants. At the start of the game the player stands outside the walled city of Antes-cher. Jumping over the wall you must avoid the deadly ants to rescue a number of imprisoned unfortunates from various points within the city. The further in you go, the more difficult it is to return to freedom. The primitive-looking townscape of buildings within the city walls are represented as shaded 3D blocks, cylinders and pyramids. In a similar way to Atari's Zaxxon, Ant Attack shows only part of the city at one time, scrolling diagonally with the action. An additional feature is a choice of viewpoints. Just as if you are a detached observer watching the proceedings from on high, it is possible to choose your vantage point. Selecting different keys gives four different views of the city. When your hero or heroine disappears in one view, hidden behind a building, it is possible to switch the viewing angle to look from the other side. "Viewing from different directions is really necessary. If you are attacked by one of the giant ants behind a building it is vital to be able to change your view to find out what is happening." Every part of the city is represented on an XYZ co-ordinate system. Each point of every building is held as three numbers by the computer. The computer does a computation on the data to work out what is within the field of view at any point from a particular viewing angle. The whole city is stored in memory, but to save time, the computer knows roughly which part of the city to look at to make up the picture you see. The screen is up-dated 12 times a second. "To make it run as fast as it does. I had to think really carefully about the routines I used. You have to watch, down to the nearest machine-cycle, what happens in a particular loop. That took much longer than anything else — just sitting down and trying to find the optimum code. "In the end. it was quite a panic to squeeze it all in. For the captions which come up from time to time I had to start modifying what they said just to fit them in. "The city is not in colour. Apart from space limitations the main reason for that is that the time taken to work out the colour information would cause the game to run at approximately half speed." The city was planned out on paper long before any programming began. Sandy's friend Angela Sutherland, also a sculptor, designed many of the actual buildings. All the different structures in the city have names because it was necessary to keep track of them when planning it out. Sandy had to write an entirely separate program just for editing the design of the city, just like a real building site. "I had to take care to avoid it looking too complicated; Too many buildings close together would mean you couldn't see between them easily." Actual programming on 3D Ant Attack took 15 weeks. "Writing the game once it was planned was incredibly tedious — like a punishment. I was crossing off the days on the wall like Robinson Crusoe waiting to get off his island. But. there is no point in starting something if you don't finish so I pressed on. If I had known what it would be like. I probably would never have started." In the event, completion of the program was quite well timed — companies were just putting the finishing touches to their plans for Christmas. Sandy first went down to the shops in Edinburgh to find out which companies had the most titles on the shelves. From this simple research. Sandy decided to offer his program first directly to Sinclair. Unwilling to send out a copy of the actual game, he sent a video tape of the program down to Sinclair's software manager at Cambridge. They sent it back, explaining they didn't have a video recorder to play the tape on. Sandy was forced to think again! Next he sent it to Quicksilva and they jumped at it. They flew Sandy and Angela down from Glasgow to Southampton the next day. And the rest is history, as they say. Now Sandy has just started thinking about what to do next after a short holiday to recover from what he describes as "computer fatigue". There is nothing definite yet, but he is kicking a few ideas round. "The problem is coming up with a good enough game — I don't want to do another one unless what I can come up with is really much better than the first." Sandy is also in the final stages of patenting his 3D code routines. "Usually it is more or less impossible to protect computer software, but I have been very lucky — the ideas behind the three-dimensional techniques I use are not necessarily applicable only to computers and the patent specification covers new ways of making 3D images." So Sandy is now looking to licence his three-dimensional routines for use by other programmers: "I may licence the package to any manufacturer who is interested, but in the meantime I shall hedge my bets by producing other games myself. "Three-dimensional graphics with colour is one possibility. I said before that it would be very slow, but I've got a couple of ideas. "Also, I'd like to explore some 3D ideas that aren't games. I had to write a game to sell my 3D routines, but now perhaps I'll do a graphics package. Computer art for the home — sounds a bit sterile, doesn't it, but it needn't be! "I'm dying to get my hands on a 16-bit machine, too. Just what could then be done is the kind of thing dreams are made of. I'm not going to limit myself to any one machine because that would be dangerous." Neither has Sandy abandoned his sculpture. He is now building custom designed computer boards to control his most recent work and he is writing a new computer language specifically to play music and choreograph robots. "I'm working on a development system to enable me to combine a music keyboard and joystick console to make it easier to enter data." At an exhibition in Aberdeen last year Sandy showed three sculptures, each of which told its own story in music and movement: "People pressed the button and they would perform for about five minutes." Sandy seems full of ideas for new projects. On the other hand, he shows no interest in converting his computer work for other machines — taking the 3D ideas across to different computers and processors. "I like innovating. Doing conversions you don't get your programming highs. "When I write a bit of code that does something new you can show it to your friends and go Hey, look at that!' and it feels good." PopularComputingWeekly
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