Textro by OTM
T E X T R O
an introductory demo by OTM
Welcome to Textro, OTM's first production. It has taken us over
a year since our group was organized to make a true demo, but the
wait is over.
- Files Included -
TEXTRO.EXE The demo itself
TEXTRO.GDM "Dextrous" composed by Stalker,
playable through OmniPlayer by
Zilym Limms
*.MSE Sound and Music Engine loadable
device drivers, BWSB v1.15 by
Zilym Limms
TEXTRO.00? Data files
TEXTRO.NFO This file...surprise!
OTM-NFO.EXE OTM info loader coded by Hurricane
FILE_ID.DIZ BBS file description
- Hardware Requirements -
This demo requires the following to run:
80386 or higher microprocessor
A VGA monitor and register compatible VGA card
About 512k free conventional memory
The following sound cards are supported:
Sound Blaster 1.x, 2.x, and compatibles
Sound Blaster Pro
Sound Blaster 16
Proaudio Spectrum/PAS+/PAS16 and compatibles
Gravis Ultrasound
- Technical Info -
Textro was coded in a mixture of assembler and Turbo Pascal. Since
this demo uses an extremely low resolution video mode, it was not
necessary to write the entire demo in assembler, this saved us a
great deal of time.
The only video modes used in Textro are 80x25 and 80x50 text modes.
If you don't believe us, try running Textro under windows from a
full screen DOS box, and switch from full screen to a window during
the demo. Textro will run VERY SLOWLY because of poor hardware
management under windows, but it should be obvious that no high
resolution graphics modes are being used, because it is not possible
to run a program using such a video mode in a window. Most of the
scenes in Textro look like they are textmode, with the exception of
the wireframe vector routines by Phred. This code uses character
set remapping before each frame to draw the line segments needed
to compose the object. If you still don't believe us, run in a
window and you will see a lot of garbage characters on the screen,
because windows doesn't allow character set remapping unless an
application is running full screen.
In reality, textmode provides the programmer with a wider range of
cell colors than any standard VGA graphics mode. The combination of
16 foreground colors, 16 background colors, and the 4 standard
halftone characters give a total of 1024 unique color combinations
for each cell. This attribute of textmode is demonstrated by the
plasma and voxel landscape portions of Textro.
In order to utilize these features to their fullest extent, Hurricane
created numerous utilities for converting images to textmode and
computing an optimum palette. These utilities were used to convert
the images used in the lens effect and the multidirectional scroller,
as well as to convert the texture map for the voxel landscape. This
code, which was originally used to do color matching in digitized
sprites, may be released at a future date.
When running Textro, try using the arrow keys to navigate through
the voxel landscape. If no keys are pressed, a random Bezier spline
path through the landscape will be followed.
- Textro History -
Textro was Hurricane's brainchild, and consequently he did the
majority of the coding for this demo. The sound and music code
was done by Zilym Limms, and the remaining code by Phred and
Voltaire. The fine music in this demo was composed by Stalker,
and the artwork was made by Supreme and Nameshift.
As the name implies, Textro began as an intro. Hurricane caught
the textmode bug after he and Voltaire viewed a demo called
Lunatic by Extreme. The final scene in Lunatic was a textmode
vector cube, and Hurricane thought it was just about the most
incredible thing he had ever seen. Soon afterward, he began
pushing us to do some textmode effects, but we ignored him because
we thought of textmode as lousy considering the vast array of
higher resolution video modes availible on the PC.
Hurricane didn't give up easily. He put together some textmode
effects and started spreading them around to the rest of the group.
Soon enough, we all caught the textmode bug. We figured that a
textmode intro would be a perfect first production for us. It would
give us a chance to brush up on our design and organization skills
using a demo that would not be extremely tough to code, and the
result would be a truly original production.
As the project picked up steam, Hurricane coded some more effects,
Zilym finished his sound and music engine, and Phred and Voltaire
each offered to code a scene in the area of their expertise. It
soon became obvious that Textro would be slightly too big to be
called an intro, but we kept the name because it had such a nice
ring to it.
We have only seen a few other textmode productions. They range from
the filled character textmode vectors in Lunatic, to a simple
textmode production with a scroller and a plasma, to an intro called
'textro' which was a text file in a nicely coded graphics mode
viewer. In our opinion, our Textro is the definitive textmode
production because it combines a wide range of effects, including
many that to our knowledge have never been implemented in textmode
until now.
- The Near Future -
What is currently cooking in Arizona? Quite a bit actually. The
majority of OTM members are currently enrolled in school. Phred,
Hurricane, and Voltaire are all studying computer science/electrical
engineering at various universities, and the rest of OTM is in high
school. Therefore, school takes up a large chunk of our time. In
addition to making demos, the majority of OTM members are also
working, some of us are working for commercial software companies,
while others are working on video games.
As for the future, OTM plans on thrilling the world with more
impressive demos. Voltaire and Phred are constantly improving their
respective 3d rendering code, which will surely be put to use in many
future productions. Zilym is also working on his sound and music
engine, adding support for more sound cards, new file formats, and
performing general enhancements.
- Final Words -
We really hope you enjoyed Textro, because we had a lot of fun making
it. Hurricane said he would like to see some more textmode productions
released, possibly even a textmode demo compo? :) Happy coding...
--
Voltaire/OTM
[ back to the prod ]