BoingTrek

How Many Different Objects Can You Paste the Boing Checkerboard On?

1989.06.15

Last updated: 2021.11.22

"Space. The area between your ears..."

I made this at the 1989 Amiga DevCon, held at the Holiday Inn hotel in San Francisco. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, the Amiga 3000 hadn't come out yet. Version 1.3 was the most current OS release; details of the upcoming new release, still called 1.4 (later to become 2.04), were being disclosed at the DevCon. Commodore was just unveiling their 2500/030 model, and was promising a 386 Bridge card Real Soon Now (uh huh...). And the big summer movie releases that weekend were Dead Poet's Society and Star Trek V (yeah, that one).

So while everyone else was cavorting around San Francisco one night, I, being a hopelessly reclusive geek, stayed behind and built this animation. I already had the Enterprise object from a wireframe model I had built back in college (using a bunch of C programs and a copy of the old Franz Joseph plans). With a little additional programming, I managed to slap the omnipresent Boing Checkerboard on to the ship's polygons.

I also wanted to exploit a feature/bug in VideoScape that I had seen Allen Hastings use once. In the old text-format object files, when specifying polygons, you tell it how many vertices the polygon has, followed by the vertex indices, where the zeroth vertex is the first index in the file. However, in the text-format files, you can also specify negative indices, which index into vertices in previously-loaded objects. Used properly, this can let you perform all kinds of strange deformation effects.

I figured I'd have a go at this, and tried to use this feature to create a warp effect like the one in the first and second Star Trek movies. Alas, it didn't come out nearly as well as I would have liked. But for one night's work, it's not bad...

Animation Info

Items for Download

• BoingTrek-anim.lha, 575K
• BoingTrek-src.lha, 575K