VideoScape 2.0 Demo

How Many New Features Can You Spot?

1988.05.15

Last updated: 2021.11.22

When VideoScape 2.0 was finally released, prolific author and AmigaZone moderator Harv Laser was asked to write a review of it for AMNews, a disk-based magazine.

Harv in turn contacted me and asked me to create an animation that could accompany his review. It had to look good. It had to show off VideoScape 2.0's new features. And it had to be 100K or less. Ack!

So with those constraints, I created this animation. I couldn't have a lot of motion, as that would blow the file size. But I tried to show off the highlights of VideoScape 2.0's new features, which included:

• New polygon colors
• Translucent polygons
• "Chrome" polygons
• Phong shading
• HAM rendering
• Z-buffering

When I finished the animation, I popped back to the CLI and nervously checked the size of the file... 99990 bytes. Am I good or what? :-)

In 2020, this animation scene became relevant again when I was writing a Videoscape importer plugin for Blender. I wanted to support all the VS3D features I could, but it turned out that the VS3D file format specification was effectively lost, and turned up nowhere on the Web. So I dug out my old boxed copy of the program, which described VS3D 1.0 format. And then I dug out this old scene, which used many VS3D 2.0 features, and reverse-engineered almost all of the new features.

You can read the spec here.

Animation Info

Items for Download

• Videoscape2-anim.lha, 65K
• Videoscape2-src.lha, 18K