If you need more information about the GCS, then you have come to the right place! Price: $69.96 + $4.00 S&H Call 1-800-537-3344 and order Visa/MC or COD (extra charge for COD) Comes on 3.5" floppies. Takes up 5 to 8 megabyte of hard disk space. Req: 386 or better PC running DOS, 4 Meg RAM, & mouse. Sound Blaster Optional. The Pie 3D GCS is an integrated software package for non-programmers. With this program, the user can create a 3D action game which is comparable to DOOM, Wolf 3D, Terminator, and others. The GCS is a DOS application that requires a 386 or better computer, with a VGA graphics card. This product has been designed from the ground up with the intent of making an easy to use program for non-programmers to use. Hence the program is very much mouse and graphically based. We have tried to retain a Windows-like (tm) simplicity of the graphical user interface to minimize manual reading for the user. Our goal was that the user should be able to build their first level within minutes of installation. So what does our product look and feel like? Basically when you start it up, it looks much like a typical paint program. There is the standard line of pull-down menus across the top of the screen, and a stack of tool icons on the left side. Most of the screen is dominated by a black rectangular viewport area with scroll bars. If you load the demo world that is included with the GCS, you will see all the wall sections in Level 1 of the demo from the top view. This looks somewhat similar the the map mode in DOOM. If you like, you can start selecting walls and move them with simple mouse clicks to the tool bar and viewport. Can click on the person icon to plop down enemies, or click on the wall icon to add new walls, etc. When you want to pop into virtual reality and walk around in your creation, simply click on the 'Test World' icon. A minute or so later, you will be wandering about in your new 3D world! Of course you haven't yet created a finished product ready for selling to your peers yet. To make your complete 3D game will take some time. But the great thing about the GCS is that you won't have to spend your valuable time learning how to program, or learning how to do 3D mathematics. We've done all of that part for you. This leaves you the responsibility for the creative aspects of game creation. You can dig right into the most rewarding part of product development, and that is game design. Will you make a dungeon or a park? How about a western town or a shopping mall? Any of these are possible. You can use our included artwork to start right away, or get your own images from public domain sources, or go wild with your hand scanner. This brings us to another major part of the Pie 3D Game Creation System. Included with the GCS is a full featured image tool which has been evolved over the past three years to be the ideal software for creating or retouching images for 3D texture mapped games. The GCSPAINT tool has a myriad of features that are just right for 3D purposes. You'll find that when you start creating your virtual environments that image resolutions, contrast, and pixel-blending are very important. GCSPAINT contains these features in a very easy to use mouse driven interface. Once when a new artist joined our team, he decide he wanted to use a $600 painting program that ran under Windows. It had a manual as thick as a cinderblock, and took up umpteen megabytes of RAM and disk space. We didn't really care which program the artist used, since it is easy to convert from other common formats to ours using the GCS. The funny thing was, that after several months we noticed that the fancy program was no longer on his hard drive. He had decided that our favorite paint program ( an earlier, simpler version of GCSPAINT ) was actually much easier to use for making the low resolution bitmaps used in 3D texture mapped games. The GCS can import 256 color images in .GIF, .PCX, and .BMP format. So now you have heard about the world builder and the image tools. What else is included with the Pie 3D GCS? The most valuable part of the GCS has got to be the 3D game engine. A game engine is the software that runs when the user is playing the 3D game. When you are running down a corridor, blasting a mutant creature to death with a shotgun, the 3D engine is doing a huge variety of complicated tasks. Each pixel on the screen has to be read from some stored image and placed in exactly the right spot on the screen. A typical screen has 20,000 to 64,000 pixels on it, which is a lot of 3D calculations! But that is only part of what a 3D engine does. It also must decide which parts of the virtual world are visible, which are hidden behind other walls or objects. It must make sure that the player and the enemies can't walk through walls. It must keep track of all the gunshots or other weapons activity, checking 3D aim, and if any objects are blocking the path between weapon and target. It must control all the moving objects in the gam, from the burning torch to the sliding doors, up to the enemy characters with their AI routines. The Pie 3D Game Creation System includes a sophisticated 3D engine which does all those tasks and more. But the truly amazing thing is that when you buy the Pie 3D GCS, you have the right to distribute this 3D game engine WITH YOUR PRODUCT! That means that you don't have to require that your customers buy our 3D engine before they can play your game. The software which will send to your customers will include a special version of the game engine that will only work with your game. The GCS takes care of creating the final product in a directory on your hard drive. To sell or distribute your game, just copy all the files from this directory that the GCS made for you, and send it to your publisher or upload service. If you need a little guidance about marketing your product, contact us when your game is complete, and we would be glad to point you in the right direction. The process of creating a game takes many steps. It may seem like alot, but you will find that it is much more fun to make games than it is to play games! You start out by thinking about what you want your game to be. Maybe you want to make 17th century town, or a Vietnam jungle. After this is decided, you can start laying out your first level. You might find you want to add some of your own scanned images or other artwork to the GCS library images. Now the real fun starts because you can jump into your world and experiment any time you like. You can use the incredibly flexible animated object system to make doors open when the player passed by a certain point, or if he shoots something else, etc. You can even have the game remember past events, and have doors or other objects respond to both the player's present activity and past events. When you have several levels done, you might start thinking about how you want to hook these levels together. In this 3D engine, you can make the passages between levels be two-way. You can connect any game level to any other, and you can have many interconnections in the same level if you like. In addition, you can have multiple game ending situations. Any animated object can be set to end the game when the player gets to certain point, or satisfies some condition. When the game engine exits, it leaves a code to be picked up which can communicate to a menu program to put up the proper still picture for the user. In addition, the 3D game engine contains 4 channel digitally mixed Sound Blaster compatible sound. You can put your own sounds in your game easily. All sounds are stored in simple standard .WAV files. Animated objects can be instructed to play your .WAV sound effect any time you like. In addition, you can change the sounds the enemies make or the weapons. General midi support for the Sound Blaster card is included also. You can have music playing. It can be different on each level. In addition to this customizability, you will be able to make your own background template. This is the artwork that covers the screen around the 3D viewing area. Thus for a caveman game, you might want a rocky backdrop, and have the area between the inventory icon boxes and so on be filled in with your rocky artwork. In addition, you can change the positions of the numerical readouts, and even the appearance of the health-status pictures. In summation, the Pie 3D GCS contains an incredible amount of software for a very low price. When you consider that 3D engines like Id's cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to use, our low price is microscopic. We are confident that after about five minutes of world building you will be having so much fun that you couldn't bear to send it back! But in the unlikely event that you decide in the first four weeks that game design isn't for you, you can return the GCS for a refund. In fact, our returns for the GCS have been so few we could count them on our hands. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ONLY $69.95 1-800-537-3344 24 hrs. Visa/MC/C.O.D. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Click here to return to the main Pie in the Sky Page