Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. orld Construction Set 2.0 installed easily from its CD-ROM and consumed about 65 MB for the complete install. The total install includes demos, tutorial files, OpenGL, etc. The terrain modeling and animation software is produced by Questar Productions. World Construction Set is available for Intel, Amiga and DEC Alpha computers as this is being written. Prices vary for each platform. The Intel retail price is $835 and street price will be less. Unix/SGI and Mac versions are promised. Check Questar's page for details. For the Intel platform Windows 95 or NT is required. RAM requirements are 16 MB minimum and of course more is always desirable. Documentation consists of 2 manuals. The first manual addresses the introduction and tutorials and is about 300 pages. The second manual is the reference manual and is about 400 pages. A mailing list is available and subscription procedures are mentioned in the first manual. The first chapter welcomes the user to the software. World Construction Set uses Digital Elevation Model (DEM) files to create terrain. There a few different types of DEM files. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has one version. Several USGS DEM files are on the CD-ROM. Terrain modeling software called Vista Pro also uses a type of DEM file. DEM files are not essential for terrain creation. World Construction Set allows the construction of terrains from an internal fractal generator, terrains that are drawn within World Construction Set by the user and grayscale images in the .iff format. (Questar now has a downloadable update that provides some support for 24 bit .tga and .bmp files.) World Construction Set also allows the use of vector data to show rivers, political boundaries, etc. (Since this review was published I have been advised by Questar that they are working on World Construction Set so it will import just about every file type around. ) There is an overview and all the features are briefly mentioned. The next chapter discusses how to use the manuals. The upgrade tips in Appendix E address the needs of users upgrading from version 1 to version 2. Appendix B addresses the needs of the geography novice. I found this information to be helpful. It has been several decades since I had a geography lesson. Even though I served 29 years in the USN and traveled all over the world the refresher was helpful. Appendix B addressed the divisions of the earth in degrees, minutes and seconds. Longitude and latitude is discussed. A brief description of all the chapters and appendixes of both manuals is provided in this chapter. Mention is made of the demo images and projects on the CD-ROM. he subsequent chapter addresses installation procedures. The next chapter discusses getting started. DEM files are actually a series of altitude numbers in table form. World Construction Set creates the terrain then applies textures, sunlight, fog, clouds, etc. to create a realistic appearing landscape. The interface is deceptively simple in appearance. There are only 4 icons and 3 drop down menus. The icons from left to right are for database, data operations, parameters and rendering. They have bubble help labels. The project drop down menu is roughly analogous to the file menu in other applications. World Construction Set consists of 5 modules. These modules work together and interrelate to each other. A change in one module will be immediately felt in the others. The modules are visible as separate windows/boxes within the World Construction Set interface. All of the modules are accessible via the module drop down menu. The parameters drop down menu is for loading and saving a variety of parameter information. The next several pages of this chapter have brief descriptions of the various modules and images of the modules' interface and dialog boxes. World Construction Set does not have an auto save feature so saving projects must be done manually. he next chapter is tutorial one. First the canyonfly.proj file is opened. Then the modules drop down menu is accessed to display the map view, parameters and camera view modules. At this point I realized my 800 X 600 display wasn't going to cut it. I could not display all the modules at the same time. I increased my resolution to 1024 X 768 which resolved the problem. (I was advised by Questar that each window can be reduced to an icon which eleminates the absolute necessity for the higher resolution. One of their employees told me he runs it all the time on a lap top without any problems.) After the modules were loaded, the status log window changed accordingly. The cam view window has the cam view control box associated with it. The cam view control box has several icons across its top. They all have bubble help labels. When the interaction/OpenGL button is selected, the cam view window changes to provide a solid image view of the terrain. The cam view window can be changed by dragging the mouse across it. The mouse speed is set by a mouse speed slider. It is a good idea to use a slow speed at first or else a small drag will cause a huge change and the user may get lost. The autodraw button provides access to some features that are mostly optional depending on the speed of the computer and whether or not OpenGL is used. The manual has a chart that shows recommended settings for slow, faster and really fast computers. I used the really fast settings on my Windows 95 133 MHz Micron with 64 MB of RAM without any problems. Next the motion list window is activated by clicking on the motion list button in the cam control box. This list provides access to controlling the camera in the cam view window. The camera altitude can be changed by dragging the right mouse button in the cam view window. Latitude and longitude can be changed while dragging the left mouse button. As the camera is dragged about in latitude and longitude, the yellow camera area in the map view window also changes accordingly. The yellow square represents the camera, the yellow cross is the camera's target which is also called the focus point, the yellow circle is the haze distance and the angled lines represent the camera's field of view. The camera can be dragged about in the map view window and the view in the cam view window changes accordingly. The map view control box provides some information and also some control. Latitude and longitude information is displayed at the bottom of this box that shows where the mouse is located on the map view window. A click on the map view window will display the altitude and some other information. The map view control box has 2 drop down menus on it. The style drop down menu provides access to single, multi, surface, emboss, slope and contour display styles. The color drop down menu provides access to gray, light gray, color and earth. The tutorial then instructs the user to set up a gray embossed map view. The tutorial then points out that World Construction Set will render a preview in the cam view window when the ecoshade preview icon is clicked in the cam view control box. After the cam view window renders, the diagnostic data box opens. This box will provide information about the just rendered image. A click on the image is required at which time the diagnostic data box provides the information you see in the adjacent image.(I have been advised by Questar that the information provided in the diagnostic data box is information pertaining to the pixel that has been clicked on.) he next tutorial has the user create a new project from scratch without using any DEM file. The new project dialog box opens and allows the user to type in a name for the new project. An existing project can be cloned. There is access to the windows         explorer provided via the small floppy looking icons at the right end of each line. Once the save button is clicked a subdirectory is created in the projects directory with the name the user typed in. The camera view and map view windows are black since there is no data. The are several ways to obtain data however this tutorial procedure requires that the user generate a fractal terrain using the fractal terrain generator. This generator is accessed via the windows drop down menu in the map view window. The generator has several controls which are explained in the reference manual. For some reason I could not find any discussion of the filter controls. (I have been advised by Questar that this feature was added after the manuals were published.) Next the auto button on the map view control box is clicked and the terrain is then displayed in the map view window. Then the defaults button is clicked on the parameters module. The ecoshade preview icon is then clicked to see what the terrain looks like. The next step is to clone the existing project. The project/new dropdown menu is selected and the new project dialog box opens. This time the user clicks on the file open icon at the right end of the clone project line. The MyProject1 project file is selected and MyProject2 is typed on the new project line. This enables World Construction Set to use the DEM files created with the original project yet have a separate project name and directory thus allowing the use of different color maps, depth maps, ecosystems, etc. orld Construction Set has a unique in my experience opening option when launched. Each time World Construction Set is launched the version dialog box appears with 2 options available. A click on the resume button will load the last project worked on at the point where it was when World Construction Set was closed and a click on the OK button will take the user to a blank screen with nothing loaded. The curious thing about the resume feature is that the project did not have to be saved. World Construction Set will take the user right back to the point the user was at even if the project wasn't saved. This could be very handy if the user closed World Construction Set without remembering to save the project first. The project drop down menu has a preferences selection available that will launch the project preferences dialog box. There is an option available for load on open which will load the last project worked on however it loads the project from its saved point. Next the MyProject2 project is cloned to MyProject3. more   All pages copyright © Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997 Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.