fine whine

I've been playing with POV-Ray again, making 3d models and rendering them. It's the program I used back when I was rendering LEGO models, and I had even used it for a college class to make some very impressive prototype mockups, but I haven't touched it in over a year and thought I was getting rusty. The POV-Ray Scene Description Language isn't exactly difficult, just complicated.

I write it all by hand, of course. Figuring out how to easily turn primitive shapes and solids (cones, spheres, boxes, planes) into interesting objects is just half of the challenge: the other half, of course, being the typing them in without making too many mistakes part. There are programs out there that can do it all visually on screen, all CAD-like and cool, but that's just not my bag, baby.

So what was my project this time? Pac-Man. I wanted to be all authentic, so I tracked down an arcade ROM* and a program to emulate it (thank you XMAME) and then set out in my quest to have a pixel-proportionate copy of the game screen, minus the titular character and ghosts.

Well, for now minus them. They're not exactly so complicated that I couldn't duplicate them with some more simple shapes...

So this is what I have, more or less. The key is turning it into something cool.

* Actually the ROM I ended up using is the original Japanese Puck-Man, but when Namco brought the hallowed game to our shores somebody smart noticed that the name (in big bold letters on the side of the cabinet) could very, very easily be changed to something not quite appropriate for an arcade full of impressionable kids.

Incidentally, I wasn't really ever that big a fan of Pac-Man. I never played it in an arcade. We had it for the Atari 2600 (say what you will about that not being a true port, it was the best we could get) but it was the first, and only, game cartridge that has ever died. Pac-Man has brought me little but trouble all along, I guess. The reason I ended up with Puck-Man was that I was having some minor difficulties with XMAME reading the correct pacman.zip, so I gave up and went with what worked. It's the same game anyway.