TITLE: Unpleasant Encounter
NAME: Simon de Vet
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: sdevet@istar.ca
WEBPAGE: http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: adome.jpg
ZIPFILE: adome.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Leveller, sPatch, Elefont

RENDER TIME: 
    6 hours, 59 minutes, 40 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 266 mmx

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A little background:

Even in today's modern era, there remains a very popular genre of games, known
as the "roguelike games."
These are adventure, RPG type games, which, for the most part, instead of using
graphics, use simple text to represent the scene. But instead of the old text
games, where they tell you such things as "You are in a large room, there is a
door to the right," it shows you, using text AS graphics.

This image is based on ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery, the best of the bunch)
made by Thomas Biskup and available at http://users.aol.com/ADOMDev/index.html

In ADOM, you, the hero is represented by an @ symbol. A shield is a " ", a sword
is ")", and so on...

This scene represents a brave adventurer (an Elementalist, no less) who has just
turned the corner, to enter a room (walls are represented by "#" symbols in the
game) and discovers, much to her horror, no less than 4 Elementals ready to
pounce (for those unfamiliar with fantasy, Elementals are essentially animate
forms of each of the 4 elements. A walking lump of dirt, an independant wave,
etc... in ADOM, they are represented as "E"s)

Now, this kind of image is a bit of an inside joke, to people who play
Roguelikes. Often, those unfamiliar with the genre think the game as "dumb", as
it has no flashy graphics. So, if making flashy graphics, why not keep them
text based? :)

I've made other images like this one, in the last month or so.
They are:
http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet/ADOM.jpg (Hero and Dragon)
http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet/ADOM2.jpg (Trollish Weaponsmith at work)
http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet/ADOM3.jpg (Discovery of a slime pit)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I decided to enter the competition quite late (August 29th) but thanks to the
ADOM type images I'd made in the last month, a foundation was already there, so
it was not too hard to put the image together.

The Earth and Water Elementals were made in sPatch, to give them a nice, soft,
organic look. The pile of dirt surrounding the base of the Earth Elemental is a
heightfield, made in leveller. The Fire and Air Elementals were made of simple
CSG, but the textures turned out very well, if I may say so myself. The Air
elemental is in the far rear, and due to its cloud-like form, is easy to miss.

The hero was made with Elefont (great proggy, BTW) to give it a nice beveled
edge, but the sword and shield are straight text objects.

The entire scene was put together in Moray, and rendered with POVray.

The reason it took almost 7 hours is due, entirely, to the Water Elemental.
Doing refraction on a complex, sPatch object is no easy task. Ofcourse, the 2
area lights didn't help the rendering time, either.

It was quite an adventure getting this image ready for submission. First of all,
it took 6 hours, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds to render, which is the longest
I've ever had to wait. Then, on August 30, when it had finally finished
rendering, I ran Paint Shop Pro, to convert it to a Jpeg file. Of course, it
was just that day that it decided my trial period was over. Argh! Download
another, earlier version of PSP. It locks up. Upload the file, so I could
connvert it on my other machine. It uploads fine, but refuses to download on
the other side. I get this fixed, and the downloaded file is 3k too big. Of
course, it won't load. Desprately search for a floppy disk, and finally find
one that is not full or corrupted. I finally get the image converted, after
much, much frustration.
So, if nothing else, give me an "E" for effort :)

I'd like to thank the entire crew at #povray (on IRC) for help, the group at
rec.games.roguelike.adom for comments on my previous ADOM images, and keeping
me doing this, Thomas Biskup for making such a great game and letting me use
his creation as inspiration for a competition entry, and everyone else who
helped me.

I hope you like it. I enjoyed making it.

