What is it? PredatorPrey is a VR sandbox that I wrote to get a better understanding of Virtual Reality.
It is derived from and is an adjunct program to the HP-15C Programmable Calculator program that I submitted as a hack two, three and four years ago.
How to use it: Double clicking the application opens it and presents a menu bar with menus Apple, File, Edit, Graphics and Stretch&Rotate. From the Graphics menu select 'New' to open a window with scroll bars and a palette. The palette has six items and is derived from the window in the Macintosh Programming Fundamentals Self-Paced Course from Apple Developer University. It has been modified extensively from its original form. The palette items are: Arrow palette item, for selecting objects in the window. A circle object pallete item, which is the default selected palette item. Clicking in the window with the mouse draws a circle in the window. Other palette items are a square, a cube, a house and a landscape item. Click on the cube with the mouse and click in the window. A square is drawn in the window. Now select from the Stretch&Rotate menu the Rotation Choice Box item and another window will open with another palette. Items in the pallete are grouped by their functionality and the top seven are used to control the orientation of the square which is really a cube as can be seen by clicking on any of the top seven palette items.
Select the house from the palete and click in the window. Apply the top seven pallette items in the Rotation Choice Box window to the house object.
Quit, relaunch and create another window by selecting 'New' from the 'Graphics' menu. Click on the landscape palette then click in the window to draw some number of objects in the window. Open the Rotation Choice Box window and click on the lower 12 pallete items to notice that the window is a window into a Virtual Reality space with 3D perspective graphics. repeat this window opening process and after selecting the landscape item, hold down the command key while clicking in the window to reveal the objects as before, but also several icons of other shareware calculators, remember the HP-15C calculator? Now select the house palette item with the mouse and prepare to click in the window. Prepare to click in the window while holding down the command key, the command and option keys or the command, option and control keys. Imagine first Snoopy sitting on top of the house. Clicking thusly equips the house with ordinance and replaces the circle pallete item with an auto loader pistol icon. Clicking on the gun to select that item and striking the tab key wil cycle through the weapons available. If command and option were held while clicking in the window, besides guns the house is thus equipped with fourteen(14, count 'em) air to air missles. Command, option and control keys equips the house with guns, missles and a neutron bomb. Equipping the house with ordinance also draws two short lines near the upper left corner of the door, functions as crosshairs. The sound effects have not worked since the release of CodeWarrior 5, but during the demo of the calculator at MacHack 94 the audience was treated(?) to the sound of .44 Magnum at 1800 rounds per minute, taking out one of the calculator icons. Switching to missles and launching them with the space bar lightens the load of the house. Only guns have functionality for taking out the calculator icons. Pressing the space bar while the neutron bomb is activated blacks out the screen. Escaping from the program at that point(the only option) is effected by command-q.
