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Documentation For LandScape =========================== This is the user documentation for LandScape. LandScape is a sort of poor-mans CAD (Computer Aided Design) program that allows you to design (landscape) a garden. It consists of two parts: a design module, where you lay out the design of your garden (using a small selection of plants, and other garden objects), and a drawing module, which takes the design, and draws a stylised 3D version from any viewpoint of what the garden would look like in real life. The LandScape distribution consists of the following files: - LandScape.docs What you are reading now. - LandScape.release_notes Release notes for this and previous versions. - LandScape The executable code - arp.library (In case you don't already have it) There are also icons for the first 3 files. This documentation assumes you have a small amount of knowledge on using your Amiga. In particular, how to click on things (left mouse button) and how to select items from menus (right mouse button). In order to set the program up the very first time, you may have to use the CLI. CONTENTS ======== 1) Obligatory legalese (what you can do!) 2) Why? (why write a gardening program?) 3) How? (example session to get you started) 4) Where? (a tour of menus and facilities available) 5) Hints and Tips 6) What's next? (plans for future versions) 7) Technical stuff 1 - Obligatory Legalese ======================= There are many different names for software (PD, freely distributable, shareware, etc) and I can never remember what they all mean. Therefore, I will just describe what you can do to this program. Although I retain copyright to all source code written by me, you can copy this distribution as much as you like, and give it to whoever you want. (note that arp.library is part of the AmigaDOS Replacement Project, and is subject to their distribution restrictions) The executable, documentation, and release notes should be kept together, but you can modify/get rid of the icons if you don't like them. You should not charge for, or have paid any money for this program, other than reasonable media costs (such as requested by Fred Fish and other reputable libraries). The executable and documentation may be compressed (using a powerpacker-type program) if you so desire. I hope that isn't too restrictive! This program is supplied 'as is'. No warranty or guarantee of any sort is implied. I am not responsible for any damage whatsoever that may arise from using this program. 2 - Why? ======== The idea for a landscape program came from several sources. Firstly, I like 3D graphics/fractals, etc, but had never written any programs of my own in this area. For myself, then I wanted to try out a few ideas. Secondly, I wanted something to model the real world. Real world modeling makes a program accessible to more people, as it is easier to follow what is going on. Thirdly, I was lent a catalogue from a "well-known garden paving manufacturer". In it, a landscape designer had drawn plans of various gardens, and then drawn the garden as it would look in 3D. I thought "I wonder if a computer could do that?". The LandScape program is the result of these musings. It is not meant to be a full-blown CAD program, as these tend to be difficult to use for people without a technical background. What I have tried to do, is to take some of the ideas of CAD (although I have never used a CAD package myself), and pitched them at a more intuitive level (hopefully). Now then, as any programmer will tell you, programs are never really finished. This version of LandScape has been deliberately limited in many respects in the interests of getting something released. If I didn't do it this way, then I'd always be adding bits here and there, and no-one would get to see what I had done. I have some ideas about the things that have yet to be added (see section 6), but would always be interested in any ideas that you may have, or things that you think a program of this type ought to be able to do. 3 - How? ======== As the best way to learn is by doing, this section presents in tutorial form a typical session. It shows you how to use some of the features the program offers. As with anything, there is no substitute for experimentation, so if anything looks a bit confusing, do not be afraid to try it out a few times. Unfortunately there is some duplication between the information presented in this section, and the more detailed information in section 4. An important thing to remember is that this is a reasonably complicated program, and you are advised to use it experimentally, to get a feel for what it is going to do, before diving in with anything complicated. If you just switch on, skim through the docs saying "Yup, that looks easy", and then proceed to try and enter an entry for the Chelsea flower show, you may well come unstuck! 3.1 Setting Up Sorry to start with a boring bit, but there is a small amount of stuff you have to set up before using LandScape. It only has to be done once (unless you change your workbench disks). In order to work, the file arp.library has to be installed into your LIBS: directory. If you have installed the ARP command set, or another program that used arp.library then this will already have been done. If, this is not the case, however, you will have to copy the file across yourself. This can be done either through the CLI and the COPY command, or by using one of the mouse-driven directory utilities (such as SID) which are quite popular. If really have no idea about how to do this, I would suggest that you seek help from a friend/neighbour/dealer/user group. I could have given a step-by-step description here on how to do it, but since I do not know the exact setup of the disk this program has been supplied on, there would always be the risk of it not working. 3.2 Scaling OK, lets assume that the setup has been completed. You can now click on the LandScape icon (or type the program name from the CLI, if you prefer). The program will come up with a blank screen. The black area is where you draw the garden plan. IMPORTANT NOTE: It is likely that when you see the scaling requester pop up, you will just thump the 'OK' gadget, and start planting. Unless the default scaling is correct, RESIST THIS TEMPTATION. If you take the default scales, you are telling the program that your garden is 6.4 metres long. If you then plonk a medium-sized tree (5 metres tall) in the middle of it, there will not be much space left for anything else. The first thing to do is to lay out the garden boundary. To do this, select 'boundary' from the edit menu. You cannot do anything useful, until you have defined some sort of boundary. Now then, a requester pops up asking you to set the screen dimensions. This is necessary, as when you are drawing the garden, the computer needs to know how big it is in real life. The two numbers show how big the black drawing area is on the ground. It will default to 640 cms across the screen. If this is too big, or too small, you can click on the up/down arrows to change it. Alternatively, you can click on one of the numbers, use the delete keys to get rid of the old number, then type in a new number and press return. You will notice that the two numbers are linked, so that if you change one, the other changes as well. This is because the scaling affects the whole drawing area. You cannot set different X and Y scales. When you are satisfied, click on 'OK'. This cursor will change into a crosshair. If you move it around a bit, you will see a distance readout appear in the top right hand of the title bar. The crosshair cursor means that you are drawing an area object. If you click the left mouse button, a white dot appears. Moving the mouse now will cause the distance readout to show how far away you are from the dot. If you click the left mouse button again, a white line will be drawn from the first dot, to the current position. You can go on in this way, clicking the left mouse button, and drawing lines from the last clicked point to the current one, drawing a boundary to be any shape you like. In order to stop drawing, just click reasonably close (within 5 pixels) of the first point on the boundary. LandScape will close the boundary, and change the pointer back to its familiar shape. An area object has a limit of about 250 points on each area object, so don't go too mad. Note that the boundary doesn't actually do anything as such. It is not drawn in the final picture, and the program will allow you to draw outside of it. However, you are strongly advised not to do this. 3.3 Area Objects Now that the boundary has been defined, we can draw the rest of the area objects. Currently, these consist of lawns, earth, and footpaths. These are all drawn in exactly the same way as the boundary, you just select the one you want. You must, however remember the following points: LandScape sets up the garden in much the same way as a real garden. i.e., you start with a big patch of mud, then plant lawns, and lay footpaths. This means that if you plan a garden with a patch of earth, a lawn, and a footpath all in the same place, the program will draw the earth first, followed by the lawn (covering the earth), followed by the footpath (covering both of them). The only time this causes problems, is if you want something different from this scheme of things, such as a patch of earth (flower bed) in the middle of a lawn. See the hints and tips section (section 5) for how to get around this. Incidentally, all area objects are colour coded so that you know what's what. The boundary is white, earth is drawn as brown, lawns are green, and footpaths are grey. Fairly predictable really. 3.4 Plants Now, we have set up our lawns, footpaths and flower beds, it's time to get planting! It doesn't really matter when you lay the plants out (before or after the area objects) as they push through and are always drawn on the top of all area objects. It makes more sense, however to draw the plants last. The program will also let you plant things on the footpath. First of all, you have to decide what to plant. To do this, select 'plant' from the edit menu. A requester will appear with a selection of plant groups on it. The groups ( the 3 boxes across the middle) represent trees, non-flowering plants, and flowering plants. The current selection is highlighted in red. If you click on one of the plant group boxes, a second set of boxes will appear towards the bottom of the requester, containing the plants available in that group. You just click on the plant you want (so that it becomes highlighted). I won't list all the plants available, as this is just a tutorial. (see section 4 if you are desperately interested). Note that you can only pick one plant at a time (obviously), but if you click on the flowering plants group, you can pick a flower AND a colour. Now if you click on 'OK', the cursor turns into a symbol of whatever you have chosen, and you can go around the garden plan 'planting' it with the left mouse button. As you do this, a little plant symbol will appear on the plan. Note that the symbols are fairly simple, and do not show the size of the plants. 3.5 Picking a viewpoint OK, now we've got a garden full of plants, all ready to draw. The most important thing to do is to save what you've done so far. Ideally, you should save what you've done every 15 minutes or so, that way if something goes wrong, you haven't lost too much work. Once you have told LandScape to draw the garden, you will not be able to save the garden plan. If you look at save under the project menu, you will see that you can save in two ways: IFF or data. IFF means that the garden plan is saved in a way that allows it to be loaded in DeluxePaint, or any other IFF compatible paint/viewing program. A garden plan saved as IFF can NOT be read back in again. If you want to be able to read the garden plan back in again, then it has to be saved as data. Whichever one you pick, you will get a file requester which you fill in to tell the program where to save the information, and what to call it. Anyway, once the garden plan has been saved, the drawing can start. This is done by selecting draw from the draw menu. Be warned that once the garden has started drawing, you cannot get back to the plan without exiting the program, starting it up again, and loading the plan back in. When you select 'draw', the screen will clear, and the boundary will be drawn on its own (no plants/lawns, etc). The pointer will turn into a cross. LandScape is waiting for you to tell it what part of the garden you want to look at. This means that no matter what direction you move your eyes to, your eyes will always look at this point (and it will appear in the middle of the screen). For most cases, the 'look at' point will be in the middle of the garden, so for the time being, move the cursor to the middle and press the left mouse button. The screen will clear again, and the boundary will be re-drawn, with the chosen 'look at' point in the middle of the screen. The first coordinate of the boundary has a red square drawn around it (so that you can keep track of where you are, if you garden is a regular shape). It is now time to pick a viewpoint. For those who are familiar with 3D rotation, this is a breeze. If you are not so familiar with this concept I will try to explain what is happening. At the top left of the screen, you will see some boxes. You click on these boxes to move your viewpoint around. Your movement can be up, down, left, right, zoom in, or zoom out. You start off vertically above the garden looking straight down. The key point is that all movement is radial (polar coordinates). This means that you are at a fixed distance from the 'look at' point. For those unfamiliar with polar coordinates, it is quite difficult to explain without a few pictures, and so there really is no substitute for clicking the buttons and seeing what happens. If I were forced to try and explain it, I would say it is rather like climbing around on the outside of a giant glass pudding basin placed over the garden. No matter where you move to, LandScape will make sure the 'look at' point is at the centre of the screen. You cannot move the viewpoint underground, or take it past vertical. Once you are happy with the viewpoint, click on the 'quit' box, and the garden will be drawn from that viewpoint. This takes quite a few minutes, but the 'drawing in progress...' title will disappear when this is done. Be warned that the drawing CAN TAKE A LONG TIME. There is a lot of maths involved with working out the plants, and although there is a lot that could be done to speed things up, that is for another version. You are better off starting off with fairly simple gardens to start off with, with not very many plants in until you work out what to expect. When the drawing has completed, a new menu will exist in the menu bar. The only thing you can really do is to save the garden as an IFF file, ready to be loaded into your favourite paint program for printing out, or for making any small changes you feel are necessary. Otherwise, you can select 'quit', and the program will end. 4 - Where? ========== LandScape consists of two largely independent parts. The editor module, and the drawing module. When starting the program, you are using the editor module. Instructing LandScape to draw a plan automatically transfers you to the drawing module. Each module is described below, and has different menus. Editor Module. The editor module is used for entering a plan of the garden when the program is first started. LandScape can be started from either the workbench, or the CLI. There is, however a subtle difference if anything goes wrong. A CLI launched program will print a error message on the CLI if a problem is detected. The workbench launched version will just beep and flash the screen. In either case the program may or may not terminate, depending on the severity of the problem. The editor module contains the following menu items: (Note that in common with all Amiga programs, many of the menu selections have keyboard shortcuts. These are useful for speeding up use of the program once you have the hang of how it works. The shortcuts can be seen by pulling a menu down. On the right of some of the selections is a funny letter A, followed by a letter. This means that you can select this menu item by holding down the right Amiga key while pressing that letter. The project menu contains the following items: - About (right amiga A): Just a quick note on how to contact me, should you wish to do so. - New (right amiga N): This empties out everything in memory, ready to type in a new garden plan. This does not have to be done when the program is started. Remember that if you select this, any plan typed in so far WILL BE LOST, so make sure you either intend to get rid of it, or save it first. - Open. (right amiga O): This allows a garden plan that was previously saved to disk (as data) to be read in. You cannot open a new garden while in the middle of editing an old one. You must first get rid of the old one by selecting 'new'. - Save (IFF/data): This allows a garden plan to be saved to disk. for later retrieval. Data can be saved in the standard Amiga IFF format for loading into a paint/view program. A garden plan saved in this way cannot be loaded back into LandScape at a later date. The second way for a plan to be saved is as a data file. This stores the plan information in LandScapes very own custom personalised file format, which can be read back in later by the program using 'open'. - What is (right amiga W): This option puts up a requester with a little bit of information about the currently selected object. (see 'select' for how to select an object) Currently, different sized plants are all drawn with the same symbol, and this is the only way of finding out how big they are. Click on OK when you have finished reading. - Select Item (right amiga S): Selecting something in the garden singles out that object from the others. On its own, it doesn't do much, however the 'delete' and 'what is' menu functions only work on things that have been selected. Anything in the garden can be selected, and when you choose this menu option, the cursor turns into a question mark with an arrow. You then move the arrow to the item you want to select, and click on it. The item will turn red, to show that it is selected. To unselect it, just click the left mouse button again. If you are selecting a plant, click on the base of its trunk/stalk. If you want to click on an area object, you have to click on one of its corners, NOT an edge. The select function 'homes in' on the nearest selectable object, so if you click the mouse in the middle of nowhere, the nearest item will be selected, even if it is on the other side of the screen. - Delete Item: This gets rid of (I suppose you could say 'digs up'!) the currently selected item. Use this carefully, as once you have deleted something, you can't get it back. - Quit (right amiga Q) This quits the program and returns you to the workbench screen. The edit menu contains the following items: - Boundary (right amiga B) When the program is started, this is the only item in this menu that can be selected. Once the boundary has been drawn, the other menu items become available, and no more boundaries can be drawn. The boundary is an area object, and is drawn in white. All area objects are drawn in the same way, the cursor turns into a cross hair, and by clicking on the left mouse button, the area can be traced out. The area is closed by clicking reasonably close (within 5 pixels) of the starting point. When placing the first point, the coordinates in the right of the title bar should the distance on the ground from the top left hand corner of the drawing area. For subsequent points, the coordinates show the relative distance on the ground to the previous point. There is a limit of around 250 points allowed on an area object, which should be enough. The boundary differs slightly from the other area objects in that before it can be drawn, you have to set the screen scale on the scaling requester. This is fairly self explanatory, you just tell the program how many centimetres on the ground each pixel on the screen represents. - Lawn (right amiga L) This allows a lawn to be laid out. This is pretty much the same as laying out the boundary. A lawn is an area object, and is drawn in green. Remember that when the final drawing is done, the lawns will be drawn overlaying any earth, but underneath any footpaths. - Footpath (right amiga F) This allows a footpath to be laid out. A footpath is an area object, and is drawn in the same way as all the other area object. Footpaths are drawn in grey. During the final drawing, footpaths are drawn on top of all other area objects (but underneath plants). - Earth (right amiga E) This allows a patch of earth to be drawn. Earth is an area object, and is drawn in the same way as any other area objects. Earth is drawn in brown. During the final drawing, earth will be drawn underneath all other area objects, so if you want a flowerbed in the middle of a lawn, you have to leave a hole in the lawn. See the hints/tips section for more information. - Plants (right amiga P) This allows you to populate your garden with a selection of different plants. Be aware that the plants at the drawing stage are fairly stylised, and aren't meant to look 100% like the real thing. Still they are approximately the right shape, and approximately the right colour. Currently there is only a small selection of plants available. I hope they are enough to do the job. Upon selecting the plant menu item, you are presented with a requester asking what type of plant you want. The requester lists three plant groups - trees, non-flowering plants, and flowering plants. The currently selected group is highlighted in red, and as you select each group, a selection of plants in that group appears in the second set of boxes at the bottom of the requester. Once you select the plant you want, (note that when selecting a flower, you also have to choose a colour) you click on OK, and the pointer turns into a mobile version of whatever plant group you have selected. You can move this pointer around the garden, and 'plant' it by clicking the left mouse button. The selected plant remains active, and you can continue to plant it around the garden, without having to re-select it. Available plants are: Trees can be: dwarf deciduous tree (approx 1 metre tall) small deciduous tree (approx 2 metres tall) medium deciduous tree (approx 5 metres tall) dwarf fir tree (approx 1 metre tall) small fir tree (approx 2 metres tall) medium fir tree (approx 5 metres tall) Non-flowering plants can be: small plant (approx 10 cms tall) medium plant (approx 60 cms tall) large plant (approx 150 cms tall) small hedge element (approx 75 cms tall) medium hedge element (approx 150 cms tall) Flowering plants can be: small flower (approx 10 cms tall) medium flower (approx 60 cms tall) rose bush (approx 60 cms tall) (Any flowering plant can be red, orange, yellow, blue, or multi-coloured) Multi-coloured means each flower is picked randomly to be red, orange, yellow, or blue. You cannot have several colours on the same bloom. The draw menu contains the following item: - Draw garden (right amiga D) This is the biggy. LandScape takes the garden plan you have designed, and passes it to the drawing module. Make sure you have saved the garden plan, as once you start drawing, you cannot get back to the editor module. The first thing the drawing module sorts out is the position the garden is to be viewed from. To this effect, the boundary is drawn with a red square around the first coordinate (this is in case you have a square garden, and lose track of how much you rotated it!). You are then invited to click on the 'look at' or viewed point. This is the point about which the garden will be rotated, and will be drawn at approximately the middle of the screen. Normally, the viewed point will be at the middle of the garden, but by varying the positions of the viewed point and the view point (described in a moment), a good range of different views can be obtained. The viewed point is selected by clicking the crosshair cursor on the appropriate part of the plan. The boundary will be re-drawn with the viewed point at the centre of the screen. From this point onwards, the program will not allow the boundary to go off the sides of the screen, and any time the boundary is moved in such a way as to cause this to happen, the program will automatically zoom the viewpoint outwards, until the boundary has shrunk enough to fit. A group of boxes at the top left of the screen control the movement of the viewpoint. They allow movement up, down, left, right, as well as zoom in and zoom out. The movement is based on polar coordinates with origin at the viewed point, so up/down are variations in polar elevation and left/right are variations in polar azimuth. These all maintain a constant radial distance from the 'look at' point. The zoom in and zoom out boxes alter the radial distance from the 'look at' point, but maintain the same polar angles. At all times, the 'look at' point remains at the centre of the screen. The angles change in ten degree increments, and the radial distance also changes in increments of ten. As the viewpoint is changed by using the boxes, the boundary is constantly re-drawn with perspective to show what the boundary would look like if viewed from that position Although there is no limit azimuth, the elevation is limited to be zero degrees and ninety degrees (i.e. you cannot go underground or over the zenith). In addition to this, the zoom in will not let you get too close to the garden, or zoom in so that the boundary extends of the screen. Once the viewpoint has been satisfactorily selected, click on the quit 'box' and the drawing will commence. There is really not much to say about the drawing process. All plants are rendered mathematically, so I hope they look reasonably lifelike, but do not expect a Rembrandt!. The 'drawing in progress...' message will be removed from the title bar when drawing is finished, so it's just a matter of sitting around and waiting. Of course, you can always switch back to the workbench and do something else (isn't multi-tasking wonderful!) When drawing is completed, a new menu bar will have appeared. There is only a project menu, and even this only has two options. The first is to quit the program, and the second is to save the drawn picture as an IFF file. Incidentally, throughout drawing, a set of coordinates are displayed in the right hand of the title bar. These show the position of the current viewpoint in polar coordinates. 't1' (t stands for theta) is angular azimuth, 't2' is angular elevation, and 'r' is radius (distance from origin). 5 - Hints and Tips ================== 1) Drawing complicated areas. If you want to define an area object (such as a lawn), it is not always best to define it as one large complicated shape. Sometimes you may find it easier to split it up into several smaller, simpler shapes. 2) Overlapping areas. Do not worry about area objects overlapping each other. If the objects are of different types, one will overdraw the other, according to their relative priorities. If the area objects are both of the same type, they will merge together and look like one in the final picture. 3) Area priorities. It is not directly possible to defeat the area object drawing priority. At first sight, this makes it difficult to get something like a flower bed in the middle of a lawn. The best way (although by no means the only way) is to draw one large patch of earth first as filling the whole garden, and then draw the lawn as two adjoining sections, each with half of the flower bed cut out of it, leaving a 'hole' where the earth shows through. 4) Circular Areas. As you have probably guessed, it is not directly possible to draw circular or rounded objects. However, since each area object can have approximately 250 points, you can get reasonably close to a rounded object by using more points spaced quite closely together. 5) Square Areas. Drawing square or rectangular areas is much easier if you keep an eye on the coordinates in the title bar. Presumably, if you are working out a real garden, you will have a reasonably good idea of what the dimensions are going to be. Funnily enough, it is more difficult to draw these objects if you are just experimenting, as you will not have thought out beforehand what the dimensions are. 6) Plant distances. The title bar coordinates also come in useful for determining how close plants should be to each other. Bear in mind that with this version of the program, the images on the plan do not give you much idea of how big the real objects are. This means that if, for example you plant a series of hedge elements so that the symbols are just touching, you may get a perfect-looking hedge. However, depending on the scaling, you may find that when it is drawn, it has gaps in it, or that the hedge plants are much too close together (meaning that it takes a lot longer to draw). Once again, you have to experiment to see what looks good. 6 - What's Next? ================ The version of LandScape released here is almost unchanged from what I decided to write several months ago. At the time, I laid done a set of minimum requirements for the program to be able to do. These were deliberately limited in the interests of having a stationary goalpost to aim at. Since then, other ideas have also occurred to me. Possibilities for improvement and extension include: 1) Making the program self-install. This would make things easier for people not familiar with using the CLI to copy any libraries, etc. 2) The garden is currently constrained to be perfectly flat. Support will be added for split levels and slopes. To be fair, all of the graphics and perspective routines already support full 3D, it's just that I have not yet thought of a way of good way of representing them on the plan yet. 3) The list of available objects will be increased to include stones/paving/brickwork/walls/fences/ponds, etc plus a greater variety of plant life. Object texturing is also being looked into. 4) Currently all dimensions are metric (centimetres). I realise that this will annoy at least one large continent, so imperial measurements will be included. 5) Context-sensitive on-line help will be provided. 6) Plan detail currently has to fit on one screen. Some sort of zoom/scroll facility is under consideration. 7) Area objects are currently only selectable by the corners, and plants only by the origin. This may be changed so that edge selection is allowed. 8) Plan symbols are currently fixed size. This will be changed so that the plant size and type is more obvious, and will also change to be proportional to the scale of the garden. 9) Workbench support will be improved. Thus saved gardens and IFF files will be provided with icons. In addition, the program will be much more configurable from the CLI and icon tooltypes. A good example of this would be with metric/imperial measurement selection. 10) Objects may be forced to be inside the garden boundary. 11) The viewpoint positioning boxes will auto repeat, making viewpoint selection a bit easier on the mouse. 12) All of the floating point maths currently used during drawing will be changed to fixed point. This should speed up the drawing a lot. 13) The algorithms for drawing the plants will be further modified and refined, to make the plants more lifelike and realistic. Now then, all of the above are just ideas. It is not definite that they will happen, and if they do, it may not necessarily all be at the same time. I wrote this program for a laugh, and to learn more about a great machine. If you find that what I have done is interesting or useful, then that's icing on the cake. I will continue to work on this program as long as I feel someone (whether myself or anyone else) is benefiting from it. The supply will try to respond to the demand. 7 - Technical Stuff =================== This section is intended for anyone who happens to be interested in some of LandScapes technical aspects. LandScape was written entirely in C, and was developed using various versions of the SAS (Lattice) C compiler. The final code was produced using version 5.10a. LandScape uses a lot of recursion during the drawing phase, but does not seem to go very deeply, as I have never seen it overflow the default 4000 byte stack. Nevertheless, as I cannot guarantee that this will never happen, I have left in SASs stack checking code. If the stack does overflow, you will get a requester warning you, and giving you the option to abort the program. Be aware that if you do this, you will not get any memory back that was in use at the time, until rebooting. This is a side effect of the SAS code, and I am not aware of any way I can regain control of the machine to free up the resources. The drawing routines make extensive use of floating point maths. This was done intentionally, as I wanted to make it work, before I made it work quickly. I may change this to fixed point maths, as the drawing speed is a little slower than I thought it was going to be. The Fast Floating Point libraries are used at runtime, which keeps the program size down nicely. Sorry FPU people, but no support for you. I had originally written in FPU support via the IEEE runtime libraries, but on my machine (with a 68881 as a peripheral processor, NOT a coprocessor) even these were significantly slower than the FFP libraries, and I had no real use for the extra precision, so out the window they went. Since LandScape was written in C, and doesn't to my knowledge do anything nasty to the machine, I believe that it should work on all processors. However, I am unable to test this. I would be grateful if anyone with access to such machines (particularly the A3000) would report on whether or not this is the case. Similarly, I have tried to make the program auto-configure to an NTSC screen, but this cannot be terribly well tested on a PAL machine. On the odd occasions that my machine boots with an NTSC screen (the well known bug), superficial testing seems to indicate that it works. The plants in LandScape are generated algorithmically at runtime. For each plant type, I have taken a basic form, and I then allow each plant to develop inside a set of constraints. The starting form, and constraints have been picked by trial and error, until the plant started to look approximately like the real thing. The algorithms have a lot of random elements, and so every time you draw a garden, the plants will look slightly different. Although things should average out, occasionally you get a badly lopsided or misshapen plant. This, I believe mirrors real life! The algorithms are recursive, and to a certain extent sensitive to size, so that a large object will have more detail than a small one. However, large objects are also drawn more coarsely to speed up the drawing time (I hope that doesn't sound too self-contradictory). Steve Goddard.