DiscWorld
Aaron Timbrell rounds up the software directory
As I am sure you are aware APDL own the rights to a good deal of commercial RISC OS titles. To be honest I would be surprised if you weren't aware of it as almost 40 titles (at the last count) have been made available to RISCWorld readers over the last 8 years. In addition the APDL website lists a huge number of titles. You may, however, have noticed that some titles owned by APDL have not been re-issued, that's because we have been saving them for RISCWorld subscribers. On the last issue of RISCWorld we gave away a copy of Virtualise, as originally published by Clares. This hasn't been available for some time. The version we gave away had been updated for StrongArm support and been tested on modern 26bit versions of RISC OS. This issue we are doing the same, including a full title that hasn't seen the light of day for some time....
Render Bender - worth £14.95
Render Bender is a full 3D modelling package and ray tracer for RISC OS computers. This is a new version of Render Bender and has been extensively updated for this special RISCWorld release. We have also included a number of extra sample files that haven't been made publically available before.
The Render Bender suite is very easy to use and can produce some quite stunning results. Simple scenes can be made using the Illuminator CAD package and then exported to the main rendering engine which can produce full screen renders in a few seconds on a modern machine.
Unlike many packages the Render Bender "scene" files are in a human readable script, so you can even tweak your scene in a text editor. Not only does Render Bender produce static images it also offers animation facilities. This means you can produce ray traced films on your computer. You might not make the next Toy Story, but you can produce some amazing results.
As always we have included a full HTML version of the manual so you can get the best out of this great package.
The complete DiscWorld line up
As per usual we have our collections of the latest RISC OS applications, as well as support files for this issues articles:
Games
All the games from Paul Brett's column.
Iyonix
Software featured in the Iyonix column.
Letters
Software covered in the letters column.
News
Software covered on our news pages.
Games
The latest RISC OS games.
PD
All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.
Render
Exclusive full version of Render Bender for every subscriber.
ToolBox
This contains two sets of Toolbox Modules. The Castle archive contains the latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines. The RISCOS Ltd archive contains later and improved versions of a number of modules and is suitable for all versions of RISC OS from 3.1 onwards. We have also included copies of SharedUnixLib and UnixHome as these are needed by some programs.
Aaron Timbrell