This game had quite an epic(!) intro for its day, but its looks suffer now when the original 320x200 is stretched across today's screens with somewhat higher resolution.
As mentioned earlier, the file 'epicflow.jr' lays out the sequence of events, but there is another level when this calls the .ig files which describe some animations using the game engine together with a background running as .256 animation.
So the first of these is 'paulx1.ig' which has a bunch of ships moving against a reddish backdrop.
![epic_intro_text.PNG](./download/file.php?id=295&sid=964a4868dfd1dcfae5909920a651ae6a)
- epic_intro_text.PNG (33.34 KiB) Viewed 2614 times
Each ship has positional information described in the text file which may be the start and end points. The ships move towards the camera while the animation a10.256 is playing in the background. This can be seen on the YT video from earlier in this thread.
It would be good to visualize this somehow, so first I have to use my crude .3 to VRML converter. Hardly anything can use VRML these days, but I can use Blender to export to glTF which works quite well except for spheres.
So, what 3D engine to use? While I'd love to use TFXplorer, it isn't quite optimized yet for this sort of activity so going with Panda3d over Godot as it looks slightly easier for a non-programmer.
Anyway, with some frig factors for scale and inverting one axis, I can sort of get the ships in their relative starting positions.
![epic_panda.PNG](./download/file.php?id=296&sid=964a4868dfd1dcfae5909920a651ae6a)
- epic_panda.PNG (265.81 KiB) Viewed 2614 times
Looks nicely anti-aliased already!
Now, I just need to work out:
1. How to move things
2. The coordinate system and scale
3. The position of the camera
4. The palette adjustment to make the ships more red (I assume that's one of the numbers in the first few lines of of 'paulx1.ig'
5. Get the animation 'a10.256' running at the same time
6. Synchronize everything