Subject: Forge-first impressions...
Date: Sat, 7 May 1994 03:25:01 +1000 (EST)
From: Nikola Vukovljak <nvukovlj@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>

Well, Forge arrived today to Australia! It arrived to my house at least! :-)

Anyway, I opened the bag and... What happened to those cool manuals ? 
Oh, the contents of the manual are great, but the cover... I wanted 
another black cover to complement my Essence I & II covers. 
Don't turn cheap on me Apex. :-) (then again, at the price Forge is a steal!)

Now, onto some impressions....

Not all good I'm afraid.

First the good stuff.

-I think that a tool like Forge is long overdue and I must congratulate 
Apex for releasing it! It just makes Essence so much more usable! 
I can see myself spending hours playing with the settings and creating 
some wierd (but useful) attribute sets!
Well done guys!

-The interface looks good and works well! Another BIG plus!

-The manual is pretty good. Maybe a short tutorial or two would help. I 
admit that I haven't read it all, but finding bits that I was interested 
in was easy with the kind of Index that Apex provide. A big PLUS in my books!

Now, onto some not so good stuff...

-No support for Display database. Seems funny to me that almost everyone 
on this list is bagging Impulse for not supporting it and yet no one 
except for Steve Koren mentions that Forge doesn't support it either.
Sure it may not need it as much as Imagine does, but that is no excuse. 
I want to be able to run a program in any resolution I please (within 
reasonable limits). It is time for developers to give us this option.  
Not just this but I am also a bit peeved that the res. is hard-coded as 
NTSC Hi-res Lace (promotable easily though). I run my machine in a PAL 
country. Guess what ? I want PAL resolutions.

-Forge can act very funny depending on where it is installed. I kept 
getting a requester saying that it couldn't locate xxxxx/xxxx/Imagine_2
directory. I don't even have that directory on my HD! Setting the hard 
texture path didn't help until I defined Imagine: as a logical device.
What is the problem here ?

-I don't think that Forge has been tested with EGS boards. I am using a 
Piccolo board with EGS v6.1. Now, the Arexx script that is used by Forge 
to display a preview on the EGS looks for a program EGS-View.
EGS-View is called ShowIFF on the Piccolo so I changed this part of the 
script. Well, after trying this option again, I got a 'Program failure' 
Suspend or Reboot requester. Subsequent playing around with EGS screen 
modes, no. of bitplanes failed to resolve the problem. The show program 
seems to startup and even attempt to load the picture, but then it crashes.
Has anyone with either the Piccolo or the Spectrum got this option to 
work ?
Help me if you can!

All in all though, I am pretty happy with Forge. Steve, Glenn and the 
rest of the Apex gang, you've done a GREAT job. (just fix the EGS problem 
OK ?)

Nik.
nvukovlj@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
 



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