When The Edge advertised Fairlight in the summer of 1985, the selling point was not the game but the method: “The first example of the revolutionary 3D ‘Worldmaker’ technique”. Worldmaker was what Bo Jangeborg had built to make Fairlight possible. It drew solid-looking rooms in overhead perspective, packed them into very little memory, and filled them with objects that slid, fell and weighed something. At its heart was Grax, Jangeborg’s own graphics language, and The Edge meant to sell it.
Fast facts
- What it was: the system behind Fairlight’s 3D castle: Grax for drawing rooms, and a world in which objects had weight and inertia.
- Author: Bo Jangeborg, author of the Spectrum art program The Artist, working for The Edge in Covent Garden, London.
- Used for: Fairlight (1985), about 80 locations; Fairlight II: A Trail of Darkness (1986), with a playing area twice the size.
- Grax: “my own language for graphics”, in Jangeborg’s words, which began as a tool for drawing pictures for Quill adventures.
- Never sold: The Edge announced Grax as a utility in 1985 and an adventure-writing system built round it in 1986; neither appeared.
Worldmaker
CRASH sent John Minson to The Edge’s offices in Covent Garden in 1985 for a preview of Fairlight. Before he described the game, he described the system. Worldmaker was “the highly advanced graphics development system that lies at the heart of the current program, and which will be used to develop a whole series of adventures. Bo is understandably proud as it provides a Quill-style utility for creating games with an overhead perspective view, something like recent Ultimate games, but with a more realistic consistency.” The Quill had let people without programming skills write text adventures; Worldmaker was offered as the same thing for the 3D arcade adventures that Ultimate’s Filmation games had made fashionable.
What impressed Minson was what happened when the hero began pushing furniture. “Worldmaker’s main feature is that the worlds it creates are credible. Objects are governed by inertia and gravity, which means that a wooden table travels less far when pushed than a small key.” Weight also limited what the hero could carry, up to five objects in numbered pockets: “With a heavy barrel, you’re unlikely to be able to manage much else”. The castle had sixty screens, with another twenty in the caves, and each area had its own colour: yellow and dark blue inside, pale blue outdoors, red in the caves. Because DROP put an object in front of the hero rather than under him, players could stack things to climb to a trapdoor. Minson also reported that Worldmaker was already being used for “a space game which includes laser combat sequences”.
Grax
Two months later Minson went back to see the drawing tool, Grax, “the programming utility at the heart of the Worldmaker technique which gives Fairlight its realistic solidity”. It worked like Jangeborg’s art program: “Those of you who’ve used The Artist would feel at home with Grax. Using a variety of graphics techniques, such as advanced rubber banding, where a line can be moved and stretched from a point, and a total of 26 different fill patterns, it’s comparatively simple to create an overhead perspective view of a room.” The designer laid out the room, then placed pre-drawn features such as windows and doors, which could be “manipulated, reversed and generally fiddled around with”, and “the system allows floors to continue through openings”.
The important part was what Grax stored. “Bo has found a way of reducing all these room details to a minimum of code.” Grax “was originally developed to produce half screen illustrations for Quilled adventures”, and by the end of 1985 it had become “a fully-fledged graphics mini-language”. A room was kept as a short program of drawing instructions rather than as a picture, and drawn afresh each time the player walked in. That is how eighty locations fitted in a 48K Spectrum. Edge, looking back in 2004, explained the name (“the ‘GRA’ being an abbreviation of ‘graphics’, the X an ever-voguish affectation”), said Grax used “code and components developed while working on The Artist”, and recorded the price of drawing every room on entry: “the black screens as GRAX drew each area were jarring”. The physics had a price too. On some screens the game slowed down badly whenever more than one object was moving, and Jangeborg remembered a player who piled every helmet the soldiers dropped into one room, until the engine was “slowing to a crawl”.
Asked by Sinclair User in December 1986 for his greatest programming achievement, Jangeborg named “the Grax programming language — my own language for graphics”.
The plan to sell it
The Edge did not mean Worldmaker to stay in-house. Minson’s November 1985 report ended with the plan. Jangeborg was “returning to Sweden and his own company, Xcellent Software, but he’s leaving Grax behind. It should form the basis for a series of diverse adventures from The Edge. Perhaps more importantly, it will eventually be possible to buy Grax as a utility — perhaps in a form for illustrating adventures to begin with, but one day you might be able to create your own Fairlight type adventure as easily as you can write a text adventure with The Quill today.”
The idea was still alive the next summer. In July 1986 CRASH listed among The Edge’s coming Spectrum releases “an adventure creation system involving GRAX, the language Bo Jangeborg put together so he could write Fairlight in the first place”, with “a summertime appearance” on the cards. In September it had a name: Dreamscape, an icon-driven adventure-writing system that was to be “easy to use and relatively inexpensive”, and “just might include Bo Jangeborg’s graphics utility Grax”. No such product reached the reviews pages.
Fairlight II
Jangeborg came back for the sequel. CRASH reported in December 1986 that “Fairlight II will look very familiar to fans of the original: the same Worldmaker system has been used, but the size of the playing area has been doubled and the game loads in two parts on the 48K machine, fitting into the 128K after one huge load.” The carrying rules were unchanged, “Up to five items may be carried, depending on their cumulative weight”, and the setting moved outdoors, “with trees and leafy glades replacing the uniform interior locations of the original”. It was the last Worldmaker game. Jangeborg left The Edge; in 1989 he told the Swedish magazine Atari-STen that an unfinished game and “the conflict with The Edge” had occupied the previous two years, and that there would be no Fairlight III.
Sources
- The Edge, Fairlight advertisement, CRASH issue 19, August 1985 (“The first example of the revolutionary 3D ‘Worldmaker’ technique”).
- John Minson, “Coming Close to The Edge”, CRASH issue 20, September 1985, pp. 36–37: Worldmaker, the Quill comparison, inertia and gravity, weight and pockets, sixty castle screens and twenty in the caves, colour coding, DROP and stacking, the space game.
- John Minson, “Trip to Grax”, CRASH issue 22, November 1985, p. 20: Grax, The Artist, rubber banding and 26 fill patterns, doors and windows, “a minimum of code”, Quill illustrations, “graphics mini-language”, Xcellent Software, the plan to sell Grax.
- CRASH issue 30, July 1986, p. 113: The Edge’s adventure creation system “involving GRAX”.
- CRASH issue 32, September 1986, p. 97: Dreamscape.
- CRASH issue 35, December 1986, p. 13: Fairlight II and the Worldmaker system.
- “Code Talk: Bo Jangeborg”, Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986, p. 30.
- “The making of… Fairlight”, Edge issue 135, April 2004, pp. 112–115: the name Grax, its origins in The Artist, the room-drawing pauses, slowdown and the pile of helmets.
- Interview with Bo Jangeborg, Atari-STen (Sweden) 1989 no. 2, June 1989, p. 22: “the conflict with The Edge” and no Fairlight III (quotations translated).