DarkMatter by FastTrak

Description

Coding 3-D games such as DarkMatter is an art form, creating the graphics for such a game even more so. Unless you happen to be a talented artist it can seriously hamper the look and feel of the finished product, leaving a great concept with a shoddy feel.

DarkMatter aims to fill the artistic void with a large selection of pre-built and pre-skinned 3-D models and hundreds of textures, which can be applied to any user created objects. The ready-built models are provided in .3DS and .X formats ready for import into a wide variety of modelling programs as well as 3-D gaming creation tools like DarkBasic and Blitz Basic 3-D. The overall quality of the models is good, some of the human figures are a little samey and vehicle wheels have some unfortunate corners but as a whole there’s enough here to populate a reasonable 3-D world without anything looking out of place.

The textures are nicely done and with more than 186 megabytes of images to choose from there’s something for all occasions, neatly stored under headings like sci-fi, urban and natural. The whole package is held together by a custom viewer which allows all of the models and textures to be viewed and selected, the interface is a little clunky but it does it job.

As an added bonus, FastTrak have thought to include an enhancement pack for DarkBasic which adds a series of new commands including multi-playerinclude, an enhancement pack for multi-player support. —Chris Russell

Platforms

Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me