[Coco] The 7th Link - 3D Dungeon?

[Andrew]

All - this is going to be a bit long - sorry:

Things are popping into my mind - I was finding a discussion of a 
play-thru on the Oblique Triad game "The 7th Link" - and after seeing 
some screenshots (looks like a CoCo 3 take on "Gates of Delirium" and/or 
ie "Ultima"):

http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/2004

...I remembered I had posted something about it...doing some digging - 
back in 2011 (specifically July 17, 2011 - for those that want to dig 
into the archive of this list) - I made mention that it seemed like this 
game had a 3D dungeon of some sort.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.tandy.coco/55364

That post references one I posted earlier on July 12, 2011...

Anyhow, Diego Barizo replied asking if I was thinking of "Castle of 
Thaggorad" - I assured him I wasn't. I sincerely remember seeing reviews 
of this game in the Rainbow (and advertisements) showing a 3D dungeon of 
some sort. I also recall (somewhere) that the author mentioned that the 
rooms of the dungeon were designed and rendered using an engine that did 
vector plotting, I believe in a 256 x 256 x 256 "cube" of coordinates.

I don't think I am crazy - maybe I need to dig into those back issues of 
mine and find the article or something - but ultimately, my question 
about this is whether that dungeon rendering technique was ever 
discussed in more detail, by the author or others?

Back then, as a kid, it fascinated me, but I didn't have the skills to 
really understand how it could potentially be done. Over the years, 
though, I've given it thought - and as my knowledge of true software 3D 
rendering techniques expanded - my best guess is that the rooms were 
pre-defined as a series of coordinates (one vertex = 3 bytes), 
pre-sorted "back-to-front" (basically a hand-done painter's algo), with 
some logic/flags to tell when an "object" was "complete" and what color 
to paint it. This was then (likely) plotted using the basic 3D-to-2D 
projection algo (SX = X / Z, SY = Y / Z) - with appropriate scaling and 
other math to prevent divide by zero errors, etc.

Then again - maybe that's over-thinking it? Maybe there's a simpler way 
of doing it (that is - simpler = faster = more appropriate for a CoCo 3 
back in the day)? I honestly don't know!

Apparently, the author of the game (Jeff Noyle) released the disk images 
to the game (and his other games Caladuril I and II):

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/approvals/jeff_noyle_approval.txt

Mr. Noyle's website, however, while it is still up - seems like a ghost 
town - and the CoCo games link is dead (in fact, most of the links 404):

http://www.distantsystems.com/

However - one link does go somewhere interesting:

http://www.distantsystems.com/DistantSystems/index.htm

There - we see that Jeff ported Caladuril and The 7th Link to the Palm 
Pilot - and, something about a 3D adventure authoring system "FATE 3D".

I am not sure any of it is related. For that matter - is Jeff Noyle 
still around? Does he have another web site? Maybe all of this is just a 
trip down a rabbit hole with nothing but dead ends, but I sincerely 
would like to hope differently.

Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona