The History of C-Light


Once upon a time there was a new computer called the Commodore 64. For it's time it was remarkable in the features it offered for the price it offered them at. One of those features is the ability to draw computer graphics on a TV screen. I'd been fascinated by animation ever since I'd seen some simple games on a Tektronics storage tube display terminal in college and saw the potential of the C64 so I bought one and started experimenting with it. After a while I began writing a sprite based animation program to do cartoon style animations. I wrote thousands of lines of assembly code and almost had the sprite editor complete when...someone else came out with exactly the product I was working on. This disheartened me greatly. I bought this program and saw that it had features I hadn't even thought of. I gave up.

Here's where you get to learn from others experience. Don't give up on a product just because someone else comes out with it before you do. Half the products out there are clones of somebody elses successful product anyway. You can still make money even if there is a competitor. I didn't know that. I thought I had to be first. Life is not a race. Most people do NOT want to get to the finish line. Life is more like a multi-threaded program running on a parallel processor.

Anyway, I kept on playing with the C64 and did some neat stuff with it, such as making a computer controlled laser light controller. And writing a video game (The Guardian-never published.) And learning more about graphics.

Then I got a job. There I learned even more about computer graphics by playing with a Graphic-8 display connected to a VAX11/750. I took some classes and learned 3D graphics and learned about ray tracing. Ray tracing looked really neat but I couldn't afford a Graphic-8 and VAX11/750 to play with it on. So I played with it a little at work and thought that was the end of it.

And then the Amiga hit the market. The Amiga was powerful enough to do ray tracing and had a graphics display system good enough to display the results. My mind clicked. I bought one and began writing the beginnings of C-Light. I was very close to done when, guess what happened? Someone else published a ray tracer for the Amiga. I had learned though, and I kept on going and got it onto the market. It started selling. I got a European distributor to take over sales in Europe. It looked good and then disaster struck.

I moved to a new job and a new state. Soon after, the European distributor went bankrupt without ever having paid me a penny. Sales fell off in the US. I couldn't do development of new code and marketing at the same time, plus hold a job. Other companies improved their ray tracers, and I was left in the dust. After a while I tried selling it as shareware which turned out to be fairly worthless as a way to sell software. Few people sent checks. I kept trying but other things happening in my life took over and my interest in trying to do anything with C-Light dwindled. Probably about 2000-3000 copies were sold and who knows how many shareware versions are out there.

And now, years later I find I'm still having fun with it and I've noticed that there is still nothing else out there that is as easy to use for creative composition of simple 3D images. And the Web is happening which glories in 3D logos, images, icons, and pictures. I still like it and I still think it's good (any King Crimson fans out there?) so here it is again. I've improved it and am offering it in a different form. If there is interest in it, I'll take it further. If not, I'll just play with it myself. You decide.


The contents of this page are Copyright 1995 by Peterson Enterprises.