Wintermute Engine Forum

Wintermute Engine => Community bulletin board => Topic started by: Mnemonic on January 10, 2010, 06:35:48 PM

Title: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Mnemonic on January 10, 2010, 06:35:48 PM
Hey guys,

as I continue working on WME2, I was thinking it would be interesting to ask you, the users, what do YOU hate the most about the current version of WME.
Of course, after reading this forum for 7 years and helping you with your problems, I think I have an idea of what the critical points are (and I tried to remove the most glaring ones, naturally), but still, maybe you'll surprise me :) So here it comes:


If you should list 1 to 5 things you hate the most about WME, what would they be?
(be it anything, related to the engine, the tools, the documentation, the website, anything)


I'm looking forward to your insights. Thanks!
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: FogGobbler on January 10, 2010, 06:54:42 PM
Nothing  ;)
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: metamorphium on January 10, 2010, 09:59:47 PM
I wouldn't call it HATE, but here goes:

WME - engine
1, certain improper script behavior (case as a case in point, nesting I know all of this will be in WME 2).
2, additional layers don't have the same quality as the main layer.

WME - tools
3, lack of features like "region based selection". If I need eg. reposition 20 buttons in the window I need to manually ctrl+click them. I curse a lot :) Also inconsistencies like eg. you can't create a new script in Window Editor as you can in Scene Editor.
4, Lack of 3D, theora and particles integration into Scene Editor. With Julia it's a major pain to position all these theoras manually. It usually is a trial and error process. A lot of hours passed. :)
5, Music and Sound extended features (3d sound, doppler effect, 5.1 or 7.1 sound etc.). I feel limited with the current stereo only. It's sooo 1990. :D

Anyway, thanks for the great work. A lot of stuff I see in Kinjal edition would have been great in main release (windowed - full screen runtime switch etc.), but I guess we have to wait for the WME 2.0. With Julia being the most complicated game I've created so far, I have to say that even by putting WME on big stress-test, it's rock solid engine. That's a great achievment indeed!  ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer ::beer
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Spellbreaker on January 10, 2010, 11:31:12 PM
I hope I don't get banned now, but I still would like a scaling feature as featured in some other ( commercial ) engines ;) e.g. You produce the game in 1024x768 for example, and engine can scale it down to 800x600 . This would need a one-time scaling for the scenes layers, and "realtime scaling" for 3D Objects....

So finally, simply because the user can then select the Resolution he wants / needs ....

My two cents, and the only thing I am currently missing in WME :)
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Darky on January 11, 2010, 04:15:53 AM
1. I hate that you can't see the red areas of every element in WindowEdit. It would be helpful to see those to prevent overlaps easily, so when you manipulate an area (scaling, moving, whatever) you see where the boundaries of the other elements are. It sucks to manually select every item just to see all of that and then loose the view again once you focus on one element.

2. More possibilities with arrays. I don't remember what I needed it for but there was a situation where I wished to define my own array keys and their values like this: var Array = new Array("mykey" => "myvalue", "secondkey" => "anothervalue");

3. I was meaning to say multi-dimensional arrays might be valuable too, but I don't know how flexible that would be compared to the traditional way of "MyVar.MyProperty" so just treat that as a regular suggestion. I just learned to love it via PHP and that kind of sticks with you as a habit, but I really don't know if its usable / useful for WME at all.


I know there were other things, but it's late and I can't remember right now. So that's just what comes to mind, if I encounter anything actually upsetting again I'll repost ;)
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Slapdash on January 11, 2010, 02:44:23 PM
Wow.. I'm finally posting hehe.
I wont call it hate either but I will put it out there...

OK I know the heated debates that was on Adventure Developer... but here goes.
1.) The fact that my games can only run on Windows and not on Mac is a pity. ...(and Linux although one can Wine ;) ) i.e I would like to get my games playable on Mac esp.  Not the editor. Windows happy there. I KNOW I KNOW!!! Direct3D etc.  but you DID ask. :D

2.) A few posts up someone mentions the scaling. Non-Scaling  is a bit of a bummer.

3.) The Fact that we don't have full 3D with our 2.5D heaven. Would be fantastic to be able to have a point and click engine with 3D / 3D camera / lighting / shadows.


I'm happy with WME as is but those ... would be awesome. I kinda hate that it's not possible, but I can't hate anything Wintermute tbh.
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Spellbreaker on January 11, 2010, 07:13:18 PM
Just a comment to 1.)

You can easily create a wine package for your game, runs fine on Linux and Mac OS X ( the games I tested ran very fine ). I know it's just a workaround, but it's a working one :)

Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Mnemonic on January 12, 2010, 02:40:21 PM
Many thanks to everyone posting their opinion. I'm relieved to see my vision for wme2 is not fundamentally different from yours so far, except for a few small things :)

Anyone else?
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Kinjal on January 12, 2010, 04:27:33 PM
Quote
Anyone else?
Will it be opensource? Fully opensource, including script compiler...
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Mnemonic on January 12, 2010, 05:05:55 PM
Will it be opensource? Fully opensource, including script compiler...
That doesn't really answer my question... Anyway, I'm not ready to talk about wme2 licensing yet.
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: joaomesq on January 12, 2010, 11:14:35 PM
Because I'm a 100% Mac user I have to go with full Mac support. Games and Editor (with a bundle for Textmate).
It's a long shot but hey, you asked! :P
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Nihil on January 12, 2010, 11:53:19 PM
As I have just started to develop again after a long break, I haven't run into any showstoppers where I'd say the term "hate" would be justified anyhow, but some things I'd like to see:

1. Filters (blur, glow, dropshadow etc) for Sprites
2. A zoom-function for SceneEdit
3. More pre-build tools for WindowEdit (Sliders, Checkboxes etc)
4. More in-depth documentation for some topics like localisation, packaging
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: mylesblasonato on January 13, 2010, 03:10:57 AM
1) No complete 3D
2) No editors for particles
3) Wish it had XNA support for 360
4) More sound manipulation
5) No Advanced shaders
6) No Physics
7) No advanced way to do conversations because it's too tedious and confusing to create branches and branches of switches to create a conversation
8) No iPhone support
9) No advanced GUI editor that allows you to see what the GUI looks like in a scene
10) No post rendering effects

Cheers  ::beer
Myles Blasonato.
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Dionysius on January 13, 2010, 08:57:21 AM
I really hate that I need Windows or Wine (winehq.org) to run WME under Linux. I want native linux version  :)
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: metamorphium on January 13, 2010, 11:37:27 AM
Quote from: mylesb
7) No advanced way to do conversations because it's too tedious and confusing to create branches and branches of switches to create a conversation

Please, please, if this ever will get changed, let the old trusty way stays. This branching is by far the best method to do complex dialogues and no stupid tool could ever possibly match that. :) On the other hand, I'm really using dialogues system in such a complex way, that I am happy with the functionality as-is.

I personally never found dialogue system to be tedious or confusing. It's good for anything ranging from simple dialogues to RPG like 'moral' choices branching. I'd be quite interested if you could elaborate on your idea of better way how to handle complex dialogues?
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Darky on January 16, 2010, 05:49:55 AM
I'm working on a new scene right now and got some more stuff I kind of hate and would like in WME2:

1. Direct Placement of actual .entity objects in SceneEdit without loading them over script
2. Ability to scale and rotate objects within the tools, especially SceneEdit

Also I'd like to mention I didn't read all follow-up posts but I agree with most of the points of others as well (like Zoom-Function for SceneEdit, etc.)

Late-Late Afteredit: I hate that I can't select multiple items in SceneEdit. I wanted to move a few items at once around to a new location incl. a region entity, but it's not possible :(
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: Slapdash on February 01, 2010, 02:51:28 PM
I'm working on a new scene right now and got some more stuff I kind of hate and would like in WME2:

1. Direct Placement of actual .entity objects in SceneEdit without loading them over script
2. Ability to scale and rotate objects within the tools, especially SceneEdit

Late-Late Afteredit: I hate that I can't select multiple items in SceneEdit. I wanted to move a few items at once around to a new location incl. a region entity, but it's not possible :(

Definitely  ::thumbup
+1
Title: Re: What do you hate about WME?
Post by: sychron on February 02, 2010, 02:02:47 AM
I hate most that I have to compile my modules into ogg files for delivering them with wintermute -- for modules are much smaller and sound better when played back natively ... second pro for modules: music fadings can be done more subtle, just imagine unreal 1. Just change the playback order, when the scene changes, and the module will play different parts of the same tune.

Second most hated fact is the current default language support only works through packages. This idea is great for deploying native products for every country, and for downloadable language packs, so I won't encourage you to drop it -- it works as intendet. BUT it would be very nice to have an ingame language switching support as well, for games which should be distributed in one version for different countries. Szenarios include (but are not limited to) advertisement games deployed at fairs, where you just cannot decide which language suits your current customer best. We found a workaround for this in The White Chamber, and a native support for different languages in one distribution is not very hard to do on side of the engine.