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[the star]

Hello,

Inspired by this thread at Adventure Gamers, I have decided to create a test. I am downloading several free adventure game creation engines, and I am going to create a short identical game on each of them. I'm going to be comparing the different features of the engines, seeing which ones do what best.

I'm posting here to ask what features should be tested? I have a list of simple things, like size of download, size of installation, and whether the engine is script based, graphic based or a combination of the two.

What features do you consider vital? Which features are not vital, but are just really, really cool? (Admit it, you don't really NEED light effects or alpha blending, do you?)

Also, which engines do you want tested? I've got WME, AGAST and AGS. I'm not going to be testing Sludge, though, because I'm a skinflint. If someone who has it wants to perform the test for me, though, that would be great.

Finally, I must warn you that I am involved in one of the adventure engine communities under a different name, but I'm not going to tell you which one because everyone would say I'm biased. I'm going to try and keep my personal preferences out of this, though.

Thank you,

The Star

[Mnemonic]

Ok, you're certainly not the first one who came up with this idea, but hopefully you'll be the first who finishes it. I'll be looking forward to the results.


A few notes:

1) You may want to consider trying other engines too, such as Visionaire or Mad. Visionaire uses a licencing scheme similar to Sludge (i.e. limited (crippled? ) free version, but IMHO this shouldn't stop you from testing them, because you can always use the free version and maybe point out its limitations you've encountered when creating the game.

2) I suppose you realize that creating a *simple* game is not the same as creating a large game. Or course you won't be able to create large games in each of the engines, but you should at least take a note of how easy/hard it is to manage and navigate game resources when there's lot of it.

[McCoy]

Yes, and code management, maintenance and isolation possibilites for large projects, because for example, AGAST is a pain for large projects with thousands of lines of code...

[FinnishBoy]

I have tried many engines too, and this is my opinion:
(Okay, I'm in Wintermute forums, so I don't praise anything

[the star]

Yes, it has been five months since I've posted anything about my experiment.  That's mainly because it has been going very badly.  It looks like I'll have to scale it back to a comparison.  Some of the engines were not what I would chose for myself at all.  In other words, I couldn't figure out how to make the darn things work.

However, I haven't abandoned the Great Test entirely.  I have started developing a website for posting a list of comparisons between the engines.  The number of engines has been expanded to 5- AGAST, AGS, Sludge, Visionaire and Wintermute. 

The first document gives the basic statistics for each engine regarding download size, what is included in the download, and what kind of files the Engine accepts.  Unfortunatly, some of the information is out of date.  Some engines update too quickly for me to stay abreast of what they can do!

My next update will be about engine support- how often they are updated, what sort of community is available surrounding the engine, etc.

Any and all comments can be made here or e-mailed to me at game_testar@yahoo.com

[Mnemonic]

Unfortunatly, some of the information is out of date.

Indeed. WME supports not only BMP, but also TGA and PNG files with an alpha channel and JPG for backgrounds. The images are NOT converted in SpriteEdit, btw. Also the distribution package contains a help file in CHM format.

As for the other systems, I'm not very familiar with them, but at least I believe AGAST does support movies.

[Jerrot]

Unfortunatly, some of the information is out of date.

Yeah... and to be honest - I'd rather decide for NOT publishing ANY data  than publishing outdated (and therefore WRONG) data. 

Anyway - I'm sorry your test failed, you should have checked the great support at the forum here for any questions. Good luck with upcoming projects,

Jerrot.