Wintermute Engine Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: PrestonD on January 11, 2005, 01:35:50 AM
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Hi All,
To the members of the forum, whether you may realize it or not, one of the premiere Adventure Game creators Jonathan Boakes has just joined the Wintermute Forum.
Welcome to the forum Jonathan, I am a great, great fan of your games!
Jonathan, what you will find on this board in conjunction with the Wintermute Engine itself is a lot of great talent, advice and experience. What you will find with the Wintermute Engine in itself is quite incredible with a lot of capability. You might drop using Macromedia Director for your game development!
To the rest of the forum team, if you ever have the chance to play one of Jonathan's games please take the opportunity, you won't be disappointed.
Regards,
Preston D
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That's pretty interesting. I was just looking over the Dark Fall 2 site..esp the Creation section. I posted it over on the 3D Gamestudio forum in my adventure game thread(which is dangerous in a shooter, GTA obsessed community). ;) There it is for your amusement: http://www.conitecserver.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=437772
Welcome Mr. Boakes.
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Hi Orange Brat,
Nice very active thread on the Gamestudio forum, I went back and reviewed the link further and missed some updates that were referred to.
Kinda off topic, I see that you mentiioned using 3D Gamestudio. I am thinking about using 3D Gamestudio for scene rendering and have the following questions:
1. What version do you use and what are your personal observations/experience with the tool if I may ask?
2. Apparently there is some sort of character modeling tool in it, have you ever used that? If not, what do you use and prefer?
I think a few others here on the Wintermute forum use Gamestudio as well.
Thanks,
Preston D
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1. What version do you use and what are your personal observations/experience with the tool if I may ask?
2. Apparently there is some sort of character modeling tool in it, have you ever used that? If not, what do you use and prefer?
I use the newest one(6.31.4). It's a good stable 3D engine. Tons of features and getting better all the time(http://www.conitec.net/forecast.htm). It's capable of adventures, too but using something like WME is better since it is specialized and there is less hassle to setup the basic functions that every adventure has. I've pretty much scripted everything in A6, though but I could never get a satisfactory point & click pathfinding solution in place. The one I have is A* but it had problems and WME's is much better. ;) There also isn't a lot of interest in adventures on the forum, but there are a few. Probably the best example of a pure adventure being done with it would be Adventures in Pocia: http://zio.echoshift.net/ It uses direct controls and the mouse for everything else. He recently implemented that A*pathfinding I mentioned so the final game will probably be completely mouse driven.
The character modeling tool is very primative...more so than even Milkshape. It's main use is to import from another format, reposition skins(if necessary) and save to the proper model format. I never really got into modeling while using it..I was more into the level design part and scripting(there are editors for each). The current level editor is nice and there's not really any reason to use an outside app with it. It even takes care of calculating lightmaps and compiling. It's not perfect, but it works well for BSP style levels. The scripting editor is syntax highlighting and you can run the engine from it. I really haven't fully explored it, but it's much better than using Notepad. ;)
I think a brand new all in one modern drag and drop editor is being developed, so some time in the not too distant future it will all be integrated and hopefully if you have it you won't have to use 3rd party apps for anything.
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Thanks for the update Orange Brat, I appreciate the info. I didnt mean the release version, but I meant to ask what edition of 3D Gamestudio do you use? Standard, Pro, Commercial, etc? Why that particular edition versus another (I am trying a cost versus performance approach here)?
Thanks,
Preston D
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I use Commercial. For now, there's really no need to go Pro unless you plan on doing a multiplayer game. There are a couple of other features that are nice with it: render to texture and a file packer(packs everything into a resource file). It also allows unlimited physics entities and maybe a couple other goodies. There's a 3rd party Newton Dynamics DLL that can be used with any edition, and there also might be a render to texture DLL in the works and you can use Molebox for a filepacker, so that takes care of most of that. Now, in the future the Pro version will be getting a few other newer features(see forecast link), so maybe it would be worth getting depending on your needs.
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Oh yeah, I forgot a couple things...Since there's an "official" WME Blender exporter, I thought I'd let you know there's a Blender MDL7 exporter now. This is useful for people like me who will use both and want to stick to a single modeling app. MDL7 is the 3DGS model format and Blender power users on the forum have said it is great. ventilator created it and he will probably continue to support it since he uses both apps. It only exports vertex animation right now but if he ever figures out 3DGS's oddball bones implementation he'll include the option for that too. I think Conitec is really beefing up the model format for the next couple of updates so I think he said he'll wait until they get it all in place(6.34 I think).
http://www.conitecserver.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=468843
Lastly, they finally updated the demo to reflect most of the new changes that had been added over the last year. You can try out the extra edition for 30 days. It is missing some features(see chart on the homepage) but you'll get the point I'm sure.
I wouldn't really recommend 3DGS for more traditional adventures(if that's your aim). It can do a Broken Sword 3, Gabe Knight 3 style but I'd stick to WME for hybrid 2D/3D games. It's specialized and there's no need to reinvent the wheel. You can those in 3DGS but there are some hoops to jump through and I just don't think it's worth it unless your really really want DX9 shaders and a few other goodies.
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You might drop using Macromedia Director for your game development!
That's the idea. ;)
Jonathan
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You might drop using Macromedia Director for your game development!
That's the idea. ;)
Jonathan
;D
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Excuse my ignorance but who's Jonathan Boakes ?
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Excuse my ignorance but who's Jonathan Boakes ?
The designer/programmer/graphic desinger/etc of "Dark Fall" and "Dark Fall 2" third person (myst-style) horror adventures.
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Excuse my ignorance but who's Jonathan Boakes ?
http://www.xxvproductions.co.uk