Wintermute Engine Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: SiriusCG on June 28, 2006, 03:44:49 AM
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First, let me say that I'm in no way looking to degrade or otherwise impune the WME with my question:
Is the WME stable enough and capable enough to run an "industrial strength" game? We're talking literally hundreds of scenes, potentially thousands of scripts, music and all the other support programming it will take.
Here's a bit of background:
I've put together a crew of four of my friends that have an interest in adventure games. We're all in our 40's, professional programmers, graphics artists, amateur music composers, with regular jobs, etc. We all started playing the text adventure style games like Zork in the 80's, then went on to Sierra's games, etc. We're not into ego-shooters and the current crop of "kill or be killed" 3D games. We enjoy solving puzzles using our grey matter over blasting others to virtual smithereens.
We also want to commercially publish a game in the adventure genre... (It's just something we've all wanted to do...) Between us, we've published other graphics works and are confident that we could get our game into the market. We considered using Inform (http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html) and using static graphics, but it wasn't quite what we wanted.
We have a great storyline (really!) and could produce enough graphics, puzzles and game play to easily go 10+ hours or more...
Between us, we could probably code an engine, but that's not what we want to do. We thought of using the JME in Java (http://jmonkeyengine.com/index.php) or Irrlicht (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/) but nixed the idea. (We write code all day long for our employers, we want to exercise our artistic side!)
We're quite taken with the WME and in looking at its features and capabilities would like to consider it as the "engine of choice" for our game project. We wish to use the newer 3D actor enviroment that is incorporated in WME 1.6.1. We're also planning to use Blender for our rigging and scene creation enviroment (we want to use freely available, non-commercial tools). That would mean some custom Python programming which we would be happy to share with the WME community. We're also considering using the newLisp library (http://www.newlisp.org) via external dll for extending the game login beyond the WME scripting language (if the newLisp license allows) and the GIMP will be our graphics creation application... We're considering our audio composition tools...
As the project is intended to be primarily FUN and a relaxation, we're in no hurry but would put a 12 to 18 month window on completion just to keep things moving along. If we're successful, we'll consider publishing our work and techniques (hence the Open Source or "free" tool chain) to encourage others to try their hand at adventure game authoring.
Any comments would be welcome. Thanks. ::wave
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Wme is stable and ready to flawless comercial game and give an incredible workflow.
I dont think any demo or game, show actually the wme potential.
Ok. wme do not have many flashy feature like some engine but feature available work like a charm. And on my own project i always find a way to do what i whant in relatively short time with script and i am not an experienced coder.
I dont know if it is posible to integrate the newLisp library. But probably Mnemonic will answer about that.
The thing i dislike
No collision Detection for the 3d actor but that could be done by script.( what i have done)
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I dont think any demo or game, show actually the wme potential.
I'd agree. While some of the games I've played using the WME have been fun to play, they were short and it seem they didn't utilized the WME to any full extent. :-\
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The largest WME game in terms of number of scenes is Five magical amulets. But various games push various aspects of the engine, that's normal, I think. We'll probably never see a game that would utilize all the features of the engine to full extent :)
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To answer the original question, it would be hypocrisy to say WME is perfect. Every game engine has its own deal of flaws and limitations and WME is no exception. Now it's up to the developers to decide if the limitations are bearable for their own purposes or not. I don't know what else to say about it..
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Thanks for the candid answer Mnemonic. I imagine as the WME creator, you would know if there were any serious limits...
As for perfection, I understand and my group isn't looking for perfection. Hopefully if we uncover any bugs in our development process, we can submit them for squashing! ;)
I'll have to find Five Magical Amulets and take to look...
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I have to agree with Leuchome!
WME is ready for commercial games.
And a clever scripter will find wasy around things that cannot be done the obvious way :)
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Well I hope so hahahahahahaha our project at MAJESTIC STUDIOS - LIMBO of the LOST is developed with WME and has 7 levels, 7 different endings, around 60 Npc`s, approx 200 items and approx 200 scenes.
10 musical scores, approx 1000 vocal sound samples lip synched to the Npc`s and the main character, approx 1500 sound samples and a DVD intro to boot.
I think its quite capable as long as your project specs hit the correct target specs of your potential audience. For example running our project on a PC with low specs would make it look ugly and crawl along, running it on more higher specced machines shows off what can be done with WME.
It will be published by GMX Media in Europe and G2Games in North America, contracts have been signed and the game will be released (hopefully) in early 2007.
This is a straight 2D game utilising 3D models (we call it 2.75D), if I can help at all answering any questions regarding WME and developing a commercial title on the platform, I would be only too happy to help.
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if I can help at all answering any questions regarding WME and developing a commercial title on the platform, I would be only too happy to help.
Thx Steve. I'm sure we'll have a number of questions as we move forward with our project! We're spending time building small "test scenes" to work out our content chain and workflows. The more I do with the WME, the better I like it!
BTW, it sounds like quite the ambitious project you have going! I'll look forward to seeing LOTL released and playing iit! 8)
Do you have a website with any screenshots available?
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Here are some links : -
MAIN MAJESTIC STUDIOS WEB SITE
http://www.geocities.com/limboofthelost/
JUST ADVENTURE PREVIEW 1
http://www.geocities.com/limboofthelost/News.html
JUST ADVENTURE PREVIEW 2
http://www.justadventure.com/Previews/Limbo/Limbo.shtm
G2 GAMES WEB SITE
http://www.g2games.com/limbo/index.shtml
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The artwork looks great! :)
It would appear that your using the newer 3D actors and scenes, your "2.75D". I assuming this from the dynamic lighting I saw in the demo reel...
How's this working out for you?
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No its not 3D actors in WME, its 3D models animated and then stills captured in 2D. You would not get this degree of detail on 3D models in 3D with WME, too many polys!!
It has no dynamic lighting, only very clever lighting of scenes and models, with static shadows projected. As I said 2.75D hahahahahahaha