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[Dudeldei]

Hi, after looking at several Engines only two remained, Wintermute and Visionaire. I have looked at both of them and tried some of the demos but a few questions remain and I hope you will be able to help me

First of all, is it possible to do a game like the Kaptain Brawe Demo? I like its inventory very much and in Wintermute I always see the inventory bar zipping up and down if the mouse is in the area. It's funny, but all demos I tried all looked pretty alike from the interface and general feeling, is it very difficult achieve let's say a Lucas Arts look?

Is it possible to do a complete 3D adventure? or must it always be a 2d Background? The game Looky the worm seamed all 3D but I'm not sure about the background as it was totally static.

What I like about the Visionaire version to come (3.x) is that it will be multi-platform ready, thus Mac support will be possible. As the conversion rates for Macs are much higher than for windows it would be a really appreciated feature for Wintermute too.



 

[Nihil]

Welcome to the forum.

I didn't play Kaptain Brawe, but since the inventory in WME is totally scriptable you can have virtually any inventory you want ... depending on you capabilities of course :-)

Full 3d is not possible (as it isn't with any other free adventure engine out there so far), but WME is actually the only one that supports 3d characters.

Cross-platform is not in sight for WME as it relies heavily on DirectX.

But who knows what future versions might bring :-)

[Dudeldei]

Cool I love quick answers

You should really take a look at Kap Brawe, it's really a lovely and cool adventure. The inventory is basically a big wardrobe you call by using the RMB.

Full 3d is not possible

Ah yes thought so, I reread the helpfile and it seems up to date I wonder if Antialiasing is a problem with 3D, Looky was pretty much aliased but maybe because of the resolution?

But who knows what future versions might bring :-)

Do you know more than you are willing to admit? 

Edit: One more question, how powerful is the scripting language, can I do some small minigames with it? are there some examples?

[metamorphium]

I personally made 2 minigames in GitS with WME and it's quite easy. Scripting language is definitely a forte of WME.

[Dudeldei]

I personally made 2 minigames in GitS with WME and it's quite easy. Scripting language is definitely a forte of WME.

can you describe a little bit what sort of minigames you've created? (without spoiling you content of course)
How powerful is the language btw? Must be quite heavy if it's possible to develop plugins for it...

[metamorphium]

well, it's a functional language without any limitation of variable count etc. It has global variables, local variables, arrays, objects etc. You can attach handlers and scripts
to anything you like. You can open separate threads and of course you can write your own plugins in C++ as dll.

My minigames for example contain 7 objects each having their behavior scripted and you have to eliminate them. But it really depend on what your game would contain. Maybe if you asked more clear questions, we could give you better answers.

[Dudeldei]

well yes you are right. I want to create small adventures for children between 4-8 years.  I want to be able add small minigames like for example fetch the balloons with one color, or a broken plate must be fit together again, or a puzzle, or which letters and in which sequence builds the correct word. You see all small minigames. Is collision checking integrated? lets say letters fall from a plane and you have to fetch the correct ones?

[metamorphium]

All of these minigames should be easily done. IMO you don't need to make a collision checking for the letters minigame. Moreover you can make this game entirely scripted because you can create new entities in the runtime. Sprite entity will have Interactive set to true which means that it recieve mouse clicks and each of them can share a same script which would check for on "LeftClick" event. So even if it's moving, there's no interaction limitation.

[Dudeldei]

very nice, very powerful, do you know if it's possible to start an exe too?

Now only a Mac version is missing 

[metamorphium]

it's possible. See this thread: http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=2349.0

[Dudeldei]

I'm totally astonished 

Now a 'last' question, just of interest the wme language is called a scripting language, is it possible to have external scripts executed from withing the running game? You know, while the game is running I edit some scriptssources and they are interpreted on runtime. Like it's done with many games before, Lucas Arts used this technique or FarCry with Lua scripting embedded.

PS: When is the book coming out and keep it pdf so it can be kept up to date?

PPS: Now I know much of the great features of Wintermute, are there some critique or weak points? stability? I've read from some bluescreens sometimes. The developer seems very fast in responding and helping...

[odnorf]

I'll answer the last (stability) question and I'll leave the others for the experts because I'm not even sure what you mean. The bluescreen you are talking about affects project manager only, not the engine itself. The engine is stable.

[metamorphium]

unfortunately this is not possible.

book - I don't know to be honest. I have to rewise a lot as WME changed and parts of the book are no longer accurate.

weak points: Window Edit component doesn't accept utf characters (problem with various inputs - for example naming savegames), WME doesn't support multidimensional arrays although this could be workarounded by simple math (somewhere around is my code for Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithm scripted in WME), absence of Pixel Shaders, reflecting surfaces and such. But to be honest, I find these (except the utf thing) as a lame excuses for not making game. 

[Dudeldei]

I'll leave the others for the experts

now that's what I call understatement ^^

and yes I know it's only the pm but a blue screen is quite a heavy behavior imo, I would expect a simple program crash, maybe simply a missing try catch in the misbehaving part? I'm slowly getting into Java so no bluescreens to be expected

I'll try to explain the scripting part a bit further. Imagine you have your game running, and now you see that something is not behaving as it should, so while the game is running you edit the script and see in realtime if the false behavior is working now. You don't have to quit the game, edit the script, restart the game and go to the scene where the error occurs, check, quit the game, edit and so on...
Hope this  makes things clearer now...

[metamorphium]

well, some of this can be achieved through WME debugging console, which is fairly powerful tool. And no - I never experienced a bluescreen, so it is probably something specific and as soon as it's isolated, I am sure it would be fixed quite promptly.