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Feature requests, suggestions / 3d scrolling
« on: November 19, 2006, 01:05:46 PM »
Hi there fellow WME-ers!
I've been quite absent after the Scumbag Joe debacle which demotivated us for a while. But we're back in business with lots of ideas for a new adventure game.
This time we're thinking of a full 3D game (smaller in story size, mid-priced game). We've been noticing two important requests from publishers and interested parties:
- "We want 3D"
The reason: people have LCD monitors nowadays, showing an incredible variety of screen resolutions.
With bitmap backgrounds, this will not look pretty.
Also, slight 3d camera panning gives the game a great look and feel, and zooming in when
the character has a dialogue (Sam 'n Max) is not much work in 3d, but for 2d you have
to (re)render a new scene. Also, when you want a slight different angle, in WME you'll need to
re-edit your whole scene, including static foreground objects.
The bottom line: WME seems to be "almost feature complete": it has 3d characters, shadows,
the whole shebang.
Basicly what we would need is to use a 3D object as environment
and define child objects in this 3D scene (clickable in scene edit) as a regular WME object.
Camera panning would be same as scrolling now, except when you want
to turn the camera and such, the user could implement a custom script that handles this.
(e.g turnCamera(pitch,yaw,roll) based on character location).
Lastly, it would be nice to be able switch camera's.
(E.g cameras are defined in 3dsmax like now).
When you have a dialogue or cutscene, you simply call ActiveCamera(myCam);
The interface (2d) could simply be a bitmap, not scaling with the screen resolution.
Just like now, but ignoring the resolution it is being displayed on.
- Cross Platform
Although I think this is increasingly getting important, it is a thing we could live with.
The interpreter, compiler could be ported (porting the tools would be huge), but I can
imagine its a b*tch to transform DirectX code to OpenGL?
However, the Mac platform is very interesting. Not much games exist for this relative small target
audience. They are willing to buy games quite easily (this has been researched by some publishers).
Phew...Sorry for the long post.
What are your thoughts on this?
I think WME is *awesome* and there is no adventure based engine that comes close to WME.
Implementing 3D environments would make WME perfect.
I understand the fear that the user base want advanced 3D stuff and WME becomes a bloated
engine, but perhaps it is possible to adapt existing technology (rendered) and provide advanced
3d stuff through some kind of external script API? Or....?
I've been quite absent after the Scumbag Joe debacle which demotivated us for a while. But we're back in business with lots of ideas for a new adventure game.
This time we're thinking of a full 3D game (smaller in story size, mid-priced game). We've been noticing two important requests from publishers and interested parties:
- "We want 3D"
The reason: people have LCD monitors nowadays, showing an incredible variety of screen resolutions.
With bitmap backgrounds, this will not look pretty.
Also, slight 3d camera panning gives the game a great look and feel, and zooming in when
the character has a dialogue (Sam 'n Max) is not much work in 3d, but for 2d you have
to (re)render a new scene. Also, when you want a slight different angle, in WME you'll need to
re-edit your whole scene, including static foreground objects.
The bottom line: WME seems to be "almost feature complete": it has 3d characters, shadows,
the whole shebang.
Basicly what we would need is to use a 3D object as environment
and define child objects in this 3D scene (clickable in scene edit) as a regular WME object.
Camera panning would be same as scrolling now, except when you want
to turn the camera and such, the user could implement a custom script that handles this.
(e.g turnCamera(pitch,yaw,roll) based on character location).
Lastly, it would be nice to be able switch camera's.
(E.g cameras are defined in 3dsmax like now).
When you have a dialogue or cutscene, you simply call ActiveCamera(myCam);
The interface (2d) could simply be a bitmap, not scaling with the screen resolution.
Just like now, but ignoring the resolution it is being displayed on.
- Cross Platform
Although I think this is increasingly getting important, it is a thing we could live with.
The interpreter, compiler could be ported (porting the tools would be huge), but I can
imagine its a b*tch to transform DirectX code to OpenGL?
However, the Mac platform is very interesting. Not much games exist for this relative small target
audience. They are willing to buy games quite easily (this has been researched by some publishers).
Phew...Sorry for the long post.
What are your thoughts on this?
I think WME is *awesome* and there is no adventure based engine that comes close to WME.
Implementing 3D environments would make WME perfect.
I understand the fear that the user base want advanced 3D stuff and WME becomes a bloated
engine, but perhaps it is possible to adapt existing technology (rendered) and provide advanced
3d stuff through some kind of external script API? Or....?
