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Why WME?

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Brassfire:
How does WME compare to other engines such as AGS? Why do I want to use this one? Is it easy for non-programmers to pick up?

Thanks.

Mnemonic:
I'm not convincing anyone to use WME, there are many engines out there to choose from and all of them are great (and all of them have their pros and cons...). Some people like WME the best, because it offers them a good ballance between ease of game development and flexibility for non-standard operations. Some people like the speed, provided by the 3D acceleration, etc.
But the final choice is yours. If you are serious about an engine choice, you should download them all and test them for a while, because *you* are the one who's gonna use the engine, it must suit *your* needs, and people's needs are very individual.

And to your last question, no, I don't think WME is a good choice for a total non-programmer. Although you are provided with prefabricated scripts and basic operations can be achieved by a few simple commands, you'll probably realize you need to do some complex actions in your game and those will definitely require you to do a good deal of scripting (unless you are going to make a very simple game...).

Well, it would be nice if people who are actually using WME write here their opinions. What they like, what they don't like, what is their experience compared to other development systems... You can hardly expect me to be truly objective on this matter :)

Brassfire:
Hiya.

Thanks for the quick answer.

More flexibility than AGS would be really nice for the features I have planned. I may be able to find a scripter or two, so the "newbie-friendly" stuff isn't as much of a problem as I thought it would be.

I would love to see some people post their own pros and cons regarding wintermute and other engines. (Or if someone would like to write an article about it here, that would be awesome!)

JustLuke:
I think that if you are planning to use a high resolution (640x480+) then it makes sense to use WME instead of AGS. AGS is notoriously slow at higher resolutions and doesn't support anything higher than 800x600.

Also, AGS only supports 16 bit colour at the moment. Personally, I think that since you spend so much time staring at more or less static backgrounds in a 2d adventure game it is very important that those backgrounds look as good as they possibly can. 32 bit colour *does* look significantly better than 16 bit colour, despite what some people might say.

One thing that AGS has going for it is it's maturity. It's been around for quite a while now, and it is a proven engine (just look at Tierra's games). WME, while very promising, is still in an early stage of development. Who knows what nasty bugs might be hidden beneath the surface? Absolutely no offence intended to the creator/s of WME, of course - WME is quite an achievment.

Uhfgood:
Plus AGS is slower on older systems (and i'm talking like pII 400 mhz 4 meg video), i've yet to test wme on that (with non-acceled mode).  I think that's one of WME's strong points, if you don't have 3d hardware you can go with the non-acceled mode.

Plus there's AGAST, which seems to be really good, but I personally have some issues with it, which is why i'm not using it.  First thing is the author of the scripting language for AGAST is very arrogant (these kinds of people turn me off to anything).  But the main reason i'm not using it, is that it requires fmod to be registered if I plan to sell it and/or use sound and music.  Plus I beleive it's all software and it's only 640x480x32bit (well i think it defaults to 16 bit if the user doesn't have 32bit).  It's also probably the most complicated in terms of it's scripting language, and there's absolutely no editors for it (other then setting up a text editor to write thep rograms with).

And now we come to SLUDGE.  It too is a script only system (although they have a few editors in the dev kit).  The problem it has is that it uses fmod but then the guy didn't register it or get a resale license.  He's got it set up so that the "engine" is free which means technically fmod should be free.  But then he still sells the dev kit.  I talked to the guy at fmod and he said that if you wanted to sell a game with
SLUDGE you would still have to register fmod, so with that legal gray area I decided i'd probably not use it.

So there's my 2c.  Oh yeah AGAST required you pay them a little bit from each commercial product you sell.  I don't have much problem paying for stuff, but i wasn't about to pay for an external sound library for an adventure system because it's not a real development enviroment.  I'd rather pay the creator of an engine some money, then have to pay for some external stuff as well.  Also fmod is not in my price range, it's like 250 for shareware games, and i don't really have that.

If WME turns out that i have to pay too much then i'll probably just prototype my game in it and figure out how to build my own system.  (and yes i'm planning on selling my game(s))

Keith aka Uhfgood
uhfgood@uhfgames.com
http://www.uhfgames.com

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