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[krkode]

Hy, I just have a introductory question. I've just begun development on my game, and i was wondering if the current WME release is equipped enough for me to begin making my game.

And another thing - would a college degree of knowledge in C be enough coding experience to be able to use the WME with relative ease?

Thanks,
krkode

[Mnemonic]

and i was wondering if the current WME release is equipped enough for me to begin making my game.

Well there are still some things missing, or not exactly how I want them to be, but I believe all the basic functionality is in place.

And another thing - would a college degree of knowledge in C be enough coding experience to be able to use the WME with relative ease?

Yeah, I think so. Of course, it depends on how much complex scripts you're going to write   but I believe the scripting in WME isn't very complicated and a C experinece will definitely help a lot.

[Castler]

Hey guys. I really like WME's capabilities, and I'll probably end up choosing it over AGS. However, I have an observation. The way AGS handles walk-behinds is really easy (just creating a region for it); but with WME you have to import the object on a new layer.

Imagine this scenario: The character is walking behind a railing, but I want him to be visible where there are spaces in the object. In AGS I could define the walk-behind area by filling in the solid part of the railing (it even allows importing masks for this). How would I do it in WME?

Thanks,

Castler

[Mnemonic]

In AGS I could define the walk-behind area by filling in the solid part of the railing (it even allows importing masks for this). How would I do it in WME?

Simply: the new layer would have transparent areas In AGS you fill solid areas, in WME you fill transparent areas.
This has been discussed several times before by people used to AGS's approach. Let me sum it up:

1) I really don't see a big difference between painting the walk-behind AGS region and cutting out part of the background a painting the transparent areas. It's basically exactly the same work.

2) The layer approach allows you to use an alpha-channel to have antialiased edges/trasparency on the obstructing object. I'm not sure it's possible in AGS

3) Performance! The layer approach can take full advantage of hardware-accelerated image drawing. The AGS approach can not (at least not easily, I believe it would be technically solvable though).

4) If you use pre-rendered backgrounds, you can render those separate objects "for free", simply by choosing which 3D objects to render. Thanks to alpha-channel, those rendered objects already have the transparency included, i.e. no more hand-painting.

[Castler766]

It seems like your approach requires more separate images and hence more disk space?

Also, since you put images in memory, it would take more memory too? BTW, about the memory thing, I think it is important in case of Alt-Tab, but maybe you could just do it when the game loses focus, then clear it out again when the game gets focus back? Sorry if I don't really understand, I'm new and curious.

[Mnemonic]

Yes, but since the images usually contain single objects, they are generally much smaller than the background image. Besides, the AGS "walk-behinds" also need to be stored somewhere (although they probably store less data per pixel).

About the alt-tab thing, that's mostly handled by Windows itself.