Wednesday, January 27, 2010
New / Improved Game Engines Now Available
Greg Squire just sent me this link last night to Enterbrain's new game development tool:
IG Maker
I haven't tried it, but it ends up as popular as Enterbrain's RPG Maker, we could see a flood of indie action games from this. It advertises that you can get a basic game of your chosen genre up and running with a simple wizard.
Well... cool. Yeah, we're going to see a flood of really horrible games from this. But emerging from all the primordial ooze of thrown-together crud I hope and expect to see some real gems emerge from designers who might otherwise never have been able to make use of their latent talents. That's the indie thing. Booyah.
In other news, I spent a little bit of time last night looking at Panda 3D. This little (and free!) 3D game engine - written for professionals and students - is really coming along nicely. In fact, it's looking good enough that I WOULD consider it a candidate for a future project... if one of the sample programs hadn't crashed unceremoniously on my laptop. Oops. Still - I think this engine has some very serious potential.
And finally, I note with some interest that the Ogre 3D crew unleashed a release candidate for Ogre 3D version 1.7.0 on New Year's Eve. Besides being a new, improved version of a very powerful (and now commercially proven) multi-platform 3D engine, it also marks the transition to their very generous MIT licensing.
Good times for indies!
Labels: game development
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:50 AM (Permalink)
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I tried out IG Maker when it was first released, and I have to say I'm not really impressed. It's not nearly as flexible as RPG Maker, not to mention the complete lack of scripting makes it difficult to make anything other than a "template game".
I also noticed this:
*Operation is not guaranteed for 64-bit operating systems
Well, that would leave me out, since I use Win7 64 bit. Don't developers realize most newer systems are now 64 bit?
*Operation is not guaranteed for 64-bit operating systems
Well, that would leave me out, since I use Win7 64 bit. Don't developers realize most newer systems are now 64 bit?
# posted by 
: January 27, 2010 5:28 PM
: January 27, 2010 5:28 PM
Also, version 8 of Game Maker came out not long ago. Among other improvements, version 8 finally handles transparency in sprites properly.
# posted by : January 28, 2010 12:26 PM
: January 28, 2010 12:26 PM
It used its own home-brew system instead of using alpha channels. If you told it to use transparency for a sprite, it would take whatever color the bottom-left corner pixel was and use that as the see-through color. There was no way to override that.
I'm not even sure you could do partial transparency under that system, though I admit I never really tried.
I'm not even sure you could do partial transparency under that system, though I admit I never really tried.
# posted by : January 28, 2010 12:37 PM
: January 28, 2010 12:37 PM
Actually this wasn't Game Maker's homebrew system but a byproduct of using Delphi to make Game Maker :-P.
This is how transparency worked in Delphi since the Win3.1 days. Lazarus, an open source Delphi clone, also works the same way.
Although i think both added alpha channel support in recent years. At least Lazarus did, i'm not sure about Delphi because i stopped caring after version 6 or 7 when they screwed up the interface.
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This is how transparency worked in Delphi since the Win3.1 days. Lazarus, an open source Delphi clone, also works the same way.
Although i think both added alpha channel support in recent years. At least Lazarus did, i'm not sure about Delphi because i stopped caring after version 6 or 7 when they screwed up the interface.
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