Erkki

Primordia and why I've had enough of this AGS resolution bullshit

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What about Daedalic Entertainment? Do they use their own engine? My German isn't good enough to find out, but they are pretty good at making adventure games.

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They may be super-good at making them, but unless they're focusing primarily on making a user-friendly framework, it won't be able to compete with something like AGS. That's why the DFA probably won't be able to compete either, unless people start working on it. Taking a framework from being game-specific (like the DFA one will most likely be) to something that's usable by and understandable to everyone, with no weird references to Chris Remo danger layer hacks or hard-coded UNC paths to 2HB.png on Double Fine's Perforce server or whatever is a ton of work, and documenting it well is an even bigger problem. The right team of open source Github nerds should be able to do it, though.

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Hmm, so even if there was a better engine, AGS would still be easier to use? But you said DFA could do it if people started working on it, right? I wouldn't be surprised if the Double Fine fanbase could figure a way to make it more accessible sooner than later. I hope they make enough "Tim and Ron's Magical Adventures" to make the Reality of the Norm series look tiny in comparison. :deranged:

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The valuable setuff in DFA's thing is the toolset for writing and implementing dialogue, puzzles, items and stuff like that, and that wouldn't be game-specific at all. It would be genre-specific to adventure games, and would require work to make something entirely different from DFA. But it's probably generic enough to create what most AGS devs are doing these days. I think out of the box this thing will be a very valuable thing to get you started. But it might still be more complex than using AGS, I guess.

Actually, I think they're not going to release anything that's actually game-specific. I don't remember the details. Chris can maybe answer this?

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Hmm, so even if there was a better engine, AGS would still be easier to use? But you said DFA could do it if people started working on it, right?

Yeah, just because the engine is technically good, with great graphics and animation and iOS support and so on, it might still be "custom-made" for the game they've made, and can therefore be hard to use for outsiders in a million ways, like using weird internal non-standard file formats, depend on other in-house tools like exporting/processing plug-ins in Photoshop, have "hacks" that were put in place because they needed something they hadn't planned for and added quick fix instead of coding it properly into the engine (this happens all the way in software development,) have lots of hard-coded references to whatever game they were making, and have no written documentation.

If Double Fine are aiming to release the source code (and since they apparently already have some experience with writing engines that run lots of different games,) they're probably keeping all these things in mind, so when they release the source code, it will be easier to convert into something everyone can use.

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I think out of the box this thing will be a very valuable thing to get you started. But it might still be more complex than using AGS, I guess.
And that's where awkward Github nerds will hopefully come in and polish off any rough edges. Judging by the DFA documentary, there'll likely be plenty of those.

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AGS is very good for story and art-focused amateurs because you can start at knowing nothing and make a game without programming a single line, progress by programming what you need changed, but nothing more than that. Games like Primordia and Resonance comes from people who started with AGS years ago by making free games and have now progressed to the point where they make commercial games, customize the interface and esp. in the case of Resonance try to bring some new life to the genre, even if the game still looks very traditional.

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Speaking of, have any of you played Yahtzee Croshaw's games? I don't remember if they were AGS specifically, but he had a pretty well-done adventure game series he made and apparently hasn't really decided to do more with now that he's writing novels.

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I wouldn't do anything based on Flash at this point – even Adobe have started to accept it's a dying, and will probably live out the rest of its days mainly as a video player platform. I was going to suggest the DFA system, but then I thought «did they really say they would release the source code for it under a license that would permit others to sell games based on it?» and did some very quick research to determine that I had probably imagined all that. If they're in fact going to release their engine, hopefully that'll become the new standard for modern 2D point-and-click games, and a good ecosystem will grow around it, with great support and sweet tools that are easy to use. I could see myself contributing to something like that.

We're going to open-source it, and I can't imagine that would be possible with a license that would restrict sales! (Maybe that is possible though? I honestly am not super familiar with the particulars of the open source movement and its licenses.)

The underlying engine, MOAI, is already free to use. What we're going to release is the toolset we're building on top of it, 2HB. (There are engine-level changes as well of course.) An earlier version of 2HB was used to build Middle Manager of Justice, and the latest 2HB work is being done to support Reds. 2HB was also used for Spacebase and Hack 'n' Slash during Amnesia Fortnight, although I doubt we're going to be folding additions from those into the main 2HB branch.

I really loved using it on Spacebase, it's a great toolset. It's a whole lot less accessible than something like AGS though; it's intended for game developers, not hobbyists. But a lot of hobbyists are basically no different to professional developers in terms of skill level and ingenuity, so I'm sure a lot of people will get a lot of use out of it.

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I wouldn't do anything based on Flash at this point – even Adobe have started to accept it's a dying, and will probably live out the rest of its days mainly as a video player platform.

Huh, my impression when I was tinkering with Flixel was that Flash was doing just fine. I got the impression that I was able to potentially compile my Actionscript libraries as an iOS or Android app if I just shelled out for a Dev kit. I guess that's not really Flash itself, but the fact it was so easy and there were so many up-to-date resources made me think that it was doing okay. I don't know much about the dev side of things--I've only briefly fiddled with Flixel, O.H.R.RPG.C.E. (good times, good times), GameMaker, AGS, Blender Game Engine, Unity, Source... Well, I've basically just touched them barely enough to know that I didn't really know what I wanted to do with them (except Flixel, really, but I got trapped in writing such terrible code that I couldn't read it anymore. I'll give it another shot someday).

We're going to open-source it, and I can't imagine that would be possible with a license that would restrict sales! (Maybe that is possible though? I honestly am not super familiar with the particulars of the open source movement and its licenses.)

There's a few licenses that are ostensibly part of the OS movement, but technically releasing your source doesn't mean that your license has to make it free. I remember hearing Lightworks was planning on releasing its source without actually giving it a free license, which makes sense in the enormously IP-heavy film industry. As far as I heard that never actually happened though.

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Is there enough non-browser stuff happening with Flash to keep it alive, though? My impression is Flash will be mostly gone in a few years, but who knows with the internet.

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Yeah, there's lots of sweet stuff still being made in Flash, and you can make sweet Flash games like Frog Fractions.

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I've heard it's used in a lot of fancy UIs, like in game menus and such, as well as animation. I wish I could remember where I heard that, though.

Whoever was telling me about it felt very strongly that Flash had life in it.

Edit: According to Wikipedia, a load of TV cartoons are made in Flash (My Little Pony, etc.). And the Academy Award nominated feature, Secret of the Kells, was entirely animated with it, too. (Can't imagine they put they on the poster, though: "Come pay $15 to watch a really long Flash animation" - it just sounds really cheap, doesn't it?)

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Flash could be very useful if you need to store vector art and animation for your game engine. There are free open-source libraries out there that can load and playback swf assets (gameswf library for example), so if you're building an engine and your artists are already using flash, then I guess you could do a lot worse than swf.

There are also commercial tools like Autodesk Scaleform, made for creating game UI's specifically, and is entirely based on Flash.

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If all of that is enough to keep Flash alive as a technology, that's great. It will still appear less and less on web sites as it's supplanted by SVG and canvas frameworks, which both have far more potential since they have wider, more built-in support and are getting a lot more developer attention in terms of performance. Maybe it'll be like Java – it disappears from the browser, but is still used a million other places.

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If all of that is enough to keep Flash alive as a technology, that's great. It will still appear less and less on web sites as it's supplanted by SVG and canvas frameworks, which both have far more potential since they have wider, more built-in support and are getting a lot more developer attention in terms of performance. Maybe it'll be like Java – it disappears from the browser, but is still used a million other places.

It's dead for the web (except for movie sites it seems). All I need to say to the client is, "Do you want people with iPads to be able to view the site?" And boom! No Flash. (Yay.)

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But thankfully the skills and technologies are transferable. So many people know Actionscript and there's so many great libraries that you can even compile it for iOS. Adobe Air seems Adobe's reaction to the decline of web Flash, and it's a pretty successful product fwiw.

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It's dead for the web (except for movie sites it seems). All I need to say to the client is, "Do you want people with iPads to be able to view the site?" And boom! No Flash. (Yay.)

It should be more deader on the web. Keeps crashing my browser occasionally.

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In terms of Flash as an animation program, it still stands to be an easy way to fuck around and teach yourself animation without a lot of stuff to worry about or mess with. Traditional (assuming you have a drawing tablet) or tween stuff.

That said, it's really shitty and lacking in features compared to more professional grade stuff now.

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