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bfish.xaedalus.net
a blog, of sorts

The Escapist

The Escapist Forums : Threads
  • Trailers: Star Trek Online - The 2800 Return Trailer

    Yes, yes, that's all very well- but the important question remains: is the game actually any GOOD?

    From what I've heard, not really. Sad.

  • Sony Still Thinks the Vita is Doing Well

    Didn't the PS3 make a loss for the first 3 years of its lifetime? Has that taught industry analysts nothing about Sony's business model?

  • Poll: Everything is pirated!

    FelixG:

    OT: This thread is good for one thing if nothing else, to prove how many of the escapist forum users, as a point of fact, don't bother to read an OP before starting to post...

    Oh I think people do, it's just that if it was indeed satire (which I'm still not convinced) it was awfully unfunny. Even then, most of the points raised still remain perfectly valid and worthy of discussion concerning piracy and used games.

    People really do need to wake up, from inside experience the music industry is far from healthy (especially the smaller independents and the like) and the vast majority of it's ills directly relate to the rise of widespread piracy on the internet. Many of the smaller artists and labels are not completely against moderates and second hand sales of CDs, but when one person buys and downloads a DRM free album costing £5 then shares it with half a million people which results in almost zero sales whilst the artist can not afford to feed their family then there's a serious problem that needs to be addressed (real world example).

    Moving on to the second hand music market, how many of those stores actually remain? Growing up there was at least one in every minor town, now it's lucky to see one in a major city (at least here in the UK). I can only see game retailers following suit in the future. There is a culture surrounding used games that never really existed with music either, I'm guessing cost may be a factor for this (although some rare albums command a higher price) - so I can understand and have no objections to initiatives like Project Ten Dollar. Intrusive DRM is not acceptable, however. Valve seem to have managed their DRM superbly, unlike say any company that uses SecuROM as an alternative. Pirates need to become responsible, just as some companies need to realise that draconian measures are punishing their paying customers and driving others away.

    It's funny though, almost all of the above will be wasted typing and space. I've yet to encounter a single person who has changed their opinion on the subject (whatever their stance) from a forum discussion.
Place features PDF Print E-mail
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Written by Mat   
Saturday, 17 January 2009 02:42
Current features of Place:
  • Free software, professionally finished;
  • No restrictions on licensing of your game;
  • Most of the work done for you, just tell Place where you want to place your entities and how you want them to react;
  • Movable entities automatically negotiate obstacles using shortest-path algorithm;
  • A bare minimum of scripting experience required of game designers;
  • Advanced features available to those who want to dig deeper;
  • Helpful debugging system enables rapid testing and makes it easy to find mistakes;
  • Prototyping system to reduce the amount of tediously repetitive work involved in development;
  • Free, extensible toolkit: add new features if you wish;
  • Uses a well-established, popular general-purpose scripting language with vast amounts of documentation, so there's no need to learn some adolescent, obscure single-purpose language just for scripting games;
  • Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and various other platforms;
  • Games get an extensive menu system for making and loading savegames and configuring all of their settings;
  • Use any graphics resolution you wish; player can choose their own and your graphics will be rescaled, preserving the aspect ratio if desired;
  • Entities can automatically scale down as they move further away to give the appearance of perspective;
  • Simple yet powerful conversation system;
  • Link subtitles with the voice audio files that go with them, if you want voice acting;
  • Multi-threaded caching system pre-loads resources before they are needed, for improved responsiveness;
  • Internationalization/localization: easily support translations of a game into foreign languages;
  • Support for cut-scenes, using either the pre-existing system of rooms and entities, or MPEG format videos;
  • Extensive tutorials to get you started.

Features planned for the future:

  • Auto-package games into a Windows .exe installer, .pkg file for Macs or .deb, .rpm or .tgz package for Linux;
  • WYSIWYG game creation and editing studio, integrated with the Gimp professional, open-source image manipulation suite and featuring a text editor for scripting with syntax highlighting, auto-completion and debugging facilities;
  • Parallax scrolling background scenes;
  • Ability to use 3D models for entities instead of flat sprites;
  • Simplify programming interface further still and extend to Java, Python, Lua and Ruby;
  • More speed improvements;
  • Native support for Nintendo's DS and Wii consoles and SymbianOS (for recent phones by Nokia and others).
Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 April 2009 20:50
 
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