Adore - A New Adventure Game Engine - Feature suggestions.

[Calin Leafshade]

Am I to take it that you know something about love? Tell me, what is love?

But yes, that is my initial plan.

[Armageddon]

I'd make it like SCUMM, an interpreter and you just make room scripts and the basic gameplay in separate files.

Awesome that you're doing this though Calin. Will if be free for commercial use? Also if it has the locked mouse cursor and characters when scaling up with nearest neighbor like AGS does then I will certainly be the first to use it. I'm a little concerned about the polygon paths for lower resolution games. Also changing the resolution and whether it's windowed in real time, enabling and disabling the nearest neighbor filter in real time as well would be cool. When I scaled up my Love2D game by x2 with nearest neighbor the objects floated between the pixels, probably to give a smoother movement but it really didn't look right at all.

But making the engine open and allowing the GUI and other things to be hard coded instead of sheets on top of an engine sounds awesome. Just using script files and not an editor would be my choice, but I'm sure if you want many people to use the engine then it should have an editor.

Also cross platform. This will probably take a long time to make though I'm guessing?

[Sslaxx]

Am I to take it that you know something about love? Tell me, what is love?

But yes, that is my initial plan.

What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more.

So long as we can have an option for a separate .love file, that's good!

[Calin Leafshade]

I'd make it like SCUMM, an interpreter and you just make room scripts and the basic gameplay in separate files.

No, I think AGS has that side of things covered. I want to make something more flexible and modern.

Awesome that you're doing this though Calin. Will if be free for commercial use?

Thanks, yes.

Also if it has the locked mouse cursor and characters when scaling up with nearest neighbor like AGS does then I will certainly be the first to use it.

It will have both.

I'm a little concerned about the polygon paths for lower resolution games.

Modern, high res adventures are my aim. I think AGS has mostly got low res covered but I will consider bitmap masks if necessary.

Also changing the resolution and whether it's windowed in real time, enabling and disabling the nearest neighbor filter in real time as well would be cool.

Already done.

When I scaled up my Love2D game by x2 with nearest neighbor the objects floated between the pixels, probably to give a smoother movement but it really didn't look right at all.

Thats because you scaled up the coordinate system. You need to make a render target and scale that after drawing to it to keep the pixels native. Adore already does this.

But making the ending open and allowing the GUI and other things to be hard coded instead of sheets on top of an engine sounds awesome. Just using script files and not an editor would be my choice, but I'm sure if you want many people to use the engine then it should have an editor.

Due to the design of the engine you are perfectly able to write your entire game without ever opening the editor. All you need to do is code the characters and stuff manually.

Also cross platform. This will probably take a long time to make though I'm guessing?

Love is already cross platform and Adore is already cross platform by design.

Well, the MAGS game I released took two weeks, including building the skeleton engine that it runs on. The editor will take some time though.

[Armageddon]

Oh  didn't know that wasn't made with AGS, I just played it. Very impressive game. Fullscreen just stretches it instead of actually changing the resolution of the game. I guess the only way around that is to sue polygons and texture filtering. It froze the character after I looked at the yucca plant and I had to restart. Probably something with being at the edge of the walk path and turning to look at it. The only thing I didn't like was the taking away control while walking to an object, something like the GotThere module would make playing much less restrictive feeling.

[Secret Fawful]

I gave White Wedding a playthrough, and found it seamless and well-made. The interfaces had neat functionality. I'm definitely interested to see what you do with this. Just know that one day, I'm probably going to try to push the engine to its breaking point. SOMEHOW. Maybe I'll use it to make a nude racing game.

[dactylopus]

I gave White Wedding a playthrough, and found it seamless and well-made. The interfaces had neat functionality. I'm definitely interested to see what you do with this. Just know that one day, I'm probably going to try to push the engine to its breaking point. SOMEHOW. Maybe I'll use it to make a nude racing game.

Please do.

[Calin Leafshade]

Oh  didn't know that wasn't made with AGS, I just played it. Very impressive game. Fullscreen just stretches it instead of actually changing the resolution of the game. I guess the only way around that is to sue polygons and texture filtering.

The current version of the engine resamples the game as the native screen resolution wherever possible and unless overrided by the user.

It froze the character after I looked at the yucca plant and I had to restart. Probably something with being at the edge of the walk path and turning to look at it.

This is a known bug and there's something wrong with the pathfinding algorithm but i can;t figure out what. I will get there eventually.

The only thing I didn't like was the taking away control while walking to an object, something like the GotThere module would make playing much less restrictive feeling.

That was an aesthetic choice in this case really. Adore does allow you to do this though:

Code: lua

--walk function is defined like this:
function character:walk(x,y,block,callback)

--this allows you to do something like this:

player:walk(200,400,false, function() 
    player:say("I arrived without being interrupted!")
end)

Basically whats happening here is that you are passing a function to the walk command which is run when the walk in completed if it's not interrupted.
Now, because Adore has a very flexible idea of what "blocking" means, this means that these actions can be independent of what the player is doing. Two characters can talk at the same time providing they're doing so in different coroutines. If the same character tries to talk in different coroutines then one will just block until the other has finished. Admittedly this could lead to some very odd behaviour if you didn't plan your game properly but there we are.

[/code]

[Baron]

It's the second coming!  The prophecy was true!  Chris has returned to us, in the form of some sort of uncrowned cat....  SINNERS REPENT!!!!!
As for features....

COTEMPORANEITY: Talking at the same time, walking at the same time (e.g. both characters pace away from each other and turn and shoot at the exact same moment).   
VECTOR GRAPHICS: Really a modern engine needs to be able to handle vector graphics.  It's such a pain to export them as pngs and import them into AGS, thereby vastly inflating the file size.  Also imposing raster masks on vector backgrounds....[shudder].  Compatibility with Flash would be ideal for me.
TRANSFORMATIONS: Vectors scale and can be rotated flawlessly.  As a developer it is a pain to work around rotations especially (usually rotating it in the drawing program and reimporting it as yet another png...)
GUIS: Why don't GUIs in AGS behave like everything else? (e.g. button transparency, animation....)
EMBEDDED OBJECTS: In its simplest form, embedding an object in another object, with its own unique functionality.  In a more complex usage, a character could be a collection of parts that will respond uniquely to interactions, thereby facilitating everything from hit detection to changing clothes.
DYNAMIC ROOMS: Why just five backgrounds?  Why?  Being able to have more backgrounds per room, or even better being able to dynamically change light levels on the background (e.g. night time) would hugely speed things up.
EFFECTS: Common Adventure scenarios like fog (fading linked to y values, even backgrounds) or water (calculating z plane and obscuring the portion of the character beneath it) would be sweet.

That's all I can think of off the bat.  Documentation will be critical to attract new users (i.e. me, for one), since it will require a lot of steep learning.  Good luck with this project!

[Phemar]

This look very exciting!

COTEMPORANEITY: Talking at the same time, walking at the same time (e.g. both characters pace away from each other and turn and shoot at the exact same moment).   

I believe this is already available, with coroutines and such as Calin has said.

DYNAMIC ROOMS: Why just five backgrounds?  Why?  Being able to have more backgrounds per room, or even better being able to dynamically change light levels on the background (e.g. night time) would hugely speed things up.

I believe Crimson has just done this with the alpha version of 3.4. Check the Editor development forum.

I think a great feature would be to have characters that are made up of different parts. Like in the SCUMM engine, most characters were made up of their heads and their bodies, allowing an easy way to have the character walk AND talk at the same time.

[Armageddon]

Yeah a follow view exactly thing like AGS has would be nice. But since the engine would be so open things like that could very easily be added.

[Billbis]

Here's my few silly ideas, which may or may not inspire you:

• A Tween function for everything
• Native parllax support
• And the most irrelevant one, but nonetheless the most modern: Support of stereoscopic 3D. For example, each background / object / character frame could be associated with a z-mask that will be use by the rendering engine to draw two different (left-eye and a right-eye) images.   

[miguel]

Tween, Paralax, Vectors and Particule effects...Native.
Please.

[Sslaxx]

Tween, Paralax, Vectors and Particule effects...Native.
Please.

LOVE has a built-in particle system: http://love2d.org/wiki/ParticleSystem

[Calin Leafshade]

LOVE has a built-in particle system: http://love2d.org/wiki/ParticleSystem

It's also rubbish. I would probably wrap it in something more complex.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I would probably wrap it in something more complex.

You should always wrap your tool of Love.

DYNAMIC ROOMS: Why just five backgrounds?  Why?  Being able to have more backgrounds per room, or even better being able to dynamically change light levels on the background (e.g. night time) would hugely speed things up.

I disagree with having animating background in the first place. But if I were to make an adventure game system, I'd have background images imported as sprites - that way anything can be a background image - even a dynamic sprite.

[Crimson Wizard]

DYNAMIC ROOMS: Why just five backgrounds?  Why?  Being able to have more backgrounds per room, or even better being able to dynamically change light levels on the background (e.g. night time) would hugely speed things up.

I disagree with having animating background in the first place. But if I were to make an adventure game system, I'd have background images imported as sprites - that way anything can be a background image - even a dynamic sprite.

Or rather Room should have View same as Character or Object .

[Ryan Timothy B]

That too. What I meant though, in my opinion, was that an animating background is generally always overkill. Where you could have separate objects (layers) animating in smaller sections instead. Of course though, some need an entire background to animate.

[Knox]

Adore...are you a Smashing Pumpkins fan?

Maybe a dumb question but could an AGS project be "transfered" to Adore without too much hassle?

[Jaffles]

Heh, I'm still working on mastering AGS, but this is a cool idea! Multiplatform support is a big thumbs up from me! I live in the Mac-OS-phere it seems, so nobody I know personally can easily play my AGS games 

Good luck with this!