Engines

[Hoffenlarft]

Does anyone knows any 2D platform engine?

[InCreator]

Er... Game Maker?

[Domino]

Whenever i'm in a mood to do games other than adventures i always check this site.  Some are out of date, but i always find it useful.

http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Happy Game Making

Shawn

[Paper Carnival]

Game Maker is, in my oppinion, the best (unless you want to make adventures; not that you can't make adventures with more flexibility than AGS, but it's definately harder). It gets better and better, but now you gotta pay to use all the features :-/. It's nothing much, just 15 euros or something

www.gamemaker.nl

If you are serious with your work and a good programmer, you can do anything with game maker

[InCreator]

Yes! You can! Yes! Anything!

Anything that'll run 1-2 fps if not less!

bah!!! 

GM community is extremely strong where I live and yet, the stupid engine is so slow, that making anything but endless pac-man / Mario / top-down-view-rally games is absolutely impossible. '

Even the greatest GM fans "turn around" as soon as they've got enough experience to try something more serious and - good. Then the stupid fps drops to PowerPoint slideshow and the so does the support & GM hype.

That's my point. You can't do anything. It's theoretically very possible, but practically gets stuck behind engine's weakness / limits.

But trying making a platform game is quite easy there, and there's gazillion webpages full of tutorials and help for this.

[Paper Carnival]

It depends on the programmer, a good programmer knows how to optimise the game eg don't update everything in the draw event, update when needed. You can also use dlls that make 3d faster and better. Don't forget that it's a 2d engine so it's better for platforms, top down games etc.

[CoffeeBob]

I'm kind of old-fashion, because I use The Games Factory. It's cheap and it's good enough for me.  But if you want something more advanced than TGF, try MMF. Torque 2D is a new 2d engine, and it looks pretty intresting. Never got the chance to try it out, though.

[scotch]

Uh, InCreator, have you really used GM? It's way, way faster than any other 2d game engine I've used (aside from specially coded, custom ones, of course), even when it wasn't 3d accelerated (version < 6) it was fairly speedy, but now I can easily go over 400fps with average complexity games at high res. GM is just so not slow I can't imagine you've really used it.  Most of the GM community are 12 year old kids who have no idea how to program efficiently, but even their stupid little game demos have run fine for me.
If it really was less than 30fps and the game wasn't completely insanely coded then you have a hardware issue.

Except for adventure games that AGS could do, I'd recommend people use GM... use GM 5 if you don't need easy sprite rotation/scaling/alpha but would rather keep high compatability or GM6 if you want more graphical possiblities.  The only reason I'm not using GM for my current 2d non adventure game is because I need to use a complex physics engine, so it was more feasible to do it in C++, it'd be GM otherwise, for sure, it's a joy to develop in when you understand it.

[HillBilly]

I recommend this thing called Flash MX. It's really handy, once you learn it.

[InCreator]

Have I used GM?
I have tried numerous RTS games, since It's my favourite genre and GM is most suitable thing for this.
Also, some isometric tycoons...

These are genres where GM will fail.

The n00bs can't mess things up, since they don't use complex drawing events. But any good quality game needs them.

Show me a well running GM Real-time Strategy game. Or an isometric game.

[Paper Carnival]

it's not that Game Maker isn't able to make those genres, it's that the people who have tried are not experienced enough. But still, I don't advice people to try strategy or any simulators/tycoons with gamemaker

http://www.geocities.com/whisperfox2000/iso_jump_v1_5.zip

here's an isometric engine I made, it's probably the only one that supports multiple ground levels. I could spend more time to make better slide collisions but the purpose of this was to show the isometric multiple ground level

Isometric games fail because they are more challenging not only programming-wise

[scotch]

GM's drawing functions are pretty fast, it's just really bad coding that makes these games slow, GM script isn't a particularly highly optimised scripting language and RTS games made by people clueless about pathfinding (it can easily become the most processor intensive thing when you have a lot of units) are a nightmare in any engine.
I don't really follow the GM community, they rarely produce anything worth playing... so I can't think of a good example of a well made isometric GM game, GM definately doesn't have a problem with isometric though, it's not really any slower than a standard 2d view. Ã, I'd make one to demonstrate but I don't have any iso art to use... I did make an iso game in old slow gamemaker, and that ran pretty well, I think I've lost that though.

[InCreator]

I have.
Just...

If Red Alert was running on GM, it would have at least 10x higher minimum system requirements.

Debates about GM's speed always go out of control.
But I'm not the first or the last one who - after hours and hours of coding, drawing, etc has just become extremely frustrated, since the engine just can't handle it all.

Take Transport Tycoon, for example. Now try to use same tile size and make as big map in gm as there was in original game. Just plain grass tiles, without any levels, etc. Without any chance to have bad coding! It's still impossible to run!
Even if it is possible, and you still get decent frame rate, you have either a 4GHz rocket, or have just pushed engine's limits to maximum. Which means that further work, like making really a game is very complicated.

Yet, original TT ran fine on 486...
I'm definetly not running ancient machinery, but 2D game can't require so expensive PC as GM games do. Especially an amateur game.

[scotch]

Well, yes, maybe not 10 times, but of course it's not going to work right on a 486.  And who doesn't have a 600mhz processor... It's only useful to compare it to other 2d game creation systems, and it's definately faster than those, if I made an adventure game in it it'd run a lot faster than AGS, it's pointless comparing it to a tightly coded custom engine that doesn't even run right on modern windows or have most of the features of GM.  It's a shame there are so few good games made in the GM community, because it's a really nice engine, imo.

[Paper Carnival]

I tried to make an advanced isometric, stealth'em'up & zelda-ish RPG (a very ambitious project  ) but I gave up, because it ended up too slow. Whenever more than 3 enemies were chasing me at the same time, the game would crawl. My custom made functions that use trigonometry were extremely used taking their toll in the frame rate killing. So, I gave up...

Now, game maker has built-in pathfinding and my favourite trigonometry functions (lengthdir_x and y) which are definately faster and more accurate now. It also supports line collisions (I had to use at least one "for" loop before to achieve that, and each enemy needed this... you get the picture) and other helpful stuff that would make the computing less complicated and hence the frame rate a lot higher.

Also keep in mind that game maker does not create real exes, it's only the .gmd file bundled with the runner. Mark Overmars says a real compiler would be too much work, but if he did that GM would be a lot faster.

It's only useful to compare it to other 2d game creation systems, and it's definately faster than those, if I made an adventure game in it it'd run a lot faster than AGS, it's pointless comparing it to a tightly coded custom engine that doesn't even run right on modern windows or have most of the features of GM.

AGS is faster than game maker when it runs on 320x240 resolution, or when it runs 8-bit. But high resolutions with alpha-channel are slow. The problem with game maker is that it has a lot of features that take their toll even if you don't want them to. Now if CJ would sit to optimise the engine, AGS would be a lot faster. But since most people prefer new features  instead of optimization, that will probably never happen

AGS already does most of the work for you and it's easy to make a non-buggy game with it, while in Game Maker the game will be buggy unless you are serious.

So... Unless you want to make an adventure game (where AGS does a dang good job) then Game Maker is your choice.

Here's an adventure game made with Game Maker btw
http://papillon.fileburst.com/sweetdreams.zip

The pathfinding is a pain, but game maker can now have a grid-based pathfinding (obviously the game was created before that)