Wintermute

[Rd27]

Has anyone here tried Wintermute?

I recently got to their website and it looks very promising.

I would like to know that if it is as flexible as AGS? Can you make any other type of games than adventure, rpg, management games?

The games page shows very nice looking games and few commercial games in production that I have watched, are made with Wintermute which I didn't know before.

I know that I could ask these in their forum but I want to know opinions from AGS users if there are any?

[Paper Carnival]

I believe it's also a very flexible engine, though a bit harder to use. If you plan to make a modern looking game (high-res, sprites with an alpha channel) then I think Wintermute would be faster and more stable.

[Radiant]

I believe it's also a very flexible engine, though a bit harder to use. If you plan to make a modern looking game (high-res, sprites with an alpha channel) then I think Wintermute would be faster and more stable.

Really? I haven't seen any instabilities in AGS in the past couple years...

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Up until AGS 3.0 was announced, Wintermute was pretty much the only decent adventure game engine out there for hi-res with d3d support, though that is no longer the case.  The few times I used it I found it rather lacking in overall features, though you can still make very good games with it if you put the effort forth.  This is true of many game engines, though!  If you are merely wondering what the benefits of wintermute are vs AGS then I would say they are so minute at this point that you should use whichever one is easiest for you to use and get help with.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

At this precise point in time, the main turn-ons for newcomers to Wintermute over AGS seems to be the use of higher-res and native 3d character support.

At which point I feel it is my duty to remind, as I did just the other day on MSN, that you rarely need a higher res than 640x480, and that AGS has a Char3d plugin, an easy3d module and a 3d module+plugin.

Bottom line, they're different engines which best suit different needs and different "programming" styles. Try 'em both.

[LimpingFish]

A rash of commercial Wintermute games have been released lately.

Well...two, anyway.

Art of Murder looks fairly professional. Ghost in the Sheet less so.

Another adventure engine is the Point and Click Development Kit 2, which also supports higher resolutions and such, but not native 3D characters. I've never taken the time to try it out in any meaningful fashion, though, and the URL I had for it's homepage was nearly two years out of date.:

A bit of googling turned up the current site, which can be found here.

I do remember the GUI was fairly horrible.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Wait, this is interesting.

I've just been contacted by some people who'd like to see my LSL2 AGS sourcecode to help them with the remake of LSL2 in Wintermute. They claimed Wintermute was more professional, versatile, powerful, and had higher-res and more features.

I took a lot at their features, and they have no more feautres than AGS currently does, appart from higher res (and some screenies they showed me of a WME project looked no better than, say, Blackwell). WME has not proven itself to be more versatile, nor more powerful, and being "more professional" is a strange thing to say indeed.

What does all of this stem from? It's not that AGS is afraid of competition, as it were, but if people are being mislead like this then we must be doing something wrong. Is it our overall retro feel?

I love retro, but when it gets to a point where people use some other engine because it looks better and then go around saying it's more professional and versatile, we gotta stop and think.

[Radiant]

What does all of this stem from? It's not that AGS is afraid of competition, as it were, but if people are being mislead like this then we must be doing something wrong. Is it our overall retro feel?

Is it possibly that AGS has a longer history, and therefore a substantial part of the games made with AGS don't actually use several modern features, because back then AGS didn't support them?

I do know that if you go to the games.php page and pick a game completely at random, you will very likely end up with a game that does not demonstrate the power or versatility of AGS.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Oh. Well put, I haven't thought of that.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

That's very true, but it can also make a point that wintermute isn't as easy to use as ags since their library is comparatively sparse while ags has birthed hundreds and hundreds of games/demos/weird things.

[auriond]

Judging from the screenshots alone, Wintermute looks like it might have a slightly steeper learning curve. But I do like their use of layers for the backgrounds, which looks quite intuitive.

But overall it doesn't look as user-friendly as AGS. Which, as Progz pointed out, is probably why our database is filled with all sorts of odd stuff. Newbies can easily toss off a working game with relatively minimal effort.

Another point, which I hate to make, is that their website looks a lot neater than ours. I guess first impressions do count. When I came back to AGS years after I first downloaded it, I initially thought (from the number of broken links and stuff on our main page) that the whole thing had been abandoned! Luckily I discovered that the community here is alive and roaring. Theirs looks rather inactive in comparison.

[Rd27]

It looks like i'm going to stick with AGS. Haven't tried 3.0 yet. Maybe I will try Wintermute some day

It sure looks promising, but still I think AGS is my thing for now .

[Snarky]

Wintermute has one major advantage over AGS (unless this has been fixed in 3.0 and I somehow missed it): It can do smooth scaling of alpha-channel sprites. Essentially, this means you can do good-looking high-res games, while in AGS you really can't (unless your game can do without scaling).

Oh, and as much as I admire the 3D modules and plugins, they do not add up to a "professional" 3D solution. AGS 3D is limited to 640x480, and the node perspective system used in Unbound only supports 320x200 scaling.

[Ali]

I'm in agreement with Snarky. However if I understand Mr Jones rightly, smooth scaling of alpha channeled sprites ought to be possible with D3D support.

I hope it will happen soon because it will significantly improve the engine in my eyes. However, I'm continuing to use AGS because of the artistic and technical support offered by AGS users and Mr J.

[deadsuperhero]

I've tried Wintermute. Wasn't my cup of tea. I've always loved AGS. The simple interface is something to be proud of (though, I'm a bit daunted by the new layout coming out.)
Truth be told, there really aren't many free game editors even comparable to AGS. As a visual learner, I tend to like being able to see my sprites, my GUIS, my rooms, my objects, and all the code, all in one app. There's just nothing really like that.
To be fair, AGS has it shortcomings just like every other game engine, but it would be rude to put them here. Maybe in some other thread.

[Moresco]

I too tried Wintermute, ages past.  I see it's improved greatly since.  Last I tried the software, it would crash often during my work.

I would also agree that their community seems rather quiet compared to the AGS community.  As for the AGS website, hasn't it been the same layout since 2003, maybe before then?  I think it's fine (minus broken links, if there are any still? that's not very good), maybe it could use a makeover at some point...but not for the sake of competing with WM, that'd be silly.

But seriously, the community is the main thing that interests me about AGS - and kept me here for all these years, even just to play all of your awesome games ^_^ and WM just doesn't seem to have that right now.

[ManicMatt]

I'm sure Alliance was referring to the actual program's look itself and not the website. I haven't seen anything on AGS 3.0... time to check it out!

[Moresco]

I'm sure Alliance was referring to the actual program's look itself and not the website. I haven't seen anything on AGS 3.0... time to check it out!

Sorry, I was referring to the post by auriond, and not alliance.  Should have quoted him there...sorry bout that.
"Another point, which I hate to make, is that their website looks a lot neater than ours."

That's what I was referring to.

[auriond]

Her.

I wasn't suggesting that the AGS website get a makeover (clings tightly to old-school blue theme), I was just pointing out something that had struck me when I returned to AGS. In actual fact, until I came here I had never heard of any of the other adventure game making software. Among the other GK fans that I used to hang out with, they too had only heard of AGS. So I guess it's pretty safe to assume that AGS is the best-known adventure game maker software out there. I just brought it up because we sometimes get a little anxious about our retro image, and Wintermute at first glance doesn't seem to have that problem.

But I love the community here. Just love it. The support here is worth a million smooth 3D sprite-scaling whatevers...

[voh]

I'm the same, sticking with AGS due to the community of awesome peopleâ,,¢.

I've tried wintermute and its biggest difference to AGS was, to me, that it made game making a hassle, whereas AGS makes it fun somehow. I don't know why, but I enjoy tinkering with AGS, I despised tinkering with Wintermute.

And I also agree that its funcionality isn't all that different from AGS. And with AGS 3.0 coming, I'm sure the gap's closing swiftly