SLUDGE 2.0 is released!

Started by Trumgottist, Fri 31/12/2010 22:51:26

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Trumgottist

Hi, everybody!

I'm proud to announce that SLUDGE 2.0 finally is ready. If you don't know what I'm talking about, the main differences compared to the old SLUDGE are:

  • Both game engine and development kit are now multi-platform, and run on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
  • The graphics code is rewritten to use graphics hardware. This makes it both faster and better looking, with support for 32 bit images with alpha channels.

For more information, see the AD forum post.

If you want to try a SLUDGE game, how about Deirdra Kiai's Life Flashes By, or my Frasse and the Peas of Kejick (special edition).

Sslaxx

Taking a look at this one...
Stuart "Sslaxx" Moore.

deadsuperhero

#2
This looks *EXTREMELY* promising. Building from source on Linux right now. Seems really simple. If you want (and provided that I'm competent enough), I sure wouldn't mind setting up a PPA for this project over on Launchpad for Ubuntu users that want to just easily install a .deb file.

Edit: Question- In order to play a game created with SLUDGE, does a user require to have the engine itself installed, or is this something where a game developer can compile the game binary and easily package it up with relatively few dependencies? (Basically, more or less...would the SLUDGE engine itself be considered a dependency for running a game made with SLUDGE?)

Edit 2: I'm getting the following error message when I attempt to run anything from the terminal. Keep in mind that I followed the instructions and have the ALURE libraries installed, built from source. I am running Ubuntu 10.10 on 64-bit.

Quoteerror while loading shared libraries: libalure.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Is this something that can be easily fixed using a link to the library, do you think?
The fediverse needs great indie game developers! Find me there!

BigMc

Hi,

@DeadSuperHero:

the library is just not found. Please run "sudo ldconfig" and tell me if that suffices to make it work.

Thanks for the offer about the PPA, but I plan to try and get SLUDGE into Debian/Ubuntu once Alure 1.1 is released. If you really want you can of course set up a PPA though.

The engine is a dependency required to run the games, but it can be bundled with games. At least for Windows and Mac. For Linux our recommendation is to let the players care for the engine themselves.

Regards, BigMc

deadsuperhero

#4
Quote from: BigMc on Sat 01/01/2011 17:55:52
Hi,

@DeadSuperHero:

the library is just not found. Please run "sudo ldconfig" and tell me if that suffices to make it work.

Thanks for the offer about the PPA, but I plan to try and get SLUDGE into Debian/Ubuntu once Alure 1.1 is released. If you really want you can of course set up a PPA though.

The engine is a dependency required to run the games, but it can be bundled with games. At least for Windows and Mac. For Linux our recommendation is to let the players care for the engine themselves.

Regards, BigMc

Awesome, I got it working just fine! :D

Would you have a game template or a tutorial to refer me to so that I can see how everything works in action?
Edit: Nevermind, I found them. ;)
The fediverse needs great indie game developers! Find me there!

BigMc

#5
So it was just running ldconfig right? (Because it's not required on Ubuntu 8.10 9.10 and I have to add it to the documentation.)

There's the VerbCoin example that is included in the tarball (doc/ExampleProjects) and the resources section of the homepage.

As documentation I recommend the documentation (link on the homepage or doc/SLUDGE_Help.html in the tarball). ;)

Regards, BigMc

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

It looks promising, but without animated gif support for loading sprites I'd never use it, personally.  I use the animated gif format exclusively for 2d artwork for its ease of use in exporting whole animations, and this is the same point of contention I've had with wintermute for ages.  Hopefully you'll add gif support at some point so I can play around with SLUDGE more.

Trumgottist

ProgZmax: Is that a general comment or a feature request? Personally, I've left 8-bit graphics behind, so it's a feature I'd never use and I'm not interested in doing the work implementing importing of gif images if nobody is going to use it.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

It's a general comment, but I'm sure there are loads of people who still use 2d artwork and would benefit from it.
Honestly, it would pretty much take something as powerful as wintermute but as cleverly designed as AGS to pull me away from AGS as far as adventure game creature goes, but that also means I'm open to trying out new engines and old ones that have made some improvements :).

Gilbert

#9
Actually the problem with GIF is not because it's 2D. It's mainly because it can only support up to 8-bit palettised graphics. Unless you're a palette whore like me, people would rather not undergo the troubles in making real 8-bit graphics or don't want their painted graphics to be downgraded, so instead they prefer to have their sprites to be in 16 or 32-bit colours.

As Sludge uses 32-bit colours extensively anyway. It does not seem to be that useful to have the GIF import feature.

MNG support would be more reasonable, but unfortunately stupid people just didn't care (only a handful of programmes support it) because they thought animated parts of webpages were better made with Flash or streamed video. :(

deadsuperhero

Something akin to AGS' view editor would be nice, though.
The fediverse needs great indie game developers! Find me there!

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

#11
QuoteAs Sludge uses 32-bit colours extensively anyway. It does not seem to be that useful to have the GIF import feature.

This simply begs the question.  It doesn't matter if an engine is 8-16-24 or 32 bit, being able to easily import a series of animated images in a single file IS useful.  It's much easier than importing a long series of separate files for each frame or requiring the engine to load in a single image full of tiled frames and separating them into cells.  If you want to argue against an issue, at least focus on the reasons why people would use it (hint: it's not because GIF is 8-bit limited).  Finally, unlike mng which is essentially a dead in the water format, millions of people still use gif for everything from web art to (in my case) exporting 2d animations for use in other programs, like AGS.



Gilbert

#12
Quote from: ProgZmax on Thu 06/01/2011 03:31:41
It doesn't matter if an engine is 8-16-24 or 32 bit, being able to easily import a series of animated images in a single file IS useful.
It's doesn't really matter whether this is useful. What matter is how useful and what benefit it would offer. More features is always good, so there is no reason to be against the act of adding them, but if there are priorities on adding things because of time and resources, one would need to make a choice.
QuoteIt's much easier than importing a long series of separate files for each frame or requiring the engine to load in a single image full of tiled frames and separating them into cells.
Even if people prefer to make animated GIFs, there are programmes that will load up one such file and generate a single image full of tiled frames. Isn't that not easy enough? (As long as Sludge can auto-import tiled sprites, and as I've never used Sludge I couldn't tell.) And IMO this would be much more useful, as this would make it possible to import sprites in whatever colour depth the engine supports, not just limited to 8-bit palettised sprites.
QuoteIf you want to argue against an issue, at least focus on the reasons why people would use it (hint: it's not because GIF is 8-bit limited).
Can you tell me why then? Because I really don't know the answer. I use animated GIFs extensively and there is no reason not to use them on webpages and the like, other than resource demanding craps such as Flash or stream video when you don't really need them. But I still don't understand the logic behind this as importing a single tiled image would not be any less simple than using an animated GIF, and what you want is to have multiple frames of animations to be fetched at once anyway, not directly animating it in its original GIF form like in webpages. Yes, maybe there are some simple information that are stored in the format that may be useful, such as frame delay time (provided the importer did take note of them and use them to assign to some parameters afterwards) but IMO this is quite minor.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

Many programs don't support the importing of tiled frames, and the ones that do all require by necessity that you manually input the dimensions of the animation and the number of frames.  This is clearly more tedious than simply loading an animated gif that already has the proper dimensions for the animation and number of frames described in the format and breaking it up internally into frames or directly applying it to an animation.  If that does not illustrate a clear strength and benefit of the format then you're either just wearing sunglasses at your computer or you choose not to see what's there.

BigMc

The Spritebank Editor supports importing multiple files at once, so if the files have their filenames in the right order and all the same size, it's the same as importing a gif file.

Mati256

You might be able to help me with this. I downloaded an old game and it pop up this error:
QuoteFATAL:
There's an error with this SLUDGE game! If you're designing this game, please turn on verbose error messages in the project manager and recompile. If not, please contact the author saying where and how this problem occured.

I can't understand a piece of music which I've been told to play!

Maybe it's stored in a format that your FMOD.DLL sound library doesn't know about... make sure you've got a recent version of FMOD.DLL by grabbing the latest SLUDGE engine from http://www.hungrysoftware.com/. Failing that, maybe the resource in question isn't a valid music format at all... in which case, contact the game's author and tell them what's happened.

I have found people that downloaded and played this game so I don't know why I can't.
I tested it on Windows XP (without SLUDGE) and Vista (Whit Sludge 2.0). And both time it gave me the same error.
My Blog! (En Español)

xenogia

Thank you so much.  I've looked at the engine and compiled easily under Linux.  Time to port my game over to Sludge :P So I can have 720p and linux support.

BigMc

Hi Mati256,

the error message is from SLUDGE 1.x. Make sure you really start the SLUDGE 2.0 engine.

@all: Better ask about bugs in the SLUDGE forum, we will notice new posts there much faster.

Trumgottist

#18
Mati256: What game are you talking about? All released SLUDGE games have been tested to work with SLUDGE 2.0, and should work. (Except the original release of Frasse and the Peas of Kejick, but that game has been re-released in a special edition, which uses SLUDGE 2.0.) But as BigMc says, the error message you're getting does not come from SLUDGE 2.0 - you must be running an earlier version of the engine.

Edit: Never mind. I've seen your post at Adventure Developers and replied there.

deadsuperhero

I'd love to port my game over, too. I'm still pretty clueless about how to use it at this point, though. :P
The fediverse needs great indie game developers! Find me there!

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