Messages

ProgZmax,

Please don't try to cheapen my criticism because you perceive some engine slant on my behalf, Mnemonic.  It's unnecessary and just clouds the issue of my own observations using your engine, and why I prefer not to use it at this time.

Just how exactly did I "cheapen your criticism"? You said the sprite creation is over-complicated. I tried to explain basic sprite creation is a matter of several mouse clicks. If you think not supporting animated gifs = sheer over-complication, so be it. You find animated gif support an essential feature, I don't. I could also go into technical details about having two different formats for animations, where one doesn't (and cannot) offer all the features of the other, but I don't think this is the right time and place.

This often happens when you try and give people 'too much' in terms of design decisions

There's a thing called design philosophy. My philosophy is to limit the users as little as possible. And I'm not going to change it just to "attract the masses".
Am I satisfied with the current tools? Of course not, and I probably never will. But my time and resources reserved for the engine/tools development are limited, so they need to be improved incrementally.

but take new project creation for example - there's no 'blank' project option to start with (unless you offer a blank template separately, which makes no sense?) so people get to start out using your program by deleting a poser model and it's many directions before they even start out.

You assume everyone starts their project by making a new character. Maybe you do, but not everyone does. IMO it's better to start with a working skeleton game, which you can actually run, and start replacing/modifying parts of it, and still seeing the result directly in-game. Starting with a blank project directory wouldn't help anyone. There actually was a blank project template in the past and I deliberately removed it later.

3.  Pretty extensive documentation.  WME I have found rather lacking in that area and I am a person who prefers reading to hanging around forums constantly asking questions.

I dare to say the docs work well as a reference guide, and cover like 95% of all the engine functionality. There could be more tutorials, tips etc., but again, I can't do everything. Fortunately there are some impressive community efforts, like the recently released WME book.

4.  I prefer using one form of variable declaration (instead of var for public and global for global).  It's the way C does it and it's the way I like doing it.

Global variables use a different keyword, because they serve a different purpose. Even in C you need to use the "extern" keyword when you want to achieve similar effect, so your comparison isn't entirely valid.

When you go to someone and ask 'why don't you use this instead of this', instead of saying their reasons are wrong or invalid I would strongly urge you to consider them.  This, perhaps, could also be part of the reason why AGS has so many users.

Firstly, I didn't ask anyone. After all those years I think I have a pretty clear idea. I just tried to correct some of the misunderstandings (and there are lots of them in this thread...). I won't bother in the future.
And if I'm perceived as someone who doesn't listen to users' suggestions, then I probably wasted the last five years of my life.

theRedPress, you probably missed one very important thing. All the files and folders you see in ProjectMan are actually files and folders on your harddisk. Which means you can freely manipulate them using the file manager of your choice. So, "importing" anything means simply copying it to the project directory.
As for templates, you wouldn't want to start a project completely from scratch, believe me.

ProgZmax, what kind of sheer over-complication are we talking about? Creating an animation in SpriteEdit means:
-creating a new file (either from template or by clicking New)
-clicking the "Add frames" button
-selecting one or more images in the file selection dialog
-setting the frame delay
-clicking the "Copy delay to all frames" button.

And that's all. All the other options are for finetuning the animations.


I think your biggest problem with WME is, that it's not AGS It's not, and it's not intended to be.

Just goes to show the wintermute developer lurks here, 'absorbs' ideas and puts it into his engine. No offense to you mnemonic. Just taking the piss. I think wintermute has far greater 2.5d capabilities than ags, since we have to us a plugin to get that...

I can assure you WME users are supplying me with enough ideas for several lifetimes, no need to "absorb" anything elsewhere
But I admit I'm visiting this forum sometimes (as well as many other adventure-related forums) simply because I love adventure games and I love game development, and AGS forum is an interesting place connecting both. (even though some people here seem to hate me and my work with passion )

I'd be using Wintermute right now if it had been listed above AGS in the magazine from which I read about them. It's all the fault of the alphabethical order.

Darn, remind me to rename WME to something like "Absolutely Awesome Adventure Creator", that should take care of alphabetical order

But if AGS and Wintermute had identical feature sets, then there'd be no point having two seperate applications, and we'd may as well merge them into WinterAGS. There are some things that Wintermute does better and some things that AGS does better, and as long as both systems are always striving to improve then at the end of the day that benefits everyone.

However, with every new release the systems are getting more and more similar to each other (which is logical, considering we have basically the same goals). My theory is, that if we both had infinite time and resources, we'd end up with exactly the same product
Congrats on AGS 3.0 release, btw!