Messages

If you aren't using speech, I guess you could use a Text Property instead. So when you click on your sidekick, he says:

Code: ags

function cChrisJones_Look()
{
        String gollygee = Room.GetTextProperty("Sidekick's Description");
        if (gollygeebatman) cChrisJones.Say ("%s", gollygee);
        else cChrisJones.Say ("Holy undefined room, Batman!");

}

Alternatively, you could use a Dialog. Just make a dialog option for each room, and turn off every other option, and when you click on your sidekick, you can have a short conversation. Just remember on loading each room to turn off every dialog option and turn on the relevant one.

You're thinking too complex. AGS has it's own foibles, but you can work with it without too much trouble.

It would be nice to have entity scripts, though, so the global script isn't cluttered with junk. Imagine having a script for each character, inventory item and GUI. Even if it's just a dummy that gets appended to the global script.

I have an unlimited length Youtube account, so as soon as I can, I'll get it uploaded and linked here, so people don't have to download an MP4 to use it.

Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s7B1a9BYDk
Here we go. Not the best quality, unfortunately.

Whilst on the surface, this game has all the appeal of an adult-entertainment Atari 2600 game, it's subtlety and method of handling this topic is surprisingly deep.

Spoiler

The main protagonist, who remains nameless, is trapped within an existential crisis. Without an identity, or anything to take his mind off of his inferiority complex (indeed, the backgrounds suggest that nothing except winning matters to him - not even his own house is important, and moving from room to room is disorientating and like stumbling through a veil of intoxication). What little decoration there is is at odds with his current situation, or completely banal. A smiling photograph of a happy couple? A well made double bed?

Our nameless protagonist shines no light on his own situation, offering no introspection other than "Must beat wifebeating rival" and "She's ugly". He cannot even think up imaginative ways to take his frustrations out on his wife, leaving that to "Jim" who calls him from an unknown location. His utter lack of meaningful social interaction leads me to believe he is friendless. The only interaction with a non victim is when "John" arrives, and immediately our protagonist is outshined by his articulate grace and masterful, symbolic artistry.

John is everything the protagonist is not.

The sparse backgrounds, the lack of existance of anyone but his goal, his rival, and his master, leads me to believe that this is actually a dream of the protagonists. He fantasises about violence and subjugation, to escape his middle age, middle class stagnation. His wife is a projection of the people he wishes to subjugate, and the rival is a projection of his anxiety of other people. No matter how he tries, he can't overcome him. He cannot even subjugate his victim, leaving it to accident and happenstance to torture her. He is too cowardly to be truly, unashamadly evil, and even his victim isn't afraid of him.

And thus, he is powerless in all corners, a worthless, squirming maggot of a man, where even in dreams he cannot transcend his craven nature.

[close]

Or is it just me?

Nice game. A bit gratuitous, but it delivered what it promised. Would have liked to have seen more interactions, to take advantage of the adventure game medium.

The stuff to the left of the rightmost building is what we pan from to establish the scene, otherwise there's this house in the middle of nowhere. The player doesn't actually interact with the left part. I just wanted something to say "This is our location right now."

Been working on an animation for the more action orientated bits of my game (since walking while being chased makes for hilarity, not drama) so here is the main character running as fast as he can (not very):



I don't like the tail, but I don't know how to get a nice sine wave action on it. Anything else I need to fix?

Also, I need some more feedback on this background:

It's a quiet little suburb on the edge of the city, far away from the noise and bustle. The house on the left right (guh, I am a dumb) is the most important part of the scene.

Monsters-as-blue collar workers has been done as Monsters Inc. pretty well. If you're gonna differentiate your idea from theirs, work from the very basic premise and go from there.

"Why are monsters scaring kids?" is the most elementary question, I'd think. Throw down a few ideas, and then develop them from that. Then you'll get something a lot more original than if you said they did it as a job. Deconstruct the premise, then reconstruct it into something new.

Here's one to get you started:

Spoiler

There are hideous, unformed, evil creatures that are coming. Creatures that even terrify our good monsters. If they wipe out humanity (and it's soft, unprotected minds), then they're doomed. Our guys are monstrous in appearance, but are actually weaker than humans.

These monsters are priming humanity for the coming storm. Adults cannot see them because adults refuse to believe that monsters exist (and thus, both the benign monsters and the evil monsters are invisible to them). If the malign monsters come, they would surely wipe out all of humanity, humanity being completely oblivious to them. So these benign creatures have to breed belief into the next generation to protect them. Of course, just APPEARING to a child doesn't have an effect. Humanity has bred in a resistance to this kind of thing. You need to tap into a primal fear more ancient than mankind itself to make yourself manifest to them.

But this is only the first step. Your army must be taught to see the things from beyond the veil. Then they must learn to fight them.

Potential horror here, as your army is in fact a bunch of kids against boogeymen that even the boogeymen are afraid of.

[close]

[1 )]

1   ) Have a strong design document. Write out everything that happens in the game, all the characters and their motivations. Show it to other people. Their approval will spur you on, and their criticism will make it better.

2   ) Keep it short. If you haven't finished a game, huge projects are really daunting and drain your energy faster than you can say "Overwhelmed".

3   ) Programmer art, programmer dialogue, and being bare bones with your game will really help. Forget the fancy arcade sequence, forget the online multiplayer (why does everyone want that nowadays?), just make the skeleton of a good game. Does it make sense that you use the squirrel on the concierge? If not, you have to put clues in, and amend your design document. Doing a skeleton of your game makes it that much more solid. You've achieved something.

4   ) Do things on paper. People often get disheartened if they do things on computers because they're left with the impression that they have achieved nothing, because what they've done isn't tangible. Write out notes in a notebook, on paper, or simply on napkins and it will spur you on. Concept art especially should be on paper. That way, you can look through it and think "Yes, I sure have done a lot for this game!"

5   ) Keep it simple. Want to allude to a grand scheme, a great conspiracy but you just can't bring yourself to write it? Leave it as an allusion. You don't have to make it anything more than that. You build on the simple, and the game will grow organically. Trying to force a huge story into something whole cloth just doesn't work, and usually ends up being obtuse and boring.

6   ) Take a break. If you're working on your long game, and you think "I AM SICK OF THE SIGHT OF THIS", just put it to the back of your mind and do something different for a while. If your design document is strong enough, and your work is on paper, you'll look at it and think "Wow, I really want to get back into this!"

7   ) Other people. If other people believe in your game as much as you do, it's a huge confidence boost. Bring on the critics lounge, post screenshots in Games in Production (This is AFTER the skeleton stage, by the way), ask people to look over your design document (but keep it hush hush), and get people to beta test and do quality control.

8   ) Force of will. Usually the only thing keeping people going at the end, you just gotta keep going and stay focused.

9   ) Deadlines. Set a deadline for each part of your project. Design document done by X, Skeleton done by Y, Character graphics done by Z. It will force you to continue.

10 ) If all else fails, and you still can't find a reason to work on your game, try something new, something fresh. Something you really believe in, and that noone else has done. Forget the rip offs, forget the remakes, forget the Deluxe Ultra Disk 5 versions and your huge worlds with huge continuity. Just make a short, enjoyable game with a lovable character and a short, simple story.

I've been looking at buying a videocamera, ostensiably for shooting reference footage for an animated short I've been doing, but in the future I'd like to do some green-screening and rotoscoping work with it (ala FMV games and early sierra games). I only want to buy one video camera, and my budget is around £300-400 ,  but I'm at a loss as to which one to get! I'm not a film tech expert and all of these brands astound me. Where do I even begin? I don't have time to trawl through several million reviews, as my coursework takes up pretty much all the time I have.

I need an SD card capable video camera, HD is preferable (widescreen necessary. I can live without full HD). This camera caught my eye:

DV Tape only cameras, unfortunately, are out of the question, as I need the SD card for the fast transfer of video from the camera to my PC. What considerations are there?
- Does interlaced footage mess up green screening?
- What's the best camera I can get for around my budget? As in, which gets the best picture in the worst lights, and records competently.


Do any of you nice film-directing-type-people know which camera I should be getting?

Thanks

Yeah, barefoot's backgrounds indicate precisely what the Critic's Lounge tries to help. He attempted linear perspective, but didn't have the technique down. It isn't some kind of outsider art.

Also, please enlighten us about all the other systems of proportion, color theory and perspective. (You sound almost like an evolution denier demanding equal time for alternatives.)

I have a few.

Byzantine or Inverse, where the vanishing point is at the bottom, focal point leads outward.
Divine perspective, where the biggest things are the most important.
Mensa perspective, where the most intellectually stimulating things are the biggest.
Krisfaluscian perspective, where the grossest or funniest things are the biggest.
Perverse perspective, where the sexiest things are the biggest.
Communist perspective, where every object is equally sized.
Pessimists perspective, where the mistakes are biggest.

I'll answer this one, since I know of it.

I think that 'can't break the rules till you know them' thing is an oft-repeated-in-art-schools fallacy (or probably more accurately an oversimplification).

There must be rules - there must be a cohesive conceptual structure to what you're doing with space and all that - but it needn't be any particular set of rules. What about the 30k years of art before linear perspective was (re)discovered? Is that just shit? Or the folk art which never adopted it?

Do we have to learn Byzantine perspective, for example, before being allowed to draw without it?

Linear perspective is really just one approach. Using it is fine, if you actually want it. But seeing it as the only way or even the default is lazy.

(same appies to all the other stuff, colour, proportion etc., I'm just using perspective to illustrate)

Byzantine perspective is a trick, it isn't how our eyes see things. I don't see how learning that before learning anything else helps in the slightest.

Linear perspective is a good way to approximate what our eyes really see. It gives a sense of space and form. You learn how to make things realistic before you learn anything else. Just like you learn how to write a convincing character before you write an alien.

You learn how light and shadow works before you can twist that around.

You learn how proportion works so you can caricature.

I mean, you could apply it to science. "Atoms! Pah! What an assumption! Atoms only came in the last 100 years, and now they're probability waves! And they might not even exist! Let's ignore it entirely and focus on the four classical elements, which were around a lot longer! Not to mention radiation. Can't even see that. It's all fire! Fire and air! Let's not assume that science has made progress in accuracy. We can do whatever we want."

Do you know anything about the production of art?

It isn't some nebulous "You can dream anything!" thing right off the bat, nor has it ever been. You still got to know how everything works before you can articulate those dreams.

Allow me to give a counterpoint. I'm an artist, not a writer, and so the art is most important to me.

The second thing is: You're all too concerned with technique. This relates in part to the above - I think it's caused by the above. This need to create meticulous pixel art this-and-that. But it goes further - the number of posts I see where someone says something like "it's nice, but the perspective is wrong" or "it's nice but the proportions are wrong" and "here's a tutorial on how to do it right".

Which is fine if it's balanced by as much concern about the actual game. About the mechanics and logic and reality you are creating. About the nature of games - what they are and what they can be. The stuff which actually makes the game a game rather than a meticulously drawn presentation. But it's not - I see virtually no discussions like this.

There seems to be an absolute adherence to a really quite staid, pedestrian and regressive approach to the formal aspects of artistic practise. Linear perspective was something the visual arts flirted with for 400 years of its 30000 of existence, and then quickly discarded. Proportion is something to play with - to meaningfully exaggerate and distort, not a rulebook. But this is beside the point.

Stop right there! What foolishness is this? The reasons we use the rules of linear perspective, proportion, colour theory, and other "pedestrian techniques" is because we need to master them before we can play with the form.

How can we break the rules if we don't know them? Breaking the rules has to be deliberate. Breaking the rules when you don't know what rules you're breaking.... that's incompetence, not being avant-garde. If it doesn't work, if it looks wrong, then it must be fixed. Then, once you know the groundwork, the foundations, then you can build up. Art is as much of a discipline as writing. You gotta be internally consistent.

Don't you dare pretend that the rules don't matter. Doing that is appealing to mediocrity.

The point is that I'd rather have a literary masterpiece written in dirt on tree bark than, say, a Dan Brown book printed on paper so smooth I want to rub my face in it, in a typeface so exquisite that seeing a single letter causes me to explode in ecstasy and bound in leather made from the skin of cloned velociraptors. It's the goddamn content that matters. It's what's inside. Of course, polish is always nice but that should really come last. It should be the least concern. The primary concern should be making games which make me think in ways I've never thought of before or make me feel things I didn't know I could feel or ... whatever it is you want to do.

Games are little universes. Every game you make is a separate universe with its own rules and logic and reality which you get to shape and dictate. It's a logical space in which you can say anything it is possible to say, you can arrange reality in any way you like. You could be asking questions about the nature of reality or what it means to be human or trying to evoke a feeling so fleeting it doesn't even have a name and instead you're worrying about whether a couple of lines converge in the same place? Really?

Oh, great. "The writing is so much more important than the art!". Way to make my kind's contribution null and void. Graphical Adventure Games are primarily a visual medium. It isn't IF. Worlds are created through the visual medium just as well as the written one. Without good art, the effect is limited. Again, if we don't know the rules, we can't break them. Saying that the visual elements are pointless, that we could just write up a new universe with crappy MSPaint art and flicky, warpy animation (or none at all) and it would be preferable to a beautiful game is a pretention I cannot stand. You seem to not get the importance of art in games. And writing is just as hard as art.

How can we engage in a dialogue, how can we invent a new universe to blow people's minds if we can't even craft a simple, enjoyable game? This talent doesn't sprout overnight. It has to be built up from the building blocks. We make simple games to practice. Think about it: The average member of the AGS community can't have made more than 1-3 games. We are not master craftsmen, or philosophers. We're amateurs experimenting with something we too are trying to understand. If the games industry has failed to make more than a handful of games that can be considered true art, made by professionals, what chance do we have?

I believe games are THE cultural form of the 21st century. The one that matters. This place has such an amazing concentration of talent and obviously has the will to make games. You have this tool and you have absolute creative freedom - you should be pushing the form forwards. You should be exploring and defining what a game can be, what a virtual world can mean. You should be engaging ina  dialogue which has a meaning and relevence now not wallowing in a discussion from 20+ years ago, vomitting it up and chewing it over again and calling it retro. Retro comments and critiques and reshapes. Remaking this stuff isn't retro, it's classicism and classicism is artistic death. More than that, it's accepting and revelling in being irrelevant.

We do what we find fun. Not what we think should be a new -ism. Philosophical masturbation isn't my bag - Entertainment is. Maybe we like the look and feel of games from that era, and want to experience more? I sure think games moved on technologically before they were ready.

Even the games which get lauded as pushing things forwards tend to be nothing more than, at best, early modernism presented as a linear narrative. A narrative that was discarded by every other medium almost 100 years ago.

Really? Well! I'm sorry for not being so educated as to know exactly what you're going on about there - it just comes across as pretentious and haughty. But I'm pretty sure modernism has never fully left the other mediums.  Being hooked on these wordisms is surely unhealthy. So long as the story comes across, it shouldn't matter what techiques you use to tell the story. Just like art: It needs rules to adhere to, otherwise it's not very good.

I think it's kind of a duty, if you have the talent and the will and the ability and desire, to make something which affects people now you as much as these games obviously did back then. To think about and understand what form that must take today and at least try to make it.

Yeah, I'll try to make an entertaining game. Like the games before entertained me.

I'm a bit offended that it comes across that you want games to be this lofty ideal, and that individuals who aren't english lit. majors should write them. But they should always play with and build on the rules of narrative!

BUT WOE BETIDE if ART gets the same treatment. Can't be allowed to build on previous knowledge there. "Stop being so anal about whether the art looks good. But the storytelling, oh, I'll be so anal about that."

What exactly is it you want? We're trying our best here, and you're dismissing our efforts so offhand. Remakes are good practice to get better at making games (they show you how to make a game - just like artists followed their masters in the old days).

Pixel art is a beautiful medium, and quicker than doing full animation at ridiculous x ludicrous pixels. It's just that much more economical. And we practice things.... to get better. You don't think someone's ultimate ambition is to remake the same game forever?

Let's be realistic here. People make the games they want to play. They want to entertain people. They want to make something beautiful or funny or silly or engaging.

Would you rather play a game based on a silly, fun thing?

Or Tracy Emin's My Bed?

I know what I would want. I must be a philistine.

It's not all remakes here in the production of DWEF. Here is a suburb on the outskirts of the city. Very rustic, very open, unlike the cramped inner city we've seen so far. This is where the normal folk live.



But not all is as it seems in this happy little burb. You'll see why in Disk 2.

Just thought it would be nice to present all new content.

I'm kinda missing the old crazy 8-bit colors in the backgrounds - they added a great, retro-like vibe to DWEF's cyberpunk world.

Actually, looking back at the game, I think most of the crazy colour choices were because my monitor was uncalibrated. I can't bear to look at the sprites in the old version, simply because they were that oversaturated.

Never fear, though, the neon aesthetic will return in the exterior scenes in the city. It'll just be easier on the eyes. I'm still using a 256 colour palette, though.

Usually I:

1) Set the lineart layer to multiply. Make sure it's clean and ONLY has the black outlines on it.
2) Magic wand tool the parts you want a particular colour.
3) Make a new layer, and Expand the selection 2-3 pixels, depending on lineart thickness.
4) Flood fill the selection.

It's quick and easy.

[PALGORITHMS: The 256 Colour Translucency Module]

Ever wanted to do some neat colour effects, but found out too late that you're actually making a 256 colour game? Don't want to take the easy route of switching up the colours to 16bit? Fancy spending long nights tearing your hair out over ill-documented, messy code?

I don't either, but here it is anyway. I was gonna release it after I finished DWEF, but heck, that would take years and by then, who knows if 256 colour games would even be made. I can attest that the functions work really nicely, but  full screen stuff is kind of slow - unless they're on small sprites. Use these things tastefully and sparingly.

PALGORITHMS: The 256 Colour Translucency Module

This module can do it if it's got something to do with a palette:

• Percentage based simulated translucency (10 real levels, interpolation/dithering for the rest)
  
• Discworld I style colourisation: Turn everything monochrome and a colour.
  
• TintScreen and FadeToColour, both of which don't pause the game - your characters can walk off screen while the shot fades to black, red, or magenta!
  
• Module is currently 99.9% nondestructive. If you ever mess up the palette enough, switching rooms will solve it.
  

This module also contains crazy voodoo I don't fully comprehend (The Translucency stuff, appropriately enough. The CLUT generation was SteveMcCrea's work, and I reused the buffer technology from Astauber's dialogue module). As of now, translucency only works on objects (no translucent characters as I can't work out how ViewFrame works), and the translucency rendering is rather slow, but that's Get/PutPixel for you. As soon as I work out how to replace frames in a view nondestructively, I'll implement character translucency. I'm not a programmer, so that will take a long time.


DOWNLOAD IT HERE!

How to use PALgorithms:

  COLOURISATION FUNCTIONS

ProcessPalette (int palsiz, int palindex[])
  Creates a new colourisation palette and sets it to the current room palette. For instance, for a discworld inventory effect, you need
   a series of the colour blue, from lightest to darkest. here is the example. PALsiz would be 7, palindex would be bluearray:
      bluearray = new int [ 7 ];
      bluearray [ 0 ] = 46;
      bluearray [ 1 ] = 47;
      bluearray [ 2 ] = 48;
      bluearray [ 3 ] = 49;
      bluearray [ 4 ] = 50;
      bluearray [ 5 ] = 51;
      bluearray [ 6 ] = 52;
   While this can be declared in Game_Start, the game will crash horribly if Process_Palette is called before a room is loaded.
   Put it in On_event for before room fades in, and you'll get a colourisation palette you can use in every room.
   Multiple minipalettes at once aren't supported in this version, unfortunately. DO NOT sort these out of luminescience order, or
   freaky stuff happens.
   
ColouriseArea (this DynamicSprite*, int x1,  int y1,  int w,  int h);
   Places a colourised version of the selected area (x1,y1 are the top left coordinates, w+h are width and height) and places it inside
   the selected Dynamic Sprite. Useful for GUI backgrounds. WARNING: Generating a realtime colourised area that is too large may
   slow down your game!
   
CreateColourisedSprite (this DynamicSprite*,  int oldsprite);
   Creates a colourised version of a sprite (oldsprite is the ID of the sprite in question) and places it in the selected Dynamic Sprite.
   Palette Index 0 is ignored.
   
  FADE FUNCTIONS

   Tint(char R, char G, char B, char p);
    Tints the entire palette that particular RGB value, with an intensity of P. P is 0-63 in range. Leaving a room will restore the palette.
   
   UnTint(char R, char G, char B, char p);
    UNtints the entire palette FROM that particular RGB value, with an intensity of P. I'm not sure what happens if you call UnTint without calling Tint first.
   
   Fadeout(char R, char G, char B, char speed);
    Fades out the entire palette to that RGB value, where P is the speed at which it happens. P is 0-63.
   
   Fadein (char R, char G, char B, char speed);
    Fades out the entire palette from that RGB value, where P is the speed at which it happens. P is 0-63.
   
   
   TRANSLUCENCY FUNCTIONS
    The most complex of the PALgorithms, since it requires being set up from outside the game.

GenerateCLUTForRoom ();
    Generates a CLUT from the room's palette for 10 levels of transparency and saves it in CLUTROOMX.BMP, where X is the Room number.
    This takes an inordinately long time, and the game may appear to hang, but a display box will pop up when it is finished. It should
    take around 5 minutes for the generation to complete, so be patient. Once you have the image file, import it into AGS (exact palette import only, room specific)
    and make a new property for your room: TransCLUTSlot. Set that value to the sprite ID of the CLUT file, and you've finished setting up.

  SetTransparency (this Object*, char alpha);
    Replaces Object.Transparency. Anything below 90 or above 10 will register on the renderer (I don't suggest breaking these bounds with
    a transparent sprite) and render it translucent. Values divisible by 10 are completely smoothly translucent, ones divisible by 5 are evenly
    dithered between the value +5 and the value -5. Values imbetween that are diffusion dithered, and will look like static.
    This is a limitation to keep down generation time and file sizes.

SetGraphic (this Object*,  int graphic);
    Replaces Object.Graphic. Use this when you want to actually change a translucent sprites appearance for animation et al.
    Views for animated objects are not supported.

There were several different soundcards in that era.

Are we talking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8raL-lWjOs&feature=related
Adlib?

or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20
MT-32?

Those are the two quintessentially retro sounds I remember when I play 90s games. There were others, but they're either wavetable or beepers.

Works like a dream! Now I have a fading function that doesn't pause the game! Thanks so much

I'm trying to write a screen tinting and fading function that can be made nonblocking (obviously I can't start that yet since the blocking version doesn't work) and I've run into a problem.

The tinting code doesn't work half as well as I wanted it to. It works, it just... tints the screen a little bit, even with repeated applications, it doesn't fade completely to any colour. It's based on ages old code from AGS 2.1 or so, so likely I've got something terribly wrong. What Fadein and Fadeout are supposed to do is fade the screen to the colour completely. What tint is supposed to do is tint the screen a certain amount.

Code: ags

//backuppal is the original palette, unmolested by any palette functions.
//
static function PALgorithms::Tint(char R, char G, char B, char p) {
  if (p > 63) p = 63;
  int i;
  while (i<256) 
  {
    palette[ i].r = backuppal[ i].r + (R - backuppal[ i].r)*p/256;
    palette[ i].g = backuppal[ i].g + (G - backuppal[ i].g)*p/256;
    palette[ i].b = backuppal[ i].b + (B - backuppal[ i].b)*p/256;
    i++;
  }
  UpdatePalette();
  Wait(1);
}

static function PALgorithms::Fadeout(char R, char G, char B, char speed) { 
if (speed>63) speed = 63;
int p=0;
while (p<=63) 
  { 
  PALgorithms.Tint (R,G,B,p); 
  p+=speed; 
  } 
}
static function PALgorithms::Fadein (char R, char G, char B, char speed) {
if (speed>63) speed = 63;
int p=63;
while (p>=0) { PALgorithms.Tint (R,G,B,p); p-=speed; } 
}

What's gone wrong?

I felt the backgrounds were weakest in the last version of the game. Now they are not. It's amazing what painting at 320x200 can do for the details. You can really get stuck in there and work it like pixel art rather than traditional painting.



Now if only the writing could go as smoothly as the art. I'm having trouble pinning down puzzles and plot, though I have the majority of it done (in the design document I had earlier). Once the links between plot points have been fully fleshed out, work will become a lot easier.

Though if anyone wants to have a stab at looking it over for me, I'd be much obliged. I'm afraid I'm not much of a game designer yet.

A Jurassic Park adventure game?!

This can only mean one thing:

"They show extraordinary intelligence, even problem-solving. Especially the big one. We bred eight originally, but when she came in she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one... when she looks at you, you can tell she's working things out."

I can't wait to play as the velociraptor!

I remember why I discarded it : At the moment, it relies heavily on scripting.

?? Every serious game relies on scripts. From SCUMM to AGI to SCI to Quake to Source, every game has a scripting language to make it extendable. The era of hard coded engines has long passed. What do you want, Klik and Play?

An engine cannot be serious and not have scripting capabilities.

Also, it's not clear how good is the rendering engine (there's not point using 3D if it then looks ugly )

You work around the limitations of a rendering engine if it isn't the best evar. Just like if your engine can only support 256 colours, if your rendering engine can't do, say, specular mapping, you work around it by not designing characters and sets that don't rely on that. There are Playstation games that look beautiful, and I don't think the PSX even supported bump maps or realtime lighting. Or 16 bit colour. I still think Spyro the Dragon is a nice looking game, as is Tomb Raider,even if they're blocky and without advanced texturing.

You don't need HDRIs and refraction or anything to make something look good. You just need an artist who can work within these limitations.