Re: [kidsgames] Generic adventure game engine

[Terry Hancock <hancock@earthlink.net>]

jm wrote:
> It might be a bad idea, but I just wanted to know if such a project was
> already existing.
> 
> May be I did not define well the target of such a game engine:
>     + the target is NON computer people that would use such a "generic"
> engine to create short or long educational adventure game.
> Just like you might have used Hypercard to create educationnal software.
> Hypercard was/is slow, sort of limited. On the other hand, in one afternoon
> you could create a quite interesting stack.
> Just like you might use www.editthispage.com  to create your website: it's
> not state of the
> art, it's limited. On the other hand, in ten minutes, you have a weblog
> running.

A somewhat softer target might be paging "games" or software "books". 
Something like hypercard, with sprite animation capabilities (and an
editor to support creating them).  You probably can do this in
a browser with Flash or Shockwave type tools.  But, of course, those
aren't free.

>  Sometimes you just want to quickly create a "basic"
> adventure game, for educationnal purpose.

> And I don't think SPEED is that important for an adventure game.

Obviously that depends.  Sierra games and the Humongous Entertainment
games my kids play seem to combine "graphic adventure" segments with
"arcade sequences."  Interestingly, the HE games seem to use the
same arcade games over and over, just with different artwork.  It
appears that they simply developed a bag of software tricks, which
they exploit by developing new artwork and characters for the
new games -- in otherwords, they are selling their entertainment/
animation/character-branding rather than the actual software.

> I know SCUMM, AGI, Infocom engine (and old EAMON) as generic adventure game
> engine (for the ones that are documented at least). So if you have any
> other idea, they are welcome.

Do you mean you know how to program them?  Maybe you could write
a specification? 

Infocom games are interpreted, and there _is_ a free game interpreter
available for X-Windows, "xzip."  I've played a game or two using it.
Of course, that's text-only.  It would appear to have been neglected
for a long time.  I don't know if anyone has tried to extend it.

Mind you, I haven't done this kind of programming myself, I've just
played the games.

> At 11:50 14/07/00 +1000, Outlaw Jim wrote:
> >Basically it's a bad idea. I'm not just talking in terms of the speed
> >of an interpreter(which can be avoided all together by having an app
> >convert it to pcode) but general functionality suffers from having
> >overly broad requirements. Sure there are parts of an engine which
> >can easily be re-used but overall it's a much better idea to just
> >write an engine specialised for the game.

> > >That engine would be using xml intensively, be from the ground up
> > >"multi-lingual", would be using SVG for graphic in 2d and some kind
> > >of
> > >"open format" for 3D , and python as the internal script engine, of
> > >course.

Is Python really that good (or really that easy)?

> > >And may be it could be extended using Bonobo/Corba

I still don't know what this is.  Is there a URL I should look at?

-- 
Terry Hancock
hancock@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~hancock/index.html
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