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Re: [kidsgames] Generic adventure game engine



jm wrote:
> 
> Well,
> 
> It might be a bad idea, but I just wanted to know if such a project was
> already existing.
> 

I know of a development tool that would do the job, no one has written a
game engine in it, though.
Its called Entity, and has most features that you are looking for:

* Its XML based.
* It has language bindings for most interpreted languages, including
python, perl, javascript, TCL, and scheme is in the works. 
* It uses GTK & IMLIB for the user interface. SVG is not yet supported,
but could be.
* The language is structure in such a way that it is very similar to
doing web page development using HTML & perl (or even HTML and
JavaScript). It also looks like PHP3 in some respects. The XML describes
the user interface, with the various interpreted languages handling
events, io, etc.
* Its object oriented.
* A graphical development tool is available (though still in
experimental stages).
* It uses dynamic loading techniques, so that if you're just using a GTK
interface and Javascript, only those features are loaded. It is pretty
fast.
* A windows port is in the works. 

The project web site is at:
http://entity.evilplan.org/

> 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.
> 
> Of course, a specific engine is always better: but that means 10 months of
> code for a product. 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
>   jm
> 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.

I beg to differ. Our entity interpreter can bring up a GTK app nearly as
fast as native C code. (We're talking fractions of seconds here)

> >
> >On that note: I am currently re writing/porting an old DOS adventure
> >game engine which definitely won't be licensed under GPL(it's a
> >commercial venture) but parts of the code will hopefully be released
> >under a BSD style license....
> >
> >-
> >Cheers,
> >Dariush


-- 
Sincerely, Kirk Ismay
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