Re: [kidsgames] Generic adventure game engine

[Jan Hlavacek <jhlavacek@sf.edu>]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 09:56:42AM -0700, Terry Hancock wrote:
> jm wrote:
> > At 10:00 14/07/00 -0700, Terry wrote:
> > >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.
> > Could you give me one HE title so I can take a look at it (well, hoping
> > there is a demo somewhere) ?
> 
> Humongous Entertainment games are not free in any sense of the word,
> althought they are cheap, and they keep the old ones on the market,
> gradually turning them into collections.  They run only on
> Win 3.1 or Win 95 (It appears that the newer ones only run on
> Win 95, though they were relatively late adopters).

OT:  did you ever have any luck running them under Wine?  I found out
that some of them work, but the colors are all messed up.  But my
Wine is quite ancient, which could be good if I wanted to drink it.

Anyway, the reason I write is that nobody mentioned another game engine
(actually two of them) from DOS, zzt and megazeux.  They are sort of
half way between the text engines and fully graphics engines.  Zzt uses
standard VGA character set to create "graphics".  Megazeux does the
same, but allows you to dynamically load in new characters, and eddit
them, so the graphics is much more impressive (sometimes it is really
hard to believe that you are in the text mode).  Both engines have
simple to use board editor, and an extension language for creating
robots.  You can do fairly impressive things with them.  While ago there
was an initiative to port megazeux to linux,  but their page
(www.zeux.org) seems to be dead for quite a while.  

I think that these two engines provide some sort of proof that such kind
of engine caold be quite useful. They also show that even though the
engine may be quite limited in order to be simple tu use, these
limitations may not necesarily be bad. 

If you don't know these games, check them out at www.zzt.org and
www.megazeus.org.

-- 
Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
Department of Chemistry                               Jhlavacek@sf.edu
University of Saint Francis               http://www.sf.edu/Jhlavacek/
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