[Wormsie]

But this is criticism. This flame will give me friends and power, to be sure.

[flame]I have some comments abiout the article "Why is AGS better than the other engines" (second issue of the AGS ezine) Giving a list of all the bugs in other engines doesn't prove anyting about AGS, especially when the article tells nothing of AGS's features! With this in mind, the final conclusion is embarrasing: "As you can see, there are plenty of engines out there, but AGS is most certainly the best. You can create anything with it. The examples are many. It is very flexible and is constantly updated. Hats off to Chris Jones – the king of all engines!"

I'll nitpick just for the fun of it - no, just because I think that the quality of writing about amateur adventures could be a little higher, and people need the right knowledge about engines, and the writers need to know that there's at least someone who doesn't like what they've written and how they might develop. If you ask me "Why don't you write it yourself?" I respond: "Because I don't know enough about other engines - anyone who doesn't know enough about other engines should stay relatively quiet about them."

Many people, including myself, Think that AGS is the best engine for adventure games.

How nice that the writer already has a View. It strikes me as odd why an ezine devoted to AGS would even need an article like this, if they weren't afraid of the other engines. (No, I really don't believe they are afraid of the other engines.)

But why is that so? Lets make a in-depth comparison between AGS and other engines and find out.

In depth my...

SLUDGE is the engine that is the most useful engine after AGS. It has many features, it is updated often, but it has no IDE.

Someone might actually like the fact that it has no IDE that messes up everything. See, there is a different viewpoint, which ought to be covered in an article that claims to be "in-depth". But of course, if the target audience is AGS users, they'd probably be more than happy to read that their engine is the best one and the rest are losers.

And the scripting language is more difficult to learn. You'll have to have at least minor knowledge about programming if you plan to use it. SLUDGE also supports any resolution and is faster on hi-res.

If you want hi-res games, AGS is not the best choice because it's still relatively slow. AGAST Morningstar and WinterMute are already 3D accelerated. Besides, whichever engine you use, you eventually have to learn the scripting language.

AGAST It is also a good engine, but it has no IDE, and the scripting language is hard to learn. There are some very nice examples of games made with it, but judging from them, it is very, very buggy.

If you want to create a basic game with the default interface it shouldn't be that hard. If you want to change the interface it gets trickier. The scripting language in AGS isn't easy-peasy, either.

If you say that AGAST has no IDE, you have to remember to tell people that it has many helpful utilities. Without the paths editor creating paths would be almost impossible.

2ma2 once challenged Agast developers to make a platform game with Agast. His exact words in his website were: "Try to make this with Agast!" And an Agast platform game was created - though its only known to few. (AGS the most flexible engine?) Also, there are two commercial games made with Agast. That's certainly a merit.

The latest Agast versions aren't buggy, the very first ones were. It seems unfair to compare games made with an old version of the engine, as the article was published in July.

MAD It is also a good engine, though still in its alpha and beta versions. It also hasn't got an IDE and it has far too less features. It also isn't updated as frequently as the others. And the only game I can think of being made is Hero6. Judging by the demos, you can do a nice game with it, but it requires far too much scripting.

Some people like the fact that everything can be changed by scripting instead of hundreds of windows, wizards and buttons. That's one form of flexibility.

I don't really know why so many people choose AGS, but probably because it was one of the first engines that were finished, and besides, it has the status of a retro engine, it has a real good-old-days -feeling. This alone has caused the fact that not as many developers have chosen the other engines, thus causing even more alienation of the other engines.[/flame]