I'm quite sceptical about GUIs. As Mnemonic imself has stated, he created the heavy GUI because the scripting language became so difficult. GUIs always try to hide something...

I disagree. GUI's in general are better for creative purposes where you basicly create a metaphor for that purpose only (e.g a music sheet in Cubase, a canvas in Photoshop).

With WME it's just the same. For scripting, there is a nifty language for you. You can create Pacman in WME if you want. With the recent support for methods, you can write powerful functions, if you want to.

But for *designing* purposes, WME offers a toolset to create a scene, tweak animations, and setup script <-> scene node relations. There are only drawbacks NOT having those GUI based tools.

Having said that, as a tool developer you have to make sure the workflow is okay, because if you have a crappy GUI, you are better of scripting in (which is not the case with WME )

[Deshrill]

Originally Posted by eriq

Deshrill, you're making a game too?

I'm making an RPG with RPG Toolkit to teach myself that program better because this summer I'll be teaching courses in RPG Game Design, Adv RPG Game Design, and Action Game Design at Emagination Computer Camps at their Boston location.

I also need to teach myself Game Maker 5.2.

I would love to learn AGS, but don't have the time right now... I'd probably learn something like TADS first to knock off a quick text adventure.

I'm also involved in the 2004 Java revision of Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet 2004 with writing documentation.

[AGA]

Heh, too many people are put off by 'learning AGS'. You don't need to learn anything much, it's just a matter of knowing maybe 5 basic commands, then learning the rest if and when you need them (and I don't think anybody's ever used anywhere near all of AGS's commands in a game )

You could work though AGS's tutorial in a few minutes, and have a character walking around a basic room in no time.

[eriq]

Originally Posted by AGA

You could work though AGS's tutorial in a few minutes, and have a character walking around a basic room in no time.

true. I have actually already gone through the tutorial and made a room with a connecting room in AGS. It's not difficult at all. Also, the text tree and dialogue interface is simple to learn. It's just a matter of plugging in text and descriptors into certain slots in the GUI. I found it very easy. And as someone already mentioned, it's going to take some scripting knowledge in any engine to create some really cool stuff.

I am just concerned about sound and engine scalability (resolution and speed). And, of course, that coin interface should work nice and smoothly.

[AGA]

Speaking of which, did you get on alright with the template I sent you?

[Deshrill]

Originally Posted by dacloo

I disagree. GUI's in general are better for creative purposes where you basicly create a metaphor for that purpose only (e.g a music sheet in Cubase, a canvas in Photoshop).

Great point, dacloo. Having something like AGS where it is run by a GUI makes it much easier to hit the ground running and get some loose form of a game up and running as opposed to programming everything from scratch.

I'm not against programming-- I can program when needed, but it's nice to spend 20 hours making some puzzles in a game work as opposed to 80 (programming the interface from scratch, etc).

[AGA]

Heh, you ought to have seen AGS in its DOS IDE days. It did have a development GUI, but it weren't pretty. I was put off using it for a few weeks before I started using it, just because it was so damned ugly. You newcomers have it easy

*AGA waves his cane at all the young whippersnappers.

[Kingzjester]

Originally Posted by AGA

Heh, you ought to have seen AGS in its DOS IDE days. It did have a development GUI, but it weren't pretty. I was put off using it for a few weeks before I started using it, just because it was so damned ugly. You newcomers have it easy

*AGA waves his cane at all the young whippersnappers.

*Flips off AGA

Sit down before you fall down, old man!

[Erwin_Br]

Originally Posted by AGA

Heh, you ought to have seen AGS in its DOS IDE days. It did have a development GUI, but it weren't pretty. I was put off using it for a few weeks before I started using it, just because it was so damned ugly. You newcomers have it easy

*AGA waves his cane at all the young whippersnappers.

Hey, I remember that. At that time I was also experimenting with AGAST and Sludge. The weird AGS dos menu's pushed me off to SLUDGE at the time. I haven't even tried AGS ever since, so I wouldn't know how it looks like today :eek:

--Erwin

[AGA]

Heh, it's a lot nicer and easier to use these days, take a look.

[eriq]

It is much easier to use nowadays. I remember the DOS version of Roomedit or whatsitcalled.. the dialogue editor.

WME also sports a fresh windows GUI.

[Igor]

Originally Posted by AGA

Heh, you ought to have seen AGS in its DOS IDE days. It did have a development GUI, but it weren't pretty. I was put off using it for a few weeks before I started using it, just because it was so damned ugly. You newcomers have it easy

You said it. I was "put off" for a whole year and was continue to work in MMF Then, after i got plagued with bugs in MMF, some persistent users on AGS forums convinced me to try it out a bit more... and i realized that behind the ugly dos look actually lies quite powerful engine (that, at the time, still had its shortcomings)... then came Win Edit and a truck-load of new features...

[Wormsie]

Originally Posted by dacloo

I disagree. GUI's in general are better for creative purposes where you basicly create a metaphor for that purpose only (e.g a music sheet in Cubase, a canvas in Photoshop).

With WME it's just the same. For scripting, there is a nifty language for you. You can create Pacman in WME if you want. With the recent support for methods, you can write powerful functions, if you want to.

But for *designing* purposes, WME offers a toolset to create a scene, tweak animations, and setup script <-> scene node relations. There are only drawbacks NOT having those GUI based tools.

Having said that, as a tool developer you have to make sure the workflow is okay, because if you have a crappy GUI, you are better of scripting in (which is not the case with WME )

You are absolutely correct. I go hang myself now. I just happen to like it more that everything, or at least as much as reasonable, is script controlled. It makes more sense to me than to open a thousand wizards and press a hundred buttons.

I do agree that I was quite harsh on WME. Some of my opinions have changed since then and some haven't. But as I'm not able to argue without making an ass of myself, I rather shut up from now on.

I'll go create some metaphors for some purposes now. Only.

Personally, I do not like what AGS has done with their "Windows GUI version".
I played with it and was surprised to see that AGS does so much for you, so much that I thought:
"Why not give that control to the user by scripts?"

E.g that screenshot you placed:

- "don't automatically move character in Walk Mode"
Uh, can't I just script this myself? E.g:
not add: On left click: actor.WalkTo(X,Y);
- "Characters turn to face direction"
If there is a command to turn to a direction, why not code that functionality myself?
...onClick{ (actor.TurnTo,myDestinationObject); }
Because if you leave that control to the user, I can for example, play an MP3, scale the character,
and show some explosions that go with the OnClick handler. (bad idea to actually do that :-)
- Room transition style...Why not do a custom transition, when I go to another scene?

Basicly: Why does the GUI interfere with what I believe to be scripting solutions?

My point is that I think "WME knows its place" when it comes to GUIs and scripting.

[Marek]

I think the best solution is somewhere in the middle. The perfect engine should have a GUI that allows a newcomer to make an adventure game with almost no scripting, but where most of the details are based on defaults or templates. So characters would turn to face objects automatically, move characters in walk mode, scenes would have a default fade in / fade out, and so on. But that shouldn't stop anyone from creating a basic adventure game. All the customization stuff should be contained in the script files, where advanced users can tailor the templates to their specific needs.

[AGA]

dacloo: some things are so fundamentally basic that you shouldn't need to script them, the engine should handle them for you like it does with AGS...

[kingBLAOW]

This may have been covered already, and if it has I apologize, but I have one question regarding AGS, WME etc etc. How are they for game size? I know now-a-days it is really a non issue with cheap storage and faster computers, but do these programs create games that have a file sizes that balloon to be larger than if you were to code them from scratch? I understand that they will all naturally be a bit bigger but is it by a considerable amount?

[AGA]

The average AGS game is about 2-3MB...

[Mnemonic]

Originally Posted by kingBLAOW

This may have been covered already, and if it has I apologize, but I have one question regarding AGS, WME etc etc. How are they for game size? I know now-a-days it is really a non issue with cheap storage and faster computers, but do these programs create games that have a file sizes that balloon to be larger than if you were to code them from scratch? I understand that they will all naturally be a bit bigger but is it by a considerable amount?

The resulting size is highly dependent on the game content; on the game resolution, number of scenes, number of animations, sounds, music etc. etc. The size of the engine runtime is insignificant. If your point is "the engines are full of various functionality most games won't ever use, therefore they make the games bigger", that's not the case, if you were to "code it from scratch", you'd probably save few hundreds of kilobytes at most.
As AGA said, average AGS game is about 2-3MB big, since the average AGS game uses 320x200 resolution. Most WME games use higher resolutions resulting in larger data files.

[kingBLAOW]

Originally Posted by Mnemonic

If your point is "the engines are full of various functionality most games won't ever use, therefore they make the games bigger"

That was indeed my point.. thanks for the informative reply.