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Written by Mat
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Saturday, 17 January 2009 02:42 |
Current features of Place:
- Free software, professionally finished;
- No restrictions on licensing of your game;
- Most of the work done for you, just tell Place where you want to place your entities and how you want them to react;
- Movable entities automatically negotiate obstacles using shortest-path algorithm;
- A bare minimum of scripting experience required of game designers;
- Advanced features available to those who want to dig deeper;
- Helpful debugging system enables rapid testing and makes it easy to find mistakes;
- Prototyping system to reduce the amount of tediously repetitive work involved in development;
- Free, extensible toolkit: add new features if you wish;
- Uses a well-established, popular general-purpose scripting language with vast amounts of documentation, so there's no need to learn some adolescent, obscure single-purpose language just for scripting games;
- Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and various other platforms;
- Games get an extensive menu system for making and loading savegames and configuring all of their settings;
- Use any graphics resolution you wish; player can choose their own and your graphics will be rescaled, preserving the aspect ratio if desired;
- Entities can automatically scale down as they move further away to give the appearance of perspective;
- Simple yet powerful conversation system;
- Link subtitles with the voice audio files that go with them, if you want voice acting;
- Multi-threaded caching system pre-loads resources before they are needed, for improved responsiveness;
- Internationalization/localization: easily support translations of a game into foreign languages;
- Support for cut-scenes, using either the pre-existing system of rooms and entities, or MPEG format videos;
- Extensive tutorials to get you started.
Features planned for the future: - Auto-package games into a Windows .exe installer, .pkg file for Macs or .deb, .rpm or .tgz package for Linux;
- WYSIWYG game creation and editing studio, integrated with the Gimp professional, open-source image manipulation suite and featuring a text editor for scripting with syntax highlighting, auto-completion and debugging facilities;
- Parallax scrolling background scenes;
- Ability to use 3D models for entities instead of flat sprites;
- Simplify programming interface further still and extend to Java, Python, Lua and Ruby;
- More speed improvements;
- Native support for Nintendo's DS and Wii consoles and SymbianOS (for recent phones by Nokia and others).
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 April 2009 20:50 |