Programming » The Engine Discussion

I wouldn't recommend Wintermute, it's too limiting for our purpose imho.

I really don't want to push you into the abyss of programming our own engine,
but it would be just perfect for our needs.

Some years ago I saw a nice little open-source 2D Adventure Engine, with all the Multilayer and Alphamapping support that would be useful for us.
I think it was on ZFX or Developia, but I can't find it atm
With some luck they finished it, and it's ready to download

Imho the programmers should determine how much time they want to spend on programming,
because they have to bear the consequences of the decision made in this thread

Wintermute may be a good idea - at least it's open source (even though you gotta request the source to get it.. I don't understand, why they don't just have it for download).
Of course it sucks that it's windows only, but maybe it's feasible to port it to Linux/OSX (at least the engine - the tools may be harder to port, but who knows).
You should evaluate the portability when you test wintermute.

Another possible engine: Broken Sword 2.5 had its own engine that was donated to ScummVM, that means support for that engine in ScummVM is under development.
So you could ask the Broken Sword 2.5 people if they let you use their engine and tools. Then you could easily support a plethora of platforms without having to develop or port an engine yourself :-)

The Adventure Game Studio may go Open Source, see http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/i...c=42016.160
Even if it doesn't it may be worth a look, at least it supports Windows, Linux and Mac.

I think porting Wintermute to Linux would be quite hard, btw.

http://opensludge.sourceforge.net/

you're welcome :-)
actually I've never heard of this project (even though I once looked for point'n'click engines on sourceforge) until I saw it on happypenguin.org a few days ago.

That doesn't make much sense.

1. The original engine does not support high resolutions. This sucks - even if TS2 doesn't have to be state-of-the-art technically, it should at least support decent resolutions and not look so pixelated. It also doesn't support 32bit color as far as I know.
2. You'd need tools to create levels etc compatible to Toonstruck 1 - these tools don't exist yet (at least outside of Virgin Interactive/Burst, but these original tools are probably lost as well)
3. AFAIK Toonstruck uses Smacker or Bink videos for backgrounds, animations etc. Its a proprietary format, which is quite inconvenient. FFMPEG has a decoder for them (also used by ScummVM), but I don't think there's a free encoder for them.
4. ScummVM does not really support custom games. Especially the toon engine probably contains much hardcoded stuff specific to Toonstruck1. I don't even know whether the gameplay itself is scripted (like in the SCUMM engine games like Monkey Island) or hardcoded in the C++ Code...


IMHO, if you want to make progress with the game itself, use a freely available engine that officially supports custom games, like OpenSludge or AGS or whatever (I'd prefer opensludge because it's Open Source and has proper Linux support).

Creating your own engine or creating tools for the original Toonstruck engine (and hacking the ScummVM port to support TS2) would probably take years. This time is better spent with creating the game itself.

I know how ScummVM works. But "perhaps we can use this knowledge to get the original toon engine for our game" sounds like you want to use the original Toon Engine (which is crap) for TS2.

OpenSludge is totally cross-platform (even the editing tools work on Windows, Linux and OSX) and also Open Source, so you could modify it to your needs.