Caltrops - Game Development





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]I have been looking for a long time for a program to allow something like what's done with Half-Life 2 or what was done with Duke Nukem 3D/ Doom that made it easy to design your own maps but provided for things like other NPCs that you can actually model and change things. The ones I can find either end up with really, really difficult tools, or they don't have the capacity to provide the nice features. If Duke Nukem 3 had provided a means to include video cut ins the way Hugo does (in my game Tripkey I use a video I took from Google Sketchup to have a department store show a video of a model of its next new store) it would have been very nice. Duke Nukem 3D has a few problems including that it's old technology and was 16-bit. It also has a 1,024 sector limit, which really kills you if you wanted to have staircases. And unfortunate it does not support use of SVG for images, because SVG is raster technology, it automatically resizes and you never get blurry images whether you have the image close or far away. So it makes doing move arounds much more realistic looking because it scales up or down nicely. There is an open-source implementation of DOOM written in Pascal, but DOOM is now so old in terms of technology that it's not really useful other than as an artifact of what we could do and a groundbreaking achievement then, the way sound was in motion pictures when "The Jazz Singer" came out over 90 years ago. The problem has been that there are some programs to do world building but either they're so complicated that it takes a degree in rocket science or brain surgery to use them, like Blender or the editing tools for maps for Half Life 2 and Portal, or they're hugely bloated. Or both. <s>Google</s> Trimble Sketchup especially, and Duke Nukem 3d, showed that you can have 3 dimensional worlds that are easy to work with and don't have to require horribly complicated tools to get the job done. Sketchup doesn't provide much in the way of capacity for having NPCs or objects that can move. There is a third-party add in called "Sketchy Physics" that offers this, but since it's not part of the application it sometimes crashes it. Plus none of this is open source, while it's basically usable for free there's no way to customize it or to add features. So it can't be that hard to build programs that can provide this sort of functionality in an easy to use package, it's there. Basically what I want more than anything else is something that can be used to create machinima. It's too bad that Disney's Stunt Island kind of died off, that's an example of something that would do what I want to do. You can use it as a game, or you can use it to make videos. And it doesn't need a doctorate in rocket science to be useful or to be able to build maps. Another one that did something fairly nice which is similar to what I'm thinking about is Second Life. [/quote]