Well I haven't posted or done much of anything lately. Haven't touched a single game I'm working on in over a month.
Mostly this is due to lack of time and motivation, but another good reason for my lack of game making is that I'm lurking in the shadows, watching Enigma evolve.I can't express my excitement for its progress in words, but its there, shiny and such. Although I've failed to get anything I had at hand to run in it, that was due to me using commands not(yet?) supported in Enigma.The fact that I can import GM stuff into it was wonderful though.Heres generally why none of my stuff would work…that even includes Shield Breaker even though it was fairly simple, some functions just won't grove with Enigma yet.Heres a list of what I found doesn't exsist…draw_set_halign & draw_set_valigndraw_set_fontmerge_colorvariable_global_exists…and there was a few others but I forget what they were.I've considered doing a project in the current released version of Enigma, just to see how far I could get, but lack of time holds me back. That and I've recently got into playing The Guild 2. Its like Sims with economics, role-playing and midevil settings. Its rather well done in all aspects, and from buying the original and then updating it, I noticed that they creators actually put work into updating and upgrading and the likes. Bravo.Suprisingly I have still been using Game Maker lately, but not for a game.Well you see I work in the PrePress department for a newspaper company, we use programs like Jazbox, Adobe InDesign and a Kodak Imaging machine to create plates which are basicly like stamps for the printing press. Unfortunatly for us the Kodak's software doesn't organize or even know what we need and when we need it.So I figured why not use GM to create a frontend program to handle the loads of stuff we get daily.I've dubbed it the CTP File Juggler (CTP = camera to plate). Not a single sprite or image is used to reduce how much space it takes up. It generates its entire GUI based on the height of the window and all buttons and objects of it are dynamicly drawn. In other words with a few changes to some key variables I can easily change the layout and sizes.
I tried to port it to Enigma but I don't think its ready for that, and like I mentioned above, key commands I use aren't there(yet?). But then there is the ability to use C code in enigma, something I haven't tried out quite yet.In other news I've been tossing around the idea of starting a software company. That would be including general or custom applications and games. I've gotten a request from a teacher to create a mathmatical version of Shield Breaker, which actually sounded like an interesting idea. Its all on paper for now.The Crawl also may take a new direction, but I'm not completely sure what as of yet.
First of all, good blog, I actually read it.
Yes Enigma is taking its time, but it will get there. And if your paying as much attention to its progress as think you are, you'll be the first to know.Nice app you made there, although with the way GM suck, I don't believe GM is a great choice for apps, or games I suppose…GM companies don't work very well. No publicity and usually not a lot of content. The only good one is Poppenkast, which I'm not sure if it considers itself a company.How could Shield Breaker be mathematical?Well I would switch to Visual C++ if I were to go with this. I like GM because it greatly reduces development. It actually preforms very well, with extensive testing of course, the program uses little ram and CPU and can run correctly on most computers. Theres issues when on computers with shitty onboard video cards, but then I wouldn't call them shitty otherwise.
Enigma could help launch some small companies better than GM ever could, I'll give you that.As for a mathamatical Shield Breaker, I know its sounds hard to imagine but I figured out an interesting way to do it. No notes on hand so I can't really recall how it worked.Enigma doesn't support draw_text… so haha
Enigma will never have variable_global_exists
To do that, it'd have to have a hash and whenever you declared a variable it'd have to set the hash value to true. Much too heavy for a small set of functionsNo draw text function? Well it never said that function wasn't available when I was going through the compiling process. Thats actually kind of odd not to have such a thing.
I could stand to stop using the variable checking functions though, but I'd like to see some kind of complete commands list once things get further along. That is unless they do have something like that somewhere.