ALT: MARS game development tool ....

[Totalimmortal]

hey any one know anything about it or where i can find it ??:p

[Carlos Camacho]

MARS was used to create "Prince of Destruction" POD (and follow up?) The developer made the tools available that created the game, they were buggy and probably wouldn't run on today's OS. But I could be wrong. I have it on an old CD-ROM SOMEWHERE. The developer isn't interested in it at all, as he now does REALBasic stuff. You might run into him sometimes, I think his handle was POD Master. Anyhow, I think you are better off looking at ColdStone Engine.

Cheers,

[ERaZer]

I would go with TNTBasic(but then you need to know Basic) becouse I think CS aint no good, why?
• Very low customization!
• Slow(its friggin choppy on my g3 300, and it doesn't even use things like antialiasing(TNTBasic supports it))
• Its really hard to change the fighting system, even a bit
Otherwise its pretty good(but I think the included graphics sucks, but thats just IMO)
I might not like CS becouse my expetation was high, becouse I've wanted to do a CRPG and I've stared a few projects but they've all gone down the drain

[Totalimmortal]

yeah i would go with cold stone but iam kinda porr right now and cant afford it, and i dont want to warez it cuz i would feel bad. MARS would be cool cuz its free and i would not need to lean a programing language, like i would if i went with real basic. any one know of any other game creators other that MARS, Cold Stone and Klik and Play?

[mySocksAreOnFire]

here ya go

http://www.zip.com.au/~tonio/mars/index.html

[Carlos Camacho]

Good of you to find the link! I thought the page is down. The person I was thinking of was Andrew B of course. Someone should ask him if he would allow MARS to go open-source, so that a new team could work on it.

As I said before, MARS may be very unstable.

Check out Al S.'s Adventure Construction System. That might be another option.

Keep in mind, even with Coldstone, you will still need to do some programming in the form of their scripts, otherwise you are just changing graphics and putting out the same thing other people are.

BASIC is not that hard to learn. Give METAL, TNT Basic or even Chipmunk a try!

[Totalimmortal]

whats that and where can i find it? sounds promising. also i found this program called "level creator" whats thats for? thanks all

[Carlos Camacho]

You can make "Hypercard" style adventures with Al's stuff. Look at:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=1791&db=mac

Don't scoof at that, because you could make a game like Myst that made some good ching. Not sprite-based stuff though.

Level Creator builds levels for games. It was made to support Spriteworld (http://www.spriteworld.org/). You still need code to do something with your levels.

[Totalimmortal]

ok well i guess theres no way around it iam going to have to learn some code :-) question is what language iam going to learn. i'll download METAL after work today and check it out.

[Josh]

If you have OS X, I would recommend learning Cocoa.

[Carlos Camacho]

METAL runs on Mac OS X and TNT Basic is getting better under Mac OS X. Chipmunk was also updated to Mac OS X if I recall. yes, COCOA should be your final destination. But if you are coming from ZERO, then I would highly rate METAL or even TNT Basic. The docs and sample code for METAL are good. I have seen some great "shooters" written with it.


Cheers

[Totalimmortal]

yeah the hypercard stack thing is not for me concerding the type of game i want to make, so i guess iam going to try METAL. i'll let you know how everything works out.

[Carlos Camacho]

Tell the "METAL-heads" that I sent ya. Their forum is very active.


Cheers

[Al_Staffieri]

GameMaker is slowly expanding beyond card based, hypercard style games. The current release has 2 player internet capability using the free GMOnline addon tool. Beta versions of GameMaker include the beginnings of a sprite system. The OS X version is in late beta testing and you can download the open beta from the web site.
http://members.aol.com/AlStaff/GameMakerHelp.html

[Totalimmortal]

so yeah i got metal last night and played with it a bit, i compilded the invaders game that came with it . i have not been able to look at the code just yet because of school, work, ect. but i hope to have a good chance to look it over tonight. yeah i was going for the Cocoa. but i dont have os x on my home computer only at work do i get to mess around with it.

[Carlos Camacho]

AL, you need to keep us up to date on the progress of GameMaker so we can let our visitors know. You might want to write an "intro" article (check out the CystalSpace article) to increase awareness of GM. If I recall, you use FutureBasic to create it?

Cheers,

[griffin239]

Wholly smokes I downloaded GameMaker months ago..opened it and closed it...I haven't liked those card based games since my Mac IIsi and trying to make similiar games on Amiga.

But after reading this thread..I found that their are tons of these things!!! What interested me was the creator's multi-player online feature..

I'm curious to see what comes of the multiplayer end of this.
What I could foresee is implementing Multi-Player Game maker into a quiz show kind of game..like hit the right multiple choice answer first type of thing. Perfect for schools..

Or a standard maze game where each player is trying to get out of the maze...perfect for Game Maker type of games.

Pretty damn cool...

SO TotalImmortal..you've had METAL for a month...whats the verdict. I'm curious. I've downloaded it a dozen times yet never get around to thinking in BASIC when I have it around. Currently I'm converting a BASIC salary program to C over at CodewarriorU.com. Should be interesting and I may actually learn this stuff if I can see my own handywork changed over.

Good Luck game makeres.

[Al_Staffieri]

Originally posted by griffin239
Wholly smokes I downloaded GameMaker months ago..opened it and closed it...I haven't liked those card based games since my Mac IIsi and trying to make similiar games on Amiga.


With a little creativity and some work, GameMaker games don't have to look or run as if they are card based. You did mention the multi-player feature which, as you said, does open up some interesting possibilties on that end. However I believe it is still best suited for adventure games, with my favorite GameMaker game being Dreaming by Helena Markoya.
http://members.aol.com/MacGameMaker/dreaming.html

[griffin239]

Hey I tried Dreaming out...almost enjoyed myself until I realized why card based games drive me nuts...click click click in circles for the last 10 minutes...getting nowhere...

I guess I like the action to be happening ..and then I have to respond to it. If there's one thing I can't stand..getting stuck...oh that bugs me...I don't suppose theirs a Game Maker Made games cheat page somewhere?


But I cracked it open in resedit..nice art....looks like interesting stuff.

Hey Al, your in Jersey? I'm in Jersey..about 2 miles from Giants Stadium...or what ever corporate name it has now.

Going to Macworld next month? Perhaps we should have lunch...I don't think I'll be getting tickets to the Developer's Party this year...that was a big favor last year..and a good time...

[Leisure Suit Lurie]

Originally posted by Totalimmortal
so yeah i got metal last night and played with it a bit, i compilded the invaders game that came with it . i have not been able to look at the code just yet because of school, work, ect. but i hope to have a good chance to look it over tonight. yeah i was going for the Cocoa. but i dont have os x on my home computer only at work do i get to mess around with it.

Well, Metal should run on either OS 9 or X, as should the programs you compile with it.

Same thing with TNT. Of course, Metal's free, and TNT is $30. On the other hand, $30 is pretty close to free for a programming tool as good as TNT is. I would avoid Chipmunk because it requires using line numbers which is very annoying. More for the nostalgic types, or someone who just moved to a mac from an Apple II or a C64.

[Najdorf]

TNT rules. It helps a lot to have a nice interface.
Oh, and if you want to have a stunning experience, you MUST try silver creator :shock: that was my first coding experience.
:shock:-I' m still shocked-:shock:

[joephish]

Well, I'm currently looking forward to BlitzMax coming out, which will be a completely cross-platform version of BlitzBasic (see blitzbasic.com (http://www.blitzbasic.com) ).

I've used it on the PC, and it is FANTASTIC, seriously. I've tried downloading most of the things for the mac which are available (like metal basic and others), and honestly, they just don't touch it.

I've already made my first game and sold it to a publisher, making a pretty decent lump of dough if I do say so myself :cool:

Of course, until it comes to the Mac though, I don't think I can be bothered with it since it means hauling some massive heavy beige boxes backwards and forwards from university ;-) That's why I'm now giving SDL a shot, which isn't too bad, but nowhere nearly as easy and fast as BlitzBasic. And talking of speed, I got better framerates with Blitz than I am with SDL since it was properly hardware accellerated.

Seriously, it has EVERYTHING. Adding a network game mode to my game was just... trivial.

Itching to get my Mac version :-)

--Joe

[Najdorf]

Oh, that blitz looks cool... I want it too!!
But I didn' t find anything about blitzmax... are you sure it' s a true thing?

[w_reade]

Yeah, I just had a look... nothing on the site that I could see; Google found a year-old IMG news item and a couple of mentions, but it seems limboed.

Damn! I've heard very good things about Blitz3d, and that post got me all excited for a minute.

[Leisure Suit Lurie]

Originally posted by w_reade
Yeah, I just had a look... nothing on the site that I could see; Google found a year-old IMG news item and a couple of mentions, but it seems limboed.

Damn! I've heard very good things about Blitz3d, and that post got me all excited for a minute.

Don't hold your breath on that. If I remember correctly, Blitz was a competitor to AMOS on the Amiga. TNT is loosely patterned after AMOS, and is sure to get better in the future. Ditto! for Metal.

Patience, boys. BASIC is slowly but surely making a comeback on the Mac.

[joephish]

Oh yes, BlitzMax is definitely on its way.

I've been in the Blitz community for quite a while, and the maker (Mark Sibly) got a free Mac from Apple a while ago, and he posted comments on his weblog saying how nice the operating system is. Also, he posted stuff a while ago saying that he had got the basic compiler to work on all platforms (to do a simple maths program or something).

Recently, Blitz Research released something called BlitzPlus, which is all over the blitz site. It is basically Blitz2D with a GUI. Mark Sibly said that this GUI was basically him learning from experience what makes a decent GUI creator etc since the other main feature in BlitzMax apart from portability are the GUI features.

I know there's not much on their site about it, but that's basically just because they're publisising what they've only just released and supporting it etc. BlitzMax was announced quite a while ago, and the site has been updated quite a lot since then, but that doesn't mean they aren't still working on it.

Don't worry, it may be late, but it DEFINITELY exists, and it'll be worth the wait :-)