Please forgive the lurker chiming in again...
I create
shareware games. Which are HARD to make a living from. (I don't
make a living with the shareware... I must supplement with a part
time job at an accounting firm...) But games are where my heart lies.
I am also into doing games and I often bite myself that I didn´t
discover Metacard back in the day. I started with Rev 1.1 searching
an alternative to Director.
I know that the new incarnations of Rev have game plugins or
something. I saw something on the website the other day about it.
[shameless plug]
As I am the one responsible for that I´d like to comment a bit. This
is not meant as advertising, but as showing off what I do with Rev.
Once I started using Rev I thought it would be very cool if it could
do this or that. It took me a while to get savvy enough to figure out
that it really allows to do what I wanted, yet required a vast amount
of script to be written. Once I figured out how easy it is to write
reusable code I made a multimedia library and happiely used it for
myself. I showed this at EuroRevCon 2004 on Malta and started talking
to Kevin about it. The result is a library stack called arcadeEngine,
that is available as a 3rd party add on via RevSelect. What does
ArcadeEngine do? Basically it takes the math pain out of creating
games. It allows asynchronous movement of different controls at
different speeds all under scripted control. You can change any
aspect of movement at any time. Start it, stop it, change the speed
or even the path while it is moving. It does collision detection
using different methods. It handles basic 3D stuff. It is packed with
geometric functions that are useful in games. Basically it is my code
library and therefore tested to the max within real world Shareware
games and multimedia presentations.
You might want to go to the following page to look at the showcase
and trial if you are interested:
http://www.runrev.com/section/revselect/arcadeengine
The current showcase for Mac Os X requires X.3.9 or higher though, as
it is a Universal Binary.
The library works with any version of rev >= 2.1 and I can´t think of
a reason why it should not work with Metacard, as it is a
librarystack. I haven´t tested it myself though. Klaus?
If you want to see a few games using the lib, just drop me a line off
list.
[/shameless plug]
But I don't know how many game developers have actually migrated to
Rev. I never hear game discussions on this list.
As far as I can judge from the mails I answer concernig AE tips and
tricks the number of people interested in creating games is not too
small and growing.
So I've sort of
figured that the primary feature requests that Rev gets are more
business app oriented. Ditto for bugs. I don't know if every
reported bug gets fixed in the next version or if there is a
heirarchy. If there is a heirarchy then, mine might not top the list.
The most important thing is to report the bugs I guess. IMHO Rev got
a lot better at handling bugreports. At least bugzilla entries get
answered since a while. I am quite happy to see there is progress.
I just want to ensure that the version I migrate to doesn't break
what I've already created, or stick a major monkey wrench into the
primary project I am focused on. You really have to plan carefully
when bug fixes don't come with the purchase.
Perfectly understandable.
[snip]
Because they can get games anywhere, my clientele tends to have high
expectations. Shareware development has a whole different approach
then what most of you probably do. One bug, and they'll post it all
over the internet on every download site in big letters, giving me a
one star rating. Everybody else who is thinking of downloading me
will read that rating and move right on to somebody else's game.
Nod. And if you want to continue supporting games for the Mac
community you need to go universal binary. The PPC will be dying
slowly. Maybe 2 or 3 years from now there will be only a handful of
people that will pay for a version that does not run natively on
INTEL machines.
I am serious about making this business pay for itself and become my
sole living.
Maybe some MC / Rev developers should cooperate on a nice games
collection, like the "After Dark Games" series. If that is of any
interest for some of you please contact me off list, as I actually
have been working on some games for it already. However working in a
team would be much more fun, wouldn´t it?
All the best,
Malte
_______________________________________________
metacard mailing list
metacard@lists.runrev.com
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
