ENIGMA Forums

General fluff => Off-Topic => Topic started by: bgordebak on July 13, 2014, 07:47:48 pm

Title: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: bgordebak on July 13, 2014, 07:47:48 pm
Hi everybody. I just want to tell you about my story of searching for a FOSS 2D game development engine.

I don't like to use proprietary software or pay for software except for games. All software I use is open source. I'm not against selling software, especially games, but I love to use software written with enthusiasm rather than popular concerns. And besides I don't have thousands of dollars to pay for software that I can replace for free. I don't like pirating either. I myself tried my hand at different FOSS projects, not much though. Well, some day I might sell the games I make. Because I see games as the end result, and entertainment, like movies or books. So I don't have a problem with paying for games, or selling them. But production tools must be free I think.

Anyway, I started with SDL in the beginning. I made some progress too. But it was painstakingly slow to develop a decent game. So I learned about rapid prototyping. I looked into easier and focused game engines. I tried Pygame, didn't like it. I tried LÖVE, and I love it. It's super easy and quick to develop a game in LÖVE, but your games have to be open source in the end. I couldn't find a way to compile LÖVE games.

I looked into Torque2D, and didn't like it. I tried Monkey-X, and didn't like it either. I couldn't run Godot on my machine. Finally I've found Enigma. I started developing with Enigma yesterday, and today I ported my LÖVE game to Enigma fully. It's not a big game, but a game in a day, one day after starting? Now, that's what I call user-friendly.

Most people here have used GM before AFAICT, and I understand Enigma is somewhat a clone of GM. But in this long post, what I want to say is: Enigma is great! Please make it better, I don't care a bit about GM compatibility. Because it isn't really important. Please let's drop cloning GM, and build a better and easier game engine on what we have now.

I love Enigma and I want it to be better than GM or other engines. I even think Enigma shouldn't try to be a GM clone and be GM-compatible. Make it a better engine which isn't slightly compatible with GM. Please. Let's all forget about GM.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: Darkstar2 on July 13, 2014, 10:55:11 pm
Oh wait till you get deeper into ENIGMA and work with it more, you'll love it even more ........ :P :P :D

I hope you know some C++ and have good debugging / problem solving skills, you'll need it later on ! :D
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: bgordebak on July 14, 2014, 01:31:37 am
Oh wait till you get deeper into ENIGMA and work with it more, you'll love it even more ........ :P :P :D

I hope you know some C++ and have good debugging / problem solving skills, you'll need it later on ! :D

I know some C++, and as a Linux user, I love problem solving. If only Enigma had a good documentation. I don't know, like LÖVE. I know it's mostly a DnD interface, but some EDL documentation would be great.

Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: Darkstar2 on July 14, 2014, 02:32:00 am
Well I am an ENIGMA user and don't use ANY D&D, I do everything by code from start to finish.  I never was much into D&D, I used it only for a short while back in GM7/8, but then I moved to code.  In LGM you can turn off D&D, that frees significant screen space.
Also in ENIGMA you can use GML, EDL and C++ in the same project.  That's what I do most of the time.  None of my projects would be compatible with GMS :P

About the documentation some of it could be better made, but most of the stuff is documented it's on the WIKI, some things are missing and some examples are wrong, I fixed some, and if I have some time will fix more add more......

There are still some issues/bugs you might run into using ENIGMA.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: TheExDeus on July 14, 2014, 06:11:24 am
Welcome aboard. Even taking into account how ENIGMA (and GM) is easy to use, I am still impressed you could remake a game (even a simple one) in one day. Usually people need to learn about events and some functions before they can do that. But when you get more proficient you will be amazed how easy it is to make stuff. 3D is harder, but 2D is extremely easy. You can make Super Meat Boy, FTL or Angry Birds clones in few hours. But we, as developers of FOSS, also encourage you to look into the source and when having problems, then post here or try to fix them. We are quite limited in manpower right now, so we are taking any help we can get.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: bgordebak on July 14, 2014, 06:42:18 am
Welcome aboard. Even taking into account how ENIGMA (and GM) is easy to use, I am still impressed you could remake a game (even a simple one) in one day. Usually people need to learn about events and some functions before they can do that. But when you get more proficient you will be amazed how easy it is to make stuff. 3D is harder, but 2D is extremely easy. You can make Super Meat Boy, FTL or Angry Birds clones in few hours. But we, as developers of FOSS, also encourage you to look into the source and when having problems, then post here or try to fix them. We are quite limited in manpower right now, so we are taking any help we can get.

Sure, I'd be glad if I can help.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: bgordebak on July 14, 2014, 07:08:21 am
Welcome aboard. Even taking into account how ENIGMA (and GM) is easy to use, I am still impressed you could remake a game (even a simple one) in one day. Usually people need to learn about events and some functions before they can do that. But when you get more proficient you will be amazed how easy it is to make stuff. 3D is harder, but 2D is extremely easy. You can make Super Meat Boy, FTL or Angry Birds clones in few hours. But we, as developers of FOSS, also encourage you to look into the source and when having problems, then post here or try to fix them. We are quite limited in manpower right now, so we are taking any help we can get.

Actually the day before I did some tutorials written for Game Maker and the first game tutorial in the wiki. In the end of the day, I was ready to develop simple games. If I can't do something, I simply search it in the YYG forums. It's not that hard.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: Josh @ Dreamland on July 15, 2014, 05:35:26 pm
Thinking of ENIGMA in terms of GM is not useful. The goal of ENIGMA is to be a decent game engine first, and compatible with Game Maker second. If you can produce a good argument as to why the latter is bad for ENIGMA, then I am happy to hear it, but I believe you'll find that the cases you present are exactly the cases where we drop compatibility. There are many compatibility requests on the tracker marked as "Will not fix" for such reasons.

We maintain compatibility with Game Maker for a few key reasons.
That's all I really have to say on the matter. You could argue that conforming to GM's library is holding us back, but it isn't. We are free to add as many functions as we like on top of its own, and we do with some frequency. I could say more on that, but it's better to let people discover new limits on their own. Though... there technically aren't any.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: bgordebak on July 15, 2014, 06:06:55 pm
I understand that. Alright, I just want it to be better and more popular. Actually right now it's good enough for me.

I never used GM, so I can't tell the differences between the two of course. Compatibility doesn't hurt anyone of course, if it's not holding the development back.

Cheers.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: Josh @ Dreamland on July 15, 2014, 06:49:37 pm
I understand the concern. It may hold some developers back, but those are the developers who would otherwise not be interested in ENIGMA, so the gain wouldn't be there.
Title: Re: Enigma as only Enigma
Post by: Darkstar2 on July 15, 2014, 09:31:34 pm
I guess I will fully agree with Josh on this one.  Having GM compatibility is good and bad.  Of course it will cater more to those who already use GM and want don't want to learn something new.

I have nothing against ENIGMA not being compatible with GM, so long as it offers the same features or better and documents properly.

Personally I have completely dropped GM, and now using ENIGMA exclusively - I intend to build ALL my projects from scratch using ENIGMA and using EGM.  NONE of my ENIGMA projects will be compatible with GM, since I use EDL, GML and C++ in nearly all my projects now, in fact ENIGMA can be expanded and new functions added, many of which I intend to add soon.  I'm sure if ENIGMA moved to being its own and dropping compatibility, people would learn it just as easy as they learned GML, since the engine is C++, but everything is tied to functions, so instead of the GML, you'd use other 1 line functions.  Having 2 products is a good thing to satisfy both markets.  Personally my use of ENIGMA was not because of GM compatibility, but mainly due to the compiled nature, and no dealing with gay runners. AND the ability to integrate C++ into the mix. Of course at first I was happy that ENIGMA had some compatibility, because I was already familiar with GML, and I use strictly code in my projects, never any single D&D, in fact D&D is turned off.  So I think the people who will require the compatibility, are mostly D&D users.  OF course I was happy the IDE had the same look and feel and simplicity, mind you, I'd still be willing to learn new sets of functions and a new IDE if the situation presented itself providing proper documentation.

If we break ENIGMA in 2 and continue progress on another version of ENIGMA which is not compatible to GM, to continue to fix bugs and broken functions held off by the GM crap, then I think we can go far, that is if GM compatibility is holding it back, whilst keeping the ENIGMA people know would be fair to both worlds :D
My main gripe with ENIGMA is the shite stability of LGM, actually enigma's plugin itself is causing LGM to crash frequently, that is a major problem which is why I am porting LGM to 6502 ASM.   ;D ;D ;D