- Has Enigma been developed Enough to create a full length and functional game? (ie. Harvest Moon for the SNES level of length and polish)
I'd say yes. I am creating many things in it for a long time now and especially old style 2d games (like your mentioned Havest Moon) can certainly be built in it. You can build any 2d game in it. And a lot of 3d games as well (although there are many things lacking for a full-blown 3d game, like animation engine and such).
- Does Enigma let you export the game as a standalone .exe file?
Yes. They are always exported like that even when run from the IDE. Then it is written to a .tmp file in the /temp folder. If you rename the .tmp to .exe it will be standalone. Right now though, we have also finally fixed the export function so you can build a game with icons and no need for that /temp work (it was more of a hack anyway).
- The licensing page is somewhat vague. Does the license allow me to release all of my and Enigma's code as free and open source software, both as gratis and commercial works? I will happily give Enigma credit of course, but does using Enigma mean that they in any way own my work (music, code, graphics, story)?
From legal standpoint this still needs to be laid down (there has been a topic about it), but I can assure you that everything you make in ENIGMA is yours. You can also sell the games. You also don't need to credit ENIGMA or anything, but you can if you want. The restrictions (with GPL) on ENIGMA is just on the ENIGMA itself. So you cannot take ENIGMA, change it a little and then sell it as your own. If you make any changes to ENIGMA and you want to sell them (which I think you can), you must still offer the changes to us for free. People like Ism or Josh can tell more.
- I played the Isometric Mario demo in the Games section. When you get to the top part of the map, the game lags considerably. Is Enigma really slow and meant for very small projects, or was it the fault of the developer of the game itself?
That is probably a bug. ENIGMA is quite fast, but as in any engine it can slow down either because of bugs in ENIGMA itself (or bad optimization) or more frequently because of the developer of the game. Like if you do 10k collision checks every frame for some reason, then it can slow down. Same if you draw like 100k sprites at the same time. So obviously there are limitations. I will check the mario game though. If it happened only in one specific place then it must be some bug (maybe some for() loop runs erroneously). To see speed try an example like this:
http://enigma-dev.org/edc/games.php?game=62 . For me it runs 2200FPS in ENIGMA, while in GM it was 300FPS (GM8). Of course if you make something specifically in ENIGMA, then you can optimize a lot of things further as you can use types. For example, in GM you have only one type, that means this:
for (i=0; i<10000000; i+=1){
do_something();
}
runs both in ENIGMA and GM. But it will be relatively slow as the type is universal (you can cast that "i" to string any time). On the other hand you can do this in ENIGMA (but not in GM):
for (int i=0; i<10000000; i+=1){
do_something();
}
And that little change will make ENIGMA run A LOT faster. Now "i" will be integer and that means you won't be able to cast it something else (assigning string to it will error at compile time), but now it works a lot faster as the specific type is known. So as always, it's not the language that is slow, but the code that is written.
- A page on this site says the game can be released on Xbox, PSP, Wii, DS, Windows, Linux, OSX, and Android. Is there sufficient documentation to explain how to release for all of these platforms?
I don't know which page, but we need to change that to not give wrong impression. Right now ENIGMA runs (usually flawlessly) on Windows, Linux and Mac (OSX support was broken for a little while as we don't usually have any Macs here, but now it should work). Other platforms have been experimented with, but nothing solid. Xbox will probably be supported trough the DirectX port we have now. For Android and iOS we need to make a specific graphics system. Right now the plan is (or was) to convert everything in the GL3 so it's standard compliant, and then it should be a lot easier to change that for GLES (which is what embedded devices use).
- Are there any examples of full length and completed games using Enigma? The only examples I have found are demos on the Games page.
Many of GM games should work. We haven't really been making any final games in it as most of us just lack time for that. There are some people who are creating some games in ENIGMA now though.
- Is there anything a developer should seriously consider before diving into Enigma and using it as their tool for creating a full length game? Perhaps I forgot something important to look up.
I personally can't tell. If the current supported platforms works good for you and you are willing to give feedback on bugs (which sometimes can negatively impact development, but many of the bugs are fixed quite rapidly), then I don't think so.