ENIGMA Development Environment

In my opinion, a lot still needs to be done. Much of the focus is getting to the stage where enigma is comparable in features to GM. Even if the two are identical in feature set, enigma has a chance to succeed just for the fact that it's free.

What might not come until later (or until someone steps forward) is optimization. Compared with some other game engines, many parts of enigma's drawing system are slower. I sure don't know how to optimize OpenGL, but I believe some functions could double their performance.

Annoyances this time around:

• Enigma fails to compile if a sprite is blank
• LGM's object duplication bug screwed me over hard. So many weird problems happened from duplication. The newest build which had this bug fix didn't run for me, and I didn't have the time to figure out why
• instance_id is not implemented
• User created constants are not supported by Enigma and are not highlighted in the editor
• Tiling background images doesn't tile things fully (poly might have fixed this one)
• Enigma runs fast. Having the room speed at 30, the step event was occurring more than 30 times per second
• If you hold the mouse down and move it outside the window then release it outside, when you move your mouse back in Enigma still thinks the mouse button is held (applies to global left button at least)
• move_toward_point causes spazzes when objects reach destination. Just did some distance calculation to avoid this
• Adding mouse wheel actions causes LGM to create a horizontal scrollbar which is kind of annoying.
• I had like 4 instances where I would have loved for user events
• sound_volume, like last time, would have been awesome to have. Processing audio files and reloading them to see how it sounds in game just to change the volume is irritating
• Playing the same sound effect multiple times simultaneously would probably be nice..

I'll upload to the EDC eventually. Want to finish my timelapse first though

It's funny because josh thought he could finish it

...

Hi

I meant specifically that YoYo may have made their format more tool-friendly, but they still don't like competing compilers.

On the transcoding issue, it will be a problem for Josh if he ever continues/finishes EGMHTML5; mostly because I don't know if there's anything available that plays nice in terms of licensing and cross platform support. Also an issue is the fact that mp3 is a restricted format, at a certain point you'll have to start paying royalties for using it.

Yes, you can host your game on YYGs and your own site. YYG currently doesn't give advertisement revenue to you though, and unless you have one heck of a popular website you won't be making much money off that either. At any rate, Kongregate's FAQ page doesn't list HTML5 as a supported format, but I've shot off an email asking because it's an interesting question. Also coming into play are sponsorships. With flash games there's a massive market to get your game sponsored, sitelocked, etc. without having to rely solely on ad revenue.

At least they were kind enough to include the Windows compiler... but overall the pricepoint of GMHTML5 makes me wonder what studio will cost, I'd guess $500+ now.

Anywho, new file format just means porting to Mac will be all but impossible until studio..

Make packing OpenAL an option checkable in LGM.

Things I've noticed:

• Declaring a global var in room create code, ie: "global.playerdeaths = 0;" causes the game to crash. If global.playerdeaths is also used in any object anywhere, it no longer errors. I think in the room create code it just doesn't add it to whatever master var list there is.
• I stumbled upon a random bug in LGM's room editor that I haven't tried reproducing yet. I was placing some objects (all the same object) and suddenly the ones I placed were just invisible. They still showed up in the object list though...
• sound_volume and LGM's sound volume slider don't work, so for my music I had to use audacity to neuter the volume
• I noticed a problem with object creation code placed in the room editor. Sometimes the code is executed before and sometimes after the object's default creation code. I believe GM does object first, room object creation code after, which allows me to change default variables I set in the objects in the room. I couldn't change the cog speeds in my game for instance because of this..
• Never bothered trying to make the console window disappear on windows, but for some reason the way LGM/ENIGMA launches the game it launches it without a console lol
• Compile option in LGM crashes, so I have to go to temp dir to pull out executable
• The tiles system in ENIGMA is quite broken, myself and others in the IRC get gaps in tiles quite often. Because of this, I had to use objects as tiles
• The above brings me to... there was no instance_deactivate. Most of my pseudo tiles didn't have any code, so I just did a check to see if the tiles were in the view, otherwise not draw them. This slight optimization will probably make quite a difference, but I didn't have time to force my drivers into non-vsync and create a dual setup to see the FPS impact

If I think of anything else I'll post here ;P as per Josh/Poly I've also made my wiki page contain my ENIGMA wishlist, because gimme.