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[polygone]

I have noticed that the community here has become a little stagnated, so I've thought of this project that may hopefully get people here a little more involved and using ENIGMA

In the past we have made a few attempts at advertising ENIGMA in order to try and gain a greater following and increase ENIGMA user activity. These attempts were however not that successful and only managed to attract a couple of users here. Having read back through some of the feedback from these attempts I noticed 2 key responses: firstly that a lot of people just wanted to see the core system worked on further, and lots of bugs needed to be ironed out - this we are always working on and things will naturally continue to keep improving; and secondly that people wanted to see examples of what ENIGMA is capable of.

We are already in a much better position than we were before because we now have the EDC where a number of examples have already been posted but I am hoping that with the help of people here some more great examples and hopefully even full games could be made which showcase ENIGMA's full capabilities. The aim is to have compiled .exes of working games and examples that will be put into a zip and then this zip can be distributed whenever ENIGMA is advertised in the future as a showcase of what it's capable of (the next serious attempt at advertising will likely come after JDI is finished and ironed out). I feel like ENIGMA is a great, free piece of software that more people would benefit from finding and using, if you feel the same way and you want to help spread the ENIGMA word then I hope you will join us in creating some work for this showcase project

[TheExDeus]

I have been thinking about this as well. I previously though on creating videos on how I use ENIGMA to create a game from start to finish. Just to show how easy and fast it is to use. But I didn't really have any ideas on what to make. I am not really a graphical guy and making sprites would take me ages. So I though maybe either making a remake (the one I specifically mentioned was FTL-Faster That Light) or a vector game (cool looking asteroids game or something like that). I did make a vector based invader type game, but never made the video. So for me it's the graphics. I don't have the time to make them very beutiful and so I fail. The same is actually with GM - there are very few pretty games made with GM and people might think that it is GM's fault. The problem is the artists - GM and ENIGMA makes it easy to program the game - it doesn't make it easy to make it pretty. I remember a hamster game in GMC - It was the most beautiful game I have ever seen in GM. The backgrounds were hand drawn - the hamster itself was beautiful and animations were superb. The problem was that the guy was an artist and so the game had a lot of bugs (crashes and collision errors). I remember offering him a hand, but he refused. He never finished it. I would love to have those sprites and remake it in ENIGMA. It really was unbelievable. And we have surfaces and shaders which allow us to make nice scenes as well. Reflecting water, god rays and things like that are even possible without shaders. With shaders it's faster though.

So if anyone is willing to make nice sprites I am willing to help with coding. I still want to make some shader examples though - but we still haven't made GL3 correctly to do that (we need to ditch FFP). When I have the time I will try to fix that. But sadly this is the end of semester and that means exams.

[polygone]

Do you have an .exe of the hamster game lol?

Yes unfortunately it is the same problem with me re graphics. However we do have the gmc community at our possible disposal still, where some decent artists reside. Maybe if we set somewhere up here for proper resource management/storage it would help attract artists.

EDIT: lollllllll holy Phodopus I just found Josh made a hamster game 8 years ago on gmc! http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=179871

EDIT 2: Found the game you were talking about but no screenshots or dl link working any more. The creator is still active on the gmc though http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=70717

EDIT 3: Got your Hamster Trouble game I think:
http://www31.zippyshare.com/v/6186389/file.html
Or a version I hacked together which is actually playable in gm8: http://www12.zippyshare.com/v/97462445/file.html  (oops you porbably need config file also in other zip)

[polygone]

Well I've remembered a big problem ENIGMA has with relation to games. That being LGM can't really handle big games or large resources and it takes forever (too long to make ENIGMA usable) to populate communication buffers and compile.

I say this problem is rather crippling to ENIGMA at the moment :/  You pretty much have to use external loading in your game if you want to get anywhere.

[TheExDeus]

Normally you should use external resources anyway. ENIGMA should actually have an option (or LGM) to put the resources in exe or in external file (like resources.dat). The populating thing could be fixed also by threading. I have 8 cores and the fact it uses only 1 when doing is painful. The compilation I think is threaded though, as it's quite easy in mingw.

edit: Yeah, I cannot compile that gmk because it just froze in populating buffers. And I say froze, because it's been like that for 45min. But the game seems to be correct. It seems he was making it for GM5 or something, because of all the left/right duplicate sprites. But he do use alpha masks as well. So all of that could be optimized for ENIGMA and 80% of those resources deleted. I will probably try to do it. But the dev didn't give the source, so you probably decompiled it. While it will be fun to make it work in ENIGMA, I sadly don't think we could showcase that without the owners permission. Especially give the source.

Also, the topic is from 2004. I think the one I saw was newer. Because the one you posted has only 1 level, while I think there were a few more. But who knows. That was years ago. But you at least can see what I was referring too. The first level looks very cool. If anyone of us could make something like that, then we could make an awesome game.

[polygone]

You could always PM him on the gmc?