What About Porting Game Creation Systems To Pandora?

[timofonic]

Hello.

I'm sure all of you know some of the folowing game creation tools here, there are active communities behind them and/or they have a good number of interesting games since years of development.

I think those tools improves the homebrew game development situation a lot, it's a powerful tool for learning how to make videogames and often there appears very good videogame gems using those tools.

I think the Pandora project and the community itself must try to make possible that those utils are available on the Pandora system, by all possible ways. Sending emails to the developers of those tools, posting about this on their forums if available and even respected developers from the community end with some kind of deal for porting it to Pandora.

So this effort can be made by both developers and (future) Pandora users. I think it's interesting to debating too about how important are those tools for homebrew/independient game development and all the benefits to the Pandora community of having the most popular ones available on it.

We must make the developers of those tools that Pandora exists, there are a strong community supporting it and there will be a high demand of those tools for Pandora.

I'm sure convince them will take time and not all will accept Pandora as supported platforms, but I think we will can convince some of them with some time and when they see the status of Pandora scene and units selled by some after the second batch.

Here is a small list of some of the game creation tools available out there, mostly the more popular ones. I'm sorry if I don't provide a detail or there are lots more to be named in the post, I'll look about this in the following days and expand the list.

-RPG Maker XP
-Visionaire Studio
-Game Maker
-AGS - Adventure Game Studio
-Unity: A complete creation game authoring tool, the development tool is only for MacOS X but it can produce games for Windows and Wii. There is in development the support for iPhone too (it uses an OMAP).
-DarkBASIC and -DarkBASIC Pro
-Verge
-C4 Engine

-Digital Novel Markup Language (DNML)
- ShiVa
- Torque Game Builder
- ShugenDo: It's a new implementation of the M.U.G.E.N game engine.
- Multimedia Fusion
- The Games Factory
- 3D Game Studio
- Gemix Studio

There are other tools that they are Open Source so they will be proted quite easily:

- Game Blender
- Tile Studio
- PyGame
- KAGE
- Ren'Py
- ONScripter: Open Source implementation of the NScripter engine.
- KiriKiri
- Fenix
- Bennu
- OpenBOR
- Sphere
- OHRRPGCE
- MegaZeux
- Adventure Definition Language
- TADS

 

[samuraicrow]

Hi.

DarkBasic and DarkBasicPro are so heavily dependent on DirectX that they could only be recreated from scratch. However, DarkBasic is based on an earlier version of Basic called Amos Basic Professional on the Amiga. This is freely downloadable and will run under UAE4All if you have an Amiga Kickstart ROM image (separately available with the AmigaForever package). To get AmosPro you can sign up at the Amos Factory website and check the downloads area.

Also, there are plans to make a compiler compatible with AmosPro that will be based on LLVM for portability to Linux, Mac, and others. It is tentatively called Mattathias named after the son of the prophet Amos. Maybe if Mattathias is a success then we can make a DarkBasic compatible frontend based on it. Just don't expect this to come overnight. These things take time.

As a general rule of thumb, consider anything based exclusively on DirectX to be unportable even if the source is available. It is often too much work to convert it all to OpenGL-es apart from starting over from scratch.

 

[Schprlock]

Another great game-creation tool is Game Editor. It's 2d only but it works great. I have the full version and I have used it in the past to create games for PocketPC and GP2X.
The author, Makslane Rodriges, is considering a port for Pandora, although he is very busy right now. Maybe if demand is high he will find the time sooner...
Check out the game editor site ate http://www.game-editor.com

http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5891
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5994

I find it a great tool and look forward to porting my games to the Pandora.