[Mercury]

Sonica, on 17 February 2013 - 10:07 AM, said:

Would love to have any news on this.

Spoiler

It's been too long! Dx

Sorry, I've been getting away from the computer a lot lately, trying to pace myself so I don't burn out on it in the final hours. I'm under a lot of pressure! =P

I'm still working hard on it, though. Right now I'm working on the initial interface users will see; starting a project, etc.

[MalcomX]

Mercury, on 17 February 2013 - 07:53 PM, said:

Sonica, on 17 February 2013 - 10:07 AM, said:

Would love to have any news on this.

Spoiler

It's been too long! Dx

Sorry, I've been getting away from the computer a lot lately, trying to pace myself so I don't burn out on it in the final hours. I'm under a lot of pressure! =P

I'm still working hard on it, though. Right now I'm working on the initial interface users will see; starting a project, etc.

No pressure. I'm sure we all know that it's no piece of cake developing something as amazing as this will seem to turn out. Please take your time, and don't get too stressed out working on it!

[Mercury]

Thought I'd drop by to give a quick update. I did promise a video of it in action soon, after all.

However, I've been chewing over a lot of the feedback on this thread and in conversation elsewhere, and I've decided to make some more major improvements to the AeStHete project. As such, I don't want to make a video yet, because if I made it now it wouldn't reflect the workflow of the finished product.

So what kind of improvements? Well, the current state of AeStHete, for all I've accomplished, is still sort of half-assed. It's just sort of a template game that has to be "hacked" by the user to work, and it's not intuitive at all. I find myself quite often having to explain that "No, it won't let you make a Sonic game with no coding knowledge" and similar things.

So - I've decided to solve this by just going the extra mile and making AeStHete a full IDE for making Sonic games. Users won't have to worry about knowledge of Game Maker or anything complicated.

There's a lot more I want to say, giving details on the cool ways it's going to work and the progress that I've made in this direction, but it will have to wait. I'll be very busy over the next couple of weeks with real life things; appearing in court, etc.

[KingofHarts]

That's a breath of fresh air for many, I'm sure... BUT it would still be open source, yea? I mean... one could still dissect it if they desired, yea?
(HINT: I've no idea what IDE is...)

[Lapper]

Mercury, on 22 February 2013 - 10:12 PM, said:

So - I've decided to solve this by just going the extra mile and making AeStHete a full IDE for making Sonic games. Users won't have to worry about knowledge of Game Maker or anything complicated.

Wow, this is pretty dang wicked news. Before you know it, all Sonic fan games will be made with this!

This post has been edited by Sonica: 23 February 2013 - 05:34 AM

[Greg the Cat]

Sonic Worlds eat your fuckin' heart out!

I take it that Freedom Planet will greatly benefit from this being more C++ friendly so that they can start porting over immediately, since they were looking at something along those lines.

[FeliciaVal]

KingofHarts, on 23 February 2013 - 03:20 AM, said:

That's a breath of fresh air for many, I'm sure... BUT it would still be open source, yea? I mean... one could still dissect it if they desired, yea?
(HINT: I've no idea what IDE is...)

I think by IDE he means this: http://en.wikipedia....ent_environment
but I'm not 100% sure about that...
but anyways that's some great news!! Probably this will mean that for me and many other users to make our games easier, but yeah, someone else posted that already, so yeah...good work!

[Lapper]

FeliciaVal, on 23 February 2013 - 01:51 PM, said:

I think by IDE he means this: http://en.wikipedia....ent_environment

Yeah pretty sure he does.
This is something I've wanted since I was quite young actually (before I could make games), so this'll be great

[Black Squirrel]

Am I allowed to say that sounds a bit excessive for a Sonic the Hedgehog engine? My guess is that it'll just hold things back, and the benefits... well...

The Super Mario fangaming community has several reasonable engines at their disposal for Game Maker. Though it arguably leads to a stronger library of games across the board, it stops people from having to think - suddenly everything is Super Mario Bros. 3 in new clothes (most of the time it's clothes I designed half a decade ago which is even worse!.. but that's a different story). Sonic of course requires more effort because the art is twice the size, but it's the same principle - make things too easy, and you pave the way for uninspired clones.

The Sonic Worlds engine already has this problem to some degree. Pop over to SAGE every year and you get half a dozen fangames all using the same default assets and all feeling like the same game. Not like the old days where we all had to wrestle TGF in new and imaginitive ways

[Mercury]

FeliciaVal, on 23 February 2013 - 01:51 PM, said:

KingofHarts, on 23 February 2013 - 03:20 AM, said:

That's a breath of fresh air for many, I'm sure... BUT it would still be open source, yea? I mean... one could still dissect it if they desired, yea?
(HINT: I've no idea what IDE is...)

I think by IDE he means this: http://en.wikipedia....ent_environment

Quite right!

And yes, it will still be totally open. Even more so than before, because I will be splitting the editor and the runner. At the moment, it works like a Popple jumping out of its own pouch (will anyone get that reference?) - the editor and runner are tied together, the editor being like a glorified debug mode. Of course this is horrible because for every project you'd need a copy of the editor, and there's no easy way to remove the editor once you've finished the game and want to distribute it.

The new paradigm will work a lot more like a traditional IDE. The editor can make projects, which can be exported as games. The game has no editor features and the editor has no game features*, keeping everything very simple and separate. Because the format of the project files and the exported game will be open, third party software could edit the files as well, meaning one could make their own modified AeStHete or even a new editor from scratch to deal with some or all of their project files.

*But you will still be able to playtest the zones as you make them, because the editor has a fully functional Sonic object that can interact with the solids, tiles, and objects being placed. This is SO IMPORTANT. Without this, you have to compile the game, run it, test it, find a problem, go back into the editor and tweak something by 4 pixels, rinse and repeat. Horrifying! But by being able to run around Sonic and bounce off of springs, etc. IN THE EDITOR, workflow will be sped up hugely.

Black Squirrel, on 23 February 2013 - 03:48 PM, said:

Am I allowed to say that sounds a bit excessive for a Sonic the Hedgehog engine? My guess is that it'll just hold things back, and the benefits... well...

LOL, you're allowed to say whatever you want.

Quote

The Super Mario fangaming community has several reasonable engines at their disposal for Game Maker. Though it arguably leads to a stronger library of games across the board, it stops people from having to think - suddenly everything is Super Mario Bros. 3 in new clothes (most of the time it's clothes I designed half a decade ago which is even worse!.. but that's a different story). Sonic of course requires more effort because the art is twice the size, but it's the same principle - make things too easy, and you pave the way for uninspired clones.

The Sonic Worlds engine already has this problem to some degree. Pop over to SAGE every year and you get half a dozen fangames all using the same default assets and all feeling like the same game. Not like the old days where we all had to wrestle TGF in new and imaginitive ways

I wouldn't worry about this too much. (Well, for one I don't really care about a sea of clones - gaming in general has this problem - the good ones will rise to the top and it's easy to ignore the rest).

Think of Game Maker. Game Maker makes it easier to make games, but an amazing variety of games can be made with it.

HOWEVER, Game Maker is not good enough on its own to make a Sonic game. There's no easy way to pause, to palette cycle, to keep track of collected objects so that they respawn correctly, to cull objects that aren't on screen, to have state machine objects for enemy and boss behaviour, to make multiple collision layers, and a bunch of other things that Sonic needs. AeStHete is another strata on top of Game Maker that makes it easier to make games that are as fancy as Sonic. That's really what everyone needs but nothing like that exists yet. Game Maker, Game Develop, Construct, Impact, Stencyl - they just aren't up to the task.

As for this change holding AeStHete back, well, I can tell you it's one of the only things that'll move it forward. I keep running into brick walls in the current mode of "game template that hacks itself" or whatever it should be described as (the hell if I know). By doing it right, my way forward becomes a lot more clear.

Finally, I don't want to do this for no gain. And E02 proves that a great Sonic engine that's too esoteric to use doesn't get used. I don't want to spend years of my life on AeStHete just for it to be a damp squib. <3

[Relick]

Only thing I don't want the IDE decision to conflict with is the fact that this engine is editable (as per the name of the engine). If I were to change something in the engine's code it would really suck for me to no longer be able to use the IDE to build the levels.

Although I'm sure whatever you do it will be topnotch quality like always Mercury! :D

[Mercury]

Relick, on 23 February 2013 - 05:08 PM, said:

Only thing I don't want the IDE decision to conflict with is the fact that this engine is editable (as per the name of the engine). If I were to change something in the engine's code it would really suck for me to no longer be able to use the IDE to build the levels.

Yeah, the editor and the runner will both still be open and editable, even though I'm separating them. If the engine is changed by the user in such a way as that the editor would need to be changed, the editor could be changed by the user to accommodate the change made to the engine. (That was badly worded...)

Quote

Although I'm sure whatever you do it will be topnotch quality like always Mercury! :D

Thanks.

[Candescence]

Mercury, on 23 February 2013 - 04:11 PM, said:

HOWEVER, Game Maker is not good enough on its own to make a Sonic game. There's no easy way to pause, to palette cycle, to keep track of collected objects so that they respawn correctly, to cull objects that aren't on screen, to have state machine objects for enemy and boss behaviour, to make multiple collision layers, and a bunch of other things that Sonic needs. AeStHete is another strata on top of Game Maker that makes it easier to make games that are as fancy as Sonic. That's really what everyone needs but nothing like that exists yet. Game Maker, Game Develop, Construct, Impact, Stencyl - they just aren't up to the task.

I'm genuinely curious, would you mind elaborating on how the various dev tools aren't up to the task? This is coming from a Construct 2 user (Construct 2 eclipses pretty much everything else in my personal opinion) who has a history of trying to create a good Sonic engine and have decided that, at this point, I'm not terribly good at it, but I digress.

I'm not really a fan of Game Maker in any case. At least a full-on IDE would be much better than having to deal with Game Maker's normal interface and abysmal event system (forcing you to use scripting for pretty much everything), among other things.

This post has been edited by Candescence: 24 February 2013 - 04:50 AM

[Mercury]

Candescence, on 24 February 2013 - 04:49 AM, said:

I'm genuinely curious, would you mind elaborating on how the various dev tools aren't up to the task? This is coming from a Construct 2 user (Construct 2 eclipses pretty much everything else in my personal opinion) who has a history of trying to create a good Sonic engine and have decided that, at this point, I'm not terribly good at it, but I digress.

That's exactly the thing: you have to make a Sonic engine in any of these programs first in order to make a Sonic game. Not so with simpler games, where you could use all the collision functions, etc. that they provide out of the box. They all brag about how easy they are to make games with, but for any game of substance the user has to forgo all the default bullshit and write their own systems for culling, collision, events etc. anyway. None of these tools targets users who want to make a Sonic the Hedgehog quality game without 5+ years of struggle. I mean, thank goodness some kind souls put together Sonic Worlds or we would have about a tenth of the Sonic fangames we do.

I'm venting to no one in particular now, but why doesn't Game Maker allow (out of the box): Collision layers? Animated tiles? A reasonable pause system? Object grouping? Access to the main program loop? Most or all of these things are part of even the most rudimentary 8-bit and 16-bit games but they are maddeningly absent.

[Candescence]

Mercury, on 24 February 2013 - 08:36 PM, said:

Candescence, on 24 February 2013 - 04:49 AM, said:

I'm genuinely curious, would you mind elaborating on how the various dev tools aren't up to the task? This is coming from a Construct 2 user (Construct 2 eclipses pretty much everything else in my personal opinion) who has a history of trying to create a good Sonic engine and have decided that, at this point, I'm not terribly good at it, but I digress.

That's exactly the thing: you have to make a Sonic engine in any of these programs first in order to make a Sonic game. Not so with simpler games, where you could use all the collision functions, etc. that they provide out of the box. They all brag about how easy they are to make games with, but for any game of substance the user has to forgo all the default bullshit and write their own systems for culling, collision, events etc. anyway. None of these tools targets users who want to make a Sonic the Hedgehog quality game without 5+ years of struggle. I mean, thank goodness some kind souls put together Sonic Worlds or we would have about a tenth of the Sonic fangames we do.

I'm venting to no one in particular now, but why doesn't Game Maker allow (out of the box): Collision layers? Animated tiles? A reasonable pause system? Object grouping? Access to the main program loop? Most or all of these things are part of even the most rudimentary 8-bit and 16-bit games but they are maddeningly absent.

This is kinda why I don't like Game Maker, they boast about ease of use, but you have to use scripting for literally everything, and it lacks various features that other software has.

Speaking as a C2 user, C2 basically has pretty much most of those - collision layers are easy (though for default behaviours it makes multiplayer undoable due to reliance on the Solid and Jump-through behaviours) as is animated tiles (no tileset system yet, but it's on the to-do list, it's mostly like MMF2 at the moment), pausing is trivial thanks to deltatime, object grouping is built-in thanks to containers and families, and I'm not sure exactly what you mean when it comes to the main program loop, but the event sheets probably fulfil that role. No palette cycling, though I'm not quite sure if it's doable in WebGL, though it can be done in HTML5 with enough work and some tricks.

Also, Ashley has entertained the notion of creating a Sonic-style 'advanced platform behaviour' on my suggestion, though he hasn't spoken about it since. He said he'd like to do it, though he also commented on the potential difficulty of replicating it, as Sonic physics are "rather clever" (I think that's what he said), though in the same thread a couple of people (including me) immediately linked him to the physics guide. I'm not sure if it's even on his to-do-list, though said to-do-list is apparently rather large, so, yeah. I'm the meantime, I'm trying to have similar created as a third-party-plugin, though I'll need some help, since I haven't worked with javascript in ages.