[Pipmak-Users] Re: Agon features

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

> Quick question. How hard do people think it would be to make a game of 
> say the level of Agon with Pipmak?
> 
> http://www.agongame.com/
> 
> It has a couple of very cool features (generally it seems very Pipmak 
> node-like) but some neat little extras are the ability to have movies 
> run in certain scenes - in one you pass a window and can see and hear 
> that it is raining outside (another nice touch is that you see yourself 
> in the window).

I had not played Agon before, but here's what I can say after having had 
a look at its first few nodes this morning.

In general, the intention is that Pipmak should eventually be able to do 
  most of the things Agon does. Many of the basic features are already 
available, some are not. The following points come to my mind that you 
would have trouble replicating in today's Pipmak:

- Sound: Pipmak 0.2.4 is mute. However, I'm working on that, and the 
next release should have a solid foundation of sound functionality 
(though it'll only support a single file format, Ogg Vorbis, for the 
time being).

- Subtitles and other text output: You could reproduce Agon's behavior 
in Pipmak, but you'd have to store every piece of text as a picture. 
Apart from the terminal, which is mostly meant for debugging purposes 
rather than for player interaction in a finished game, there is no 
possibility of text output in Pipmak. This is a planned feature, though.

- Real-time-rendered objects: In Agon, the rain outside of the windows 
and your reflections in them seem to be real-time-rendered 3D objects. 
This is not something that's on my immediate to-do list for Pipmak. I'm 
not ruling out the possibility that it might be implemented some day, 
but I'm not planning to do it anytime soon.
However, you could probably implement the rain and the player 
reflections using Pipmak's current primitive animation capabilities 
(demonstrated by the rotating wheel in the demo project).

- Movies: Pipmak currently can't play movies. Of course this will be 
possible some day, but no detailed planning has been done yet. You can 
do animation by storing each frame as a separate image file (what I 
called "primitive" above), but that's neither convenient nor fast enough 
for bigger movies (see Urs' "Fully animated cube").

These are the "big" limitations of Pipmak in its current state. If you 
can live with those and go on with your project, it's very possible that 
you run into some "small" limitations: "I can't figure out how to do 
this or that. It would be easy if Pipmak could do xy." In that case, 
please come here and ask. It might turn out that feature xy is trivial 
to add. This has happened to me repeatedly while working on the demo 
project. Because I'm not really "eating my own dog food" with Pipmak 
(I'm not using it to create a serious game), I need other people's 
feedback on such things.

  -Christian