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FAQ

Anonymous Christian Walther Seryous

Overview

Questions

  • 1 What is PIPMAK?
  • 2 How does PIPMAK work?
  • 3 How can I create my own game project?
  • 4 What do I need to edit Lua files?
  • 5 Is it possible to use different cursors and unbind default keys?
  • 6 Can I put videos in my Pipmak project?

Answers

  • 1 An open-source cross-platform game engine and authoring environment, the Pipmak Game Engine enables you to create point-and-click adventure games in the style of the Myst series, including panoramic ones like Myst III: Exile.

Some of its features are:

    • Static “slide show” images or full panoramic views (cubic).
    • Image patches can dynamically modify part of a view in response to user actions, game state.
    • Transition effects such as dissolve, rotate, and wipe.
    • Overlays to create head-up displays, inventories, or the like.
    • Scripting of arbitrary game logic in Lua, an easy to learn, simple, and powerful scripting language.
    • Directional sound effects and background sounds or music.
    • Runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and possibly other platforms (both authoring and deployment).
    • Freely redistributable and modifiable under the GPL licence, also for commercial projects.
    • Available documentation: reference manual, demo project that shows all features in action.
    • Friendly community support on the mailing lists/newsgroups.
  • 2 PIPMAK is a program that interpret the LUA coded included in the project.

Making a game using Pipmak is mostly a matter of creating the game’s graphics using a 3D rendering program or other graphics software and then describing to Pipmak how these should be presented and how they should behave in specially formatted text files.

  • 3 Until the 0.2.5 version you have to recreate the structure directories mentioned in the Reference.pdf or just copying it from a demo project

+MyGame Project main folder
+-main.lua Main file related to the project and start node
+-1 Start node
+-+-node.luaFile describing the slide
+-+-filename.gif/jpeg/png ... background node or cube faces
+-2 another node
+-+-node.luaFile describing the slide
+-+-filename.gif/jpeg/png ... background node or cube faces

  • 4 You need just an ASCII text editor (NOT a word processor).
  • 5 Using your own cursor is as simple as loading a file, and calling a function to make the make that image the cursor. Unbinding default keys is only possible if you package Pipmak with your project.
  • 6 Sadly, no... at least, not yet. The closet thing you can get is to store every frame in a separate image file, manually calculate when to display each frame on the screen, and explicitly tell Pipmak to display each frame on the screen. An example of this is shown in the Pipmak Demo. When this is implemented, the Ogg Vorbis codec will be used first, not MPEG.

Common problems

Problems

  • 1 I see a picture with question point instead my picture.
  • 2 My pano node seems discontinued or don't have the right behavior.
  • 3 Hotspot map doesn't work or hotspot index is wrong.
  • 4 Pipmak runs REEEAALLLLLLY slow... and it won't quit as soon as I hit the Q key.

Possible Solutions

  • 1 This means that your image is not found, check that the path is correct: just "image.png" if the picture is in the same folder of the node.lua or "patch/image.png" if is in the "patch" folder in the node directory. See the Pipmak reference for details.
  • 2 The correct sequence is front,right,back,left,up,down every picture must be token at about 90° FOV depending the size. Check on 'reference.pdf' what FOV you have to use http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/calc.htm here can found a focal length - FOV and vice versa converter.
  • 3 Make sure that the hotspot definitions in "node.lua" are in the same order as the hotspots in the hotspot map. The order of hotspots in a map are the same as the colors in the indexed image (i.e color 0 -> background/no hotspot, color 1 -> hotspot 1).
  • 4 Without 3D hardware acceleration, Pipmak doesn't run fast enough to be of any use, so make sure your system (only OpenGL really) is configured to use any hardware acceleration your video card has.

Related

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