Official Section: Engines

[Marked 197]

Introduction

The Engines section is to give our visitors and members information on various game making software. One of the goals of the site is to promote the making games and the goal for this section is to show off each engine's benefits as well as see community feedback on the engines.

 

Link

http://www.gdunlimited.net/engines

 

Features

• Direct downloads
  
• Overviews of stats - screen resolution, supported filetypes, etc.
  
• Screenshots
  
• A like system (click on the heart)
  
• Short URLs
  
• Sharing links
  
• Recent forum activity
  

Support GDU and the engines you like

The purchase links are setup using Enterbrain's affiliate program where GDU will receive 30% of the purchase for anyone who buys an engine through that link. If you're thinking about buying one of those engines, please consider doing it through those links :) Also share the engine with your friends on facebook, google+ or through a tweet. Or be anti-social and just click "like".

 

The future of the engines section

At the moment there aren't many interactive features aside from a like system. In the future we want to include a rating system out of 5, or 10, as well as an official GDU review and rating of each engine and user reviews by community members. We want to allow visitors to filter through the most liked and more highly rated engines by our community. These filters will be developed as our selection of engines increases.

 

Your feedback

Do these pages display the information that you need to see when making the decision whether to try out the engine? Let me know what features are lacking that you think should be added to these pages. So far we've only got RPG Maker VX Ace and RPG Maker XP, but we are certainly interested in expanding. If there's an engine you think should be in there, let me know.

 

Screenies

If you would like to see your work in these engines in the screenshots for everyone to see, post your best screenshots and here and I will add them in, particularly for Ace and screenshots of your game inside the editor.

[FranklinX 37]

You made a slight mistake in ACE's Engine information. It was released in 2012, not 2011.

 

[Marked 197]

In the "About" and help document in Ace it said 2011, so I went with that.

[RageMage 5]

Unity 3D definitely needs to be in there, being a 3D engine that it very easy to use it is a great option. It has both a free and paid license and both of them can be used to develop games for profit. The free license has quite a bit that is very nice to have and the paid license just include a few things to make life simpler though professional quality games can be made using either one. The paid license allows for console development license's (as well as PC) to allow for development on PS3, XBox360, Wii, and even phones/tablets/handhelds.

These options really make it a pretty powerful engine, I've been doing some development on it with high poly models and it runs every bit as fast as other engines I've used with low poly models, though my hardware has something to do with that. The engine also makes use of doing scripts in both Java and C#, as well as a language called 'boo' which is based on python. There is also numerous free assets on the Unity website that make things such as terrain a a breeze.

One of Unity's strongest features is live editing, which allows you to tweak things in the editor while play-testing and see the tweak take place live in the game, some of these different 'edits' might not always stay after ending play-testing, but taking notes of things during testing is always a good idea and lets you see how drastic the change really is from the editor point of view. Putting gravity physics on objects then play-testing is also a nice way to find the point where an object can 'sit' on the ground so that it wouldn't fall through the ground or fall to the ground from the start.

The only downfall I see from using this engine for some of the people who use RM all of the time is that scripting is required, there are no events but scripts are written and then attached to objects creating an instance of the scripts which allows you to use the same script several time as opposed to re-creating a door event 873 times in RPG Maker.

 

On a side note VX Ace was released December 2011, it wasn't released in English until March 2012 though.

[Noob Saibot 38]

Fill it up more and I'll be able to update my list with a Recommended filter.

[Heretic86 25]

Hmm, I dont see any screenshots here yet, so I'll throw a couple of mine in, just to show off what the XP Engine itself is capable of doing.

 

The Eye of Moron Sauron

 

 

The Eye in this particular scene is FULLY ANIMATED.  Upcoming game I'm working on and hope I have the tenacity to fininsh and release.

 

---

 

Beach

 

Editor Screenshot

 

There are a ton of events in this map.  The events are mostly Tile Graphics.  It was experimental to try out a visual style.  I was quite happy with the visual style that resulted so I went back and edited the Tileset I used to pull out a bunch of the events and replaced them with Tiles.  The effect I was going for here was to allow the player to walk underneath (behind) the cliffs along the edge of the beach.

 

Stormy Screenshot

 

This is a cave that links to another part of the beach above.  I wanted the player to be able to walk through the cave, so again, some tile editing was necessary.  It also shows off some Alpha Fog Transparencies as well as the default weather effects.

 

Walking Behind Beach Cliffs

 

This screenshot was just intended to show that the player can walk underneath (or behind) tilesets depending on the way they are set up.  It is intended to show that more "3D'ish" games can be accomplished just by using clever Tileset editing.

Edited April 1, 2013 by Heretic86

[dolarmak 23]

Nice screens Heretic.

 

It's just a matter of us getting more information about the different engines before more are posted.

 

Nice work Marked.

[Heretic86 25]

Well, if I remember correctly, VX doesnt support a Fog Layer without Scripts while XP does.  Not sure on Ace.

[Marked 197]

Hmm, I dont see any screenshots here yet, so I'll throw a couple of mine in, just to show off what the XP Engine itself is capable of doing.

Sweet, thanks! http://www.gdunlimited.net/engines/rpg-maker-xp

 

I wanted the screenies for the engines to be made by the community, but they were like errgafdikjdfask minecraft. So I stole a few from the screenshot thread :D

[Bigace360 38]

Sweet, thanks! http://www.gdunlimited.net/engines/rpg-maker-xp

 

I wanted the screenies for the engines to be made by the community, but they were like errgafdikjdfask minecraft. So I stole a few from the screenshot thread :D

Lol wat?  :huh2:

[Marked 197]

I wish I could understand them too.

 

I've been thinking about the engines pages recently.

The last number on the right is the bounce rate. This means about 80% visitors leave the page. So the content on this page is really quite useless to people. I'm thinking about having the downloads and info etc down the the left sidebar and having the main content related to new content; games, tuts, scripts, resources, the usual. Hopefully that will reduce the bounce rate and visitors will keep clicking through.

 

By the way bigace, the VXA scripts page has jumped to #3 most viewed over the last month, behind only the forum index and homepage. Good job :thumbsup:

[Bigace360 38]

sweet just have to just have to get the RMXP/RMVX sections up to date and were good.