How to design a Myst - styled adventure?
Author
Hi. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to design a Myst - style game. Are there any free/open source engines to do this? If I have to start from scratch, should I just use the win32 api or what?
By the way, I'm making it on a Windows machine, not Mac. Also, I know about Pipmak but that doesn't support FMV.
The predecessors to Myst were written in HyperTalk, and multimedia languages like this are close to ideal for such things. Flash, the moral descendant of HyperCard, is a good modern option. The basic idea is that you'd have one frame (or a sequence of frames) per viewpoint.
You could probably use the sample code for application in the DirectX SDK.
One of the samples was how to program a 'pick' function which you use to select 3D objects (via facet sets). For choosing things via the mouse....
They have a sound interface for playing background music + sound effects
Most of the hard work would be creating the scenery (3D editors) and the animations for the interactive parts of the game.
I recall the game worked by moving you between fixed viewpoints where you then looked at canned pictures. You would need to generate those canned pictures or possibly just view the 3D directly (more data to include...) but then particle effects can be added (DirectX SDK covers that too with working sample programs)
The logic for the interactions is mostly finite state machines which you should be able to find articles about online.
Well, you probably should learn a proper language like delphi, c++, etc.
visual pascal (delphi) or visual c would be easiest as it has a lot of components 'ready made', however you will want to customize these or program your own after you understand how they work (eg to make them skinnable, etc).
Using any 3D editor, you could render your scenes then export as individual images in jpg or bmp format, then load them into your game code (nice and easy under delphi). Then run a main game loop that checks for fps (typical for games is 30-60) so that no matter what computer you run the game on (power wise) the animations will play at the same speed. You can use the API from within delphi (nice and easy) and it has great basic features for timing routines, etc.
basically, when a player clicks on part of your screen (which is typically handled in delphi via a 'mousedown' event [you fill in what code should ocurr when windows detects this event] you would set up the appropirate animation to play and then maingameloop() would play it as a series of jpg or bmps.
even a game like myst can be deceptively complex for a naive coder, and there's a lot of background work to deal with. It's one thing to make a game that 'works', but another to make it work really well (and smooth!).
so it really depends on your coding xp, but i assume you don't have that much else why would you be asking how to code such a game here?!
Delphi is cool, and powerful, no less so than any c compiler (ooh, that should cause some flaming!) BUT IT'S TRUE. ;You just have to know how to code properly.
You can even access DirectX or openGL from within delphi, so longs as you use version 3 or later (current is like v 8 or something anyway so that won't be an issue)
hope this helps a bit
visual pascal (delphi) or visual c would be easiest as it has a lot of components 'ready made', however you will want to customize these or program your own after you understand how they work (eg to make them skinnable, etc).
Using any 3D editor, you could render your scenes then export as individual images in jpg or bmp format, then load them into your game code (nice and easy under delphi). Then run a main game loop that checks for fps (typical for games is 30-60) so that no matter what computer you run the game on (power wise) the animations will play at the same speed. You can use the API from within delphi (nice and easy) and it has great basic features for timing routines, etc.
basically, when a player clicks on part of your screen (which is typically handled in delphi via a 'mousedown' event [you fill in what code should ocurr when windows detects this event] you would set up the appropirate animation to play and then maingameloop() would play it as a series of jpg or bmps.
even a game like myst can be deceptively complex for a naive coder, and there's a lot of background work to deal with. It's one thing to make a game that 'works', but another to make it work really well (and smooth!).
so it really depends on your coding xp, but i assume you don't have that much else why would you be asking how to code such a game here?!
Delphi is cool, and powerful, no less so than any c compiler (ooh, that should cause some flaming!) BUT IT'S TRUE. ;You just have to know how to code properly.
You can even access DirectX or openGL from within delphi, so longs as you use version 3 or later (current is like v 8 or something anyway so that won't be an issue)
hope this helps a bit
Author
Thanks for the feedback. I actually am fairly decent at C/C++, but I've never given Delphi a try. Maybe I should.
Once I learned c++ I never looked back at Delphi.... Stick with c++. :)
I coded a Myst-like project using the WYSIWYG-components in Borland Builder a couple of years ago, now that stuff is even easier using OpenGL, DirectX etc.
Google for tutorials on picking, image rendering (etc) and you'll be on track in no time!
/Robert
I coded a Myst-like project using the WYSIWYG-components in Borland Builder a couple of years ago, now that stuff is even easier using OpenGL, DirectX etc.
Google for tutorials on picking, image rendering (etc) and you'll be on track in no time!
/Robert
Quote:Original post by Sneftel
The basic idea is that you'd have one frame (or a sequence of frames) per viewpoint.
The newer myst games has a full 3D camera though.
Quote:Original post by marius1930
The newer myst games has a full 3D camera though.
A couple do. More common for the franchise, though, is a panoramic 2D camera, which uses prerendered imagery even though it allows the player to look around freely. This should be easily achievable on something like Flash.
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