Purgatory Adventure Game - Looking for the right Engine

[Joel]

Hi all!

The Adventure Forum Section doesnt seem to be very active, so i thought i'd just post my questions here.

I'm currently in preproduction of what will be my first Adventure Game (i already worked on two educational children CD-Roms which used Director and Flash. But never as a programmer unfortunately).

It'll be a horror game, kind of like The 7th Guest. Since everyone interested in 1st Person Adventures of course knows, that Myst was created in HyperCard, i found this website. Actually, i looked at RunRev a few years ago, when the Media Package still cost around 50 bucks and had a nice little Adventure Creation Kit implemented.

Sadly, it is gone now. Are there any plans to revive this?

Anyway, i played around with RunRev and it seems to be very easy. I didnt look much at RevTalk yet, but it reminded me a lot of Lingo.

Do you think, its possible to make a smoothly running Myst Like Adventure with a lot of Video playback in the Screens? I'm planning to incorporate a lot of Actors in the world, which will be shot on a greenscreen and rendered as Videos with an Alphachannel. So the Quicktimes would be running on top of the Game Screens.
I've also got a question about 360° Panoramas: I havent got a lot of experience with Quicktime VR. The Screens are rendered as Panoramic Views and should be enhanced with Videos and Hotspots. How is this handled in RR? I havent found much about it unfortunately... Is there a way to see those VR's some kind of "unfolded" way in the editor or do you have to code everything instead of visually placing buttons and videos?

What should i focus on, when learning the language? I dont want to get into web application programming, basically all i want to do is an interactive slideshow with an inventory system, which will probably be the most complicated part...

Thanks in advance and cheers!

[Mark]

Hi Joel,

Plans are subject to change and I don't thin they are supposed to be discussed publicly. Only Enterprise license holder have a clue of what might happen with Rev in the future.

Theoretically, it is possible to do what you want, however:
- you may be unable to put objects on top of movies
- I can't guarantee that the alpha channel will always work
- when you open a movie invisibly, you can't get its rect until it is visible
- visual effects don't combine well with QT movies
- when moving your app to Windows, the movies may not play correctly

Panorama movies should play correctly, just like any other movie in QT format. The problems arise when you want more than just a standard player object.

Surely, it is always possible to find a solution for every problem, but it will take some effort. If you want to do cross-platform development, make sure that you always test every change on every platform to make sure that it stays cross-platform.

Best regards,

Mark