TURBU engine

[masonwheeler]

I've posted a lot of questions on here over the last several months, and I'd like to thank everyone who's helped me with them. My project under development is called TURBU (The Ultimate Rpg BUilder), and it aims to be an easy-to-use RPG-creating engine without all the limitations and "questionable legality issues" that come with the most common programs in use today. (Anyone who's used the RPG Maker series will know what I'm talking about.)

It's currently in an alpha stage, with me releasing incremental improvements every week. Right now I'm working on cloning the feature set for RPG Maker 2000, in order to both build a basic game engine and create an import tool for RPG Maker 2000, at the same time. (Incidentally, RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 were written in Delphi.)

It can't do everything yet, but it's about 60% complete. The current tools will open maps from existing RPG Maker 2000 projects. If you use it, head over to www.turbu-rpg.com and check out what I've got so far. The site has its own forum, and any comments (especially bugreps!) are welcome.

Mason

[pstudio]

Sounds interesting. Unfortunately I can't test it since I don't have any maps :(
What are your plans for this project? Is it going to allow users to make an .exe file or will there be a reqiurement to use a special 'run' program?
Is this Windows only or will it be crossplatform?
Will this be a full competitor to RPG Maker and Toolkit or is it something else?

[masonwheeler]

What are your plans for this project? Is it going to allow users to make an .exe file or will there be a reqiurement to use a special 'run' program?
The latter. It will use a pre-made game engine program, but all the game data will be in user-generated files. However, the built-in scripting engine (running under RemObject's PascalScript) will allow almost unlimited customizability.

Is this Windows only or will it be crossplatform?
At the moment it's Windows-only, because it's tied to DirectX. But I'm growing more and more dissatisfied with the graphics system I'm using, and I plan on rewriting the whole thing in SDL once I'm finished with the 1.0 version, and releasing it cross-platform.

Will this be a full competitor to RPG Maker and Toolkit or is it something else?
That's exactly what it'll be.

Mason

[pstudio]

Now it sounds really great :D

May I suggest that if you're going to use SDL then use OpenGL for rendering. This allows many more possibilities for drawing effects (including 3D naturally) plus hardware rendering.

Will this be a commercial project or will it be free?

[Robert Kosek]

Screenshots?

I'm glad to see you're doing something along the lines of Game Maker; so many people use it without an inkling that it was written in Delphi. :) Even the Windows "Blitz Basic" language was written in Pascal.

BTW, you might get some testers, especially those who use Game Maker, here (http://gcscentral.proboards78.com/index.cgi). Albeit that forum has receded in membership in recent years.

[masonwheeler]

May I suggest that if you're going to use SDL then use OpenGL for rendering. This allows many more possibilities for drawing effects (including 3D naturally) plus hardware rendering.
Yes, that's one of the things that made SDL attractive to me.


Will this be a commercial project or will it be free?
Both. The free version will be a complete, full-featured game creation tool, while the "pro" version will add several extra, more advanced features for advanced developers, including a licensing provision for distributing projects commercially.

Mason

[Robert Kosek]

What about Phoenix? It too is OpenGL and is completely native code, so no extra DLLs beyond OpenGL and OpenAL (for audio of course).

[savage]

When you say "build 2D console RPG" do you mean on Nintendo GBA and DS and the like or something else?

[masonwheeler]

Wow! Someone pinned this up as an Announcement? :shock:

By "console RPG" I mean "console-style". Although if SDL works on those platforms, I might be able to port it eventually.

As for Phoenix, never heard of it. What is it, does it run cross-platform, and how's it stack up in ease-of-use against SDL? Those questions are more important than bundled libraries IMO.

Mason

[Robert Kosek]

SDL, no offense to Savage or his work, is complex when compared against Phoenix. At least to me it is. It is a full library for sound and graphics.

http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewforum.php?f=71
http://www.phoenixlib.net/

[masonwheeler]

Interesting. I'll check it out.

One caveat to my earlier statement about consoles. It would be kinda difficult to port the editor to a platform with no keyboard, seeing as how my main goal is to make it easy for the developers to create a quality game.

Trying to do "letter selection" with a control pad is bad enough just for the short things that it's typically used for (usually names); I can only imagine the frustrating horrors that attempting to write scripts in Pascal would entail! So that's kind of unlikely. The game engine, on the other hand, is being consciously designed from a "console-input-style" perspective, and could be ported to a console with minimal difficulty if cross-platform libs are available. The game itself, of course, will be in user-created data files, and be platform independent.

Mason

[pstudio]

I haven't checked it out yet, but the GP2X console supports SDL (Without OpenGL) and there is FPC4GP2X to compile Pascal code. However I don't think that it supports all of SDL yet. :(

[arthurprs]

SDL + scripting language fits very nice with each other

[masonwheeler]

New update up, in case anyone's interested. Progress is a little bit slow, but it's definitely progressing.

Mason

[masonwheeler]

UPDATE: Things are really going well with the engine development. I just finished a bunch of new event commands. I upgraded the engine to the latest SDL_Mixer, plus added official support for several music formats.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but this is finally starting to resemble a real game engine! Check it out at www.turbu-rpg.com.

[arthurprs]

What are you using for scripting?

[masonwheeler]

I'm using PascalScript. (http://www.remobjects.com/?ps)