It comes from looking too often at the Playstation 2 startup screen: I wondered what the principle was behind the 7 circling dots:
Here’s how it works: The 7 dots simply move around a circle, increasing the distance from each other while the sine and cosine parts of the circle go out of sync (this makes it look like the circle is “turning” in space). Sometimes the dots overlap to give the impression of fewer dots. It’s hard to explain, but I find it extremely cool that they chose to use 7 dots (rather than the more pedestrian 8).
So I recreated it using the new version 6 of wonderful Game Maker (the registered version). Download your own Project file, executable, windowed executable.
I’m curious what sorts of limitations Game Maker imposes from a failry critical view point. Assuming competence with programing would it make sense to use this to protype (2d) game ideas, or would I realy be better with sticking to a Macromedia product or an actual programming language (albeit a simple one, like maybe python), or even going so far as using the 2D parts of a 3D game engine, such as Unreal or Torque
I think that for prototyping 2d game ideas, Game Maker is vastly superior to Flash/director.
3d is another issue – there are some 3d extension for game maker, and version 6 has 3d facilities, but shockwave 3d is more developed. Depends on what you want to do, really.
But the Macromedia products are really made for drawing graphics, not for creating games, and I think is shows.
There’s a free trial of Gamemaker at the site.
Personally I find Director3D’s way of thinking a little strange.
You can also use gmax (http://www4.discreet.com/gmax/)many free (legal?) exporters to other formats..
or swish as an alt to flash http://www.swishzone.com/
I wonder if anyone has seen this? Espen mentioned some time ago he was looking for an open source game engine for academic collaboration.
Anything with Alan Kay behind it has a head start, especially if it is open source: http://www.opencroquet.org/About_Croquet/about.html
game engines: Quest3D I prefer to Torque unless you are doing large landscapes or on a real budget. http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ is the best game engine review site I have seen.
You may find it interesting to visit the pages about…
I would like to try do the same thing but using Flash MX, any sugestions?