Wintermute Engine: Difference between revisions
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==License== |
==License== |
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Wintermute Engine is completely free to use for non-commercial purposes |
Wintermute Engine is completely free to use for non-commercial purposes, which makes it popular with [[Amateur adventure game|amateur adventure game]] developers. |
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For commercial use the developers must obtain a separate paid commercial license, which is being discussed on a case-by-case basis with the engine developer. Licence terms vary depending on the distribution model the game will employ (downloaded, boxed, etc). The typical license fee ranges from 0-300 Euros, without royalties. The engine author has said that the licence terms don't vary, but his unusual method of disclosing them (via a specific email query only) is more to keep track of who is licencing and interested in the engine. The flexible nature, and relative inexpense, of the licence for even large commercial projects has made the Wintermute Engine a popular tool among [[Independent video game industry|independent commercial game developers]]. |
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==Alternatives== |
==Alternatives== |
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Revision as of 20:24, 20 July 2006
Wintermute Engine (commonly abbreviated as WME) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter (game engine) primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games.
History
Wintermute Engine was designed and programmed by Czech programmer Jan Nedoma. The first public beta version has been released on January 12th 2003. The engine is still being improved and there are several updates being released every year.
Features
The game engine provides most of the features necessary for creating classical 2D graphical adventure games. Basically it's a 2D-based graphics engine with a built-in script interpreter for implementing game logic. In addition, Wintermute Engine provides support for the combination of real-time 3D characters and 2D backgrounds, which became de facto standard for modern adventure games (for example Syberia, Still Life). The game engine also supports some features not commonly present in game engines, such as accessibility support for vision-impaired players, or support for Theora video.
Game design process
Wintermute Engine follows the object-oriented design philosophy. The game developers use the engine tools for building various game objects (actors, scenes, windows etc.) and assembling them together. Every game object is defined by its appearance (graphics, animations, captions, fonts) and by a script, which defines the underlying logic of a given game object and its responses to game events. All those game definitions are then interpreted by the engine runtime interpreter, which is otherwise completely independent on any actual game implementation.
License
Wintermute Engine is completely free to use for non-commercial purposes, which makes it popular with amateur adventure game developers.
For commercial use the developers must obtain a separate paid commercial license, which is being discussed on a case-by-case basis with the engine developer. Licence terms vary depending on the distribution model the game will employ (downloaded, boxed, etc). The typical license fee ranges from 0-300 Euros, without royalties. The engine author has said that the licence terms don't vary, but his unusual method of disclosing them (via a specific email query only) is more to keep track of who is licencing and interested in the engine. The flexible nature, and relative inexpense, of the licence for even large commercial projects has made the Wintermute Engine a popular tool among independent commercial game developers.
Alternatives
There are several other similar adventure game development tools available: AGS, AGAST, SLUDGE, Visionaire. Modern commercial adventure games are often built on the Virtools middleware system.