Spainion

I am not going to use that engine again as the graphics are hard to modify and I don't know how to use director very well. I had some of my funniest times gaming on First Star Servers but anything made with that engine has an expiry date. If you decide to try a different engine you may have more success. My first game with Eclipse was Vanatu's Curse and we managed to get a pretty decent little following. I know that you've probably invested many hours into mapping and gameplay, if your Macromedia skills are polished and you have a source you might have a chance but their are plenty of giants like: [http://www.terragaming.net/content/screenshots](http://www.terragaming.net/content/screenshots) that use basically the same graphics and a similar engine. They have been running for years and are pretty much dead. I originally started as a mapper after I could no longer find hosting for my server, it may be a good place to get your foot in the door here. Good luck with your project, I am not trying to discourage just save you some time.

Nice job putting this together, its nice and clean and takes care of most of the major problems that comes with many other versions of eclipse. I'll be using this engine to start my little project. Thanks for the time and effort you've invested into this.

Looks good but its jam packed with so much stuff I'm not sure anyone will be able to use it. When developing a 2D game a good bit of your target market tends to have less powerful computers. I have a Quad Core 3.0Ghz, 8 Gb of Ram and a ATI 6890\. I get _**45FPS**_ with nothing going on, if your code is sloppy and runs fast your better off then something that is very neat, tidy and barely runs. Look through your main gameloop and try and shave some fat. Isolate the problem by commenting sections out of your loop till you find what causes the biggest drop.. then optimize it. Their are tones of features but with the way it runs right now its not really usable. You should basically _just_ focus on bugfixes and optimization till everything is stable and smooth. (Should be getting hundreds of FPS uncapped, when you add features you could uncap it to see how much of a hit your client took) Anyhow just food for thought.

> Hi spainion , are you from fso community? i remember you , i am a very old player , i hope you try my project too. > > Sorry i dont have it , but i think that you can get in with someone in unfun forums. > > > > Thanks I have a copy of the stratics source kicking around somewhere, they had it available for free very briefly. Yeah I ran a server on FSO 2 and played FSOS for a short while. " Himmel Gagen Holle " the owner of the server was an idiot so he came up with an idiotic name. Haha. Yeah I'll definetly try your project out. Keep up the hard work you have lots of ground to cover.

Nice man. This engine is First Star Online Stratics, do you have a copy of the First Star Online 2 engine?

As I said it depends on the situation. Personally I don't think EA is that bad, I've fixed a few bugs and get decent performance on all my machines. Comparing EE to EA is pretty extreme. Way to take my sentence out of context boys. I suppose I could've said FOR ME to make it a bit more clear for you guys, "Its much easier to optimize and remove then to start from scratch, I'm not sure what kind of life you lead but I simply don't have 7 hours a day to spend programming," If you have the time to add the features he has from a base or scrap engine and still have time to develop a half decent game then I encourage you to do so. This engine is suppose to be feature rich and relatively easy to use, If you hate EA so much release a stable optimized engine with the same features. In my opinion most of them have been missing for a long time and are pretty essential. Saying I want to make a game with "No Quest, No Projectiles, No Chat Bubbles…" is just stupid. Those things are easy to remove or simply not use but more people will want them then people who won't.

> Ok, so why did the transition from the bugged Eclipse Stable to the from-scratch Eclipse Origins happen, then, if it's easier to fix buggy things than to start from scratch? Why did the programmers here with actual prowess support Robin with his decision, rather than argue that it'd be quicker and easier to fix up ES? > > Because, it's actually the complete opposite, funnily enough. It depends on the severity of the damage EA is not a total hell hole. Its quite easy to customize any way you wish.

> First of all lets just get the fact that I'm not _trolling_ out of the way. > > Secondly, lets use EA as an example. Deathbeam single-handedly managed to destroy the community with this engine. He's forced bad coding habits onto people and we're seeing the same games coming out all the time. > > Yes, for an engine there needs to be a balance but EA doesn't offer that. An engine is something that is meant to be used as a base, yes? Then why are we seeing games coming out of the Eclipse Projects board with the _same exact things_. > > I totally agree - there needs to be a balance. I'm not saying that I should release my base DX8 as it is and slap a fancy name onto it and call it a brand new engine. I agree there needs to be some features to allow the newer members of the community to mess around a bit. > > What an engine should do is balance performance and features. Why should we be giving people Blood and a stolen Particles engine if it is not necessary? Taking the genre Eclipse is built upon, RPG, and looking through the list of garbage features EA has, how many are necessary in making the game fit the genre? Isn't the tutorials section supposed to provide people with the stuff they need but maybe can't do by themselves? > > If I want to make a game that's pretty basic, no quests, no ranged combat, no chat bubbles, etc and my only decent option is an engine full of garbage that I don't need, is it better to get a bare bones(ish) engine or spend hours removing heaps of useless features I'll never use (which is especially hard if I'm new to programming - I might remove the wrong things). Its okay if there are plenty of crap games on the board, that is to be expected in a public forum like this. Its the same deal as the engines, the ones worth recognition shine. I am developing a game using EA as a base just because I don't feel like spending a load of time adding features. Its much easier to optimize and remove then to start from scratch, I'm not sure what kind of life you lead but I simply don't have 7 hours a day to spend programming, not that I couldn't write it myself but its packaged well enough. He steps outside some boundaries occasionally but it does work well. If you wanted to be an asset to the community you would collaborate with him to optimize the best current engine. EA. No one says you have to slap a 'fancy' name onto it, but its a forum and the reality is… a catchy name brings views. So logically a fancy name would be a smart thing to do as long as you don't present the engine as something its not. A master topic with a full description of each engine might be a good idea. I was around like 4 years ago when DFA ripped vbGore's particle system into a version of Ecplise. Robin released EO publicly but I had seen his code in other projects for years prior, he has probably been stolen from more then anyone else in any orpg community. Spodi released vbGore publicly he doesn't care about his particle system as long as you give him credit. Same goes for anything else he added, its not stolen from people who are asking him to stop. I think adding a tutorial on how to add a particle engine to your game is probably a bad idea. Particles aren't optional anymore almost every single professional 2D game engine has a particle system. I actually have efficiently utilized most features in EA, plus added some of my own. I don't know what kind of short backward-ass games you plan. But I would say Quests, and Ranged combat are pretty important if you expect to gain any kind of following. Its much more likely that people **want** to have, quests, ranged combat, chat bubbles, etc.. Otherwise it is VERY easy to remove unwanted features (I'm pretty sure one of the first things I did was remove useless code when I started poking away at eclipse), or find a more barebone version like you said. _Your only option isn't this one engine because we allow people to freely post and develop custom engines._ If the people have to vote EA or EOptimize you are not gonna like the result.

> Spanion, there's a limit to the amount of loosely coded and forgotten loops you can leave in however. Sure, there's a LOT more memory and processing power available these days. But this does not mean you can simply neglect any shape of optimization and just write stuff in the most abysmal manners. There should be a balance between the two(have you ever seen the source code of PHP? Dear lord..). > > Optimization, whole not as important in today's market should also not be completely neglected. A few additional loops or wrongly defined variables won't kill your program, but you also shouldn't take it too far "because our computers are stronger anyway". I remember a fair amount of games here having issues on computers that were relatively modern because of this way of thinking. I didn't say fill your code up with dogshit. You can always take things one step farther one step faster. > stable and somewhat optimized Means coded correctly, not with a bunch of bugs and running loops. I went to college for computer programming, although I didn't learn as much as I should have I had several PHP projects. Balance is what I was talking about, it needs to be coded correctly but you don't need to reinvent the wheel to get a small performance boost.

> I've said it before, if a certain developer wins the developer contest I will step in and make a decent engine. I've released my clean and optimised DX8 so you can take a look at that if you think I'm just babbling away. In any case I find optimisation important because let's look at the reason why people play 2D games - their computers aren't powerful enough to handle 3D games. Having a 2D engine that runs worse than a 3D game is pretty bad in my opinion. You make a valid and important point people searching for 2D games most likely are not on a modern machine, but the last time I had success with a 2D title was 2 or 3 years ago. Even a stock P4 shouldn't have much problems running any of these clients, memory/power is cheap/free now. Pretty soon this language will be so outdated it won't run natively on windows, their is a certain degree of optimization you need to put into every project but time is also a factor. A feature rich engine which is stable and somewhat optimized is better then a plain extremely optimized engine in my opinion (depending on the time you want to invest in your project, optimization is always wonderful). Rookie engines are riddled with bugs and I would agree are totally worthless but sometimes people get interested and it motivates the creator to stitch it together into a more polished product. Even when they finish its still probably worthless but they will be a more knowledgeable and respected member, maybe even pass some of their experience on to the even younger members. As I said if it sucks total sh!t they will get no replies and it will fade into the abyss, you trolling helps neither them nor you.

> I'm not trying to be discouraging, I find it fantastic that we're seeing another member learning to program. What I don't find so fantastic is the sudden amount of "full game" custom versions around which are genuinely discouraging creativity. Look through the Eclipse Projects board, 9 times out of 10 you will see the same game with the same set of features with the same GUI just with a different title. I understand that but at least these guys did it themselves, this board is flooded with crap but you gotta support the rookies sometimes they evolve into a great asset to the community. The engines that deserve recognition shine like a gem I'm looking forward to seeing a solid stable version out of you. To be honest computers grow more powerful everyday I find optimization less important as long as you aren't adding total slop to your code. Forget having a set amount of engines, just have a moderator pin the versions that are worthy. Let people release their crap that how you learn, one step at a time. Sorry to the people who's posts I didn't read I don't have time.

Looking forward to the final release excellent job. You will see your engine in my upcoming game, good work stitching it all together.

> It's not about that. You're encouraging lazyness. How long did it take you to make this? Not long, it's simply a case of CTRL-C, CTRL-V. Though this is probably true I've noticed a lot of your posts are negative and downright discouraging. I have written some great things now but I started somewhere around where this guy did. You need to stop being a troll and bitching about everything you don't like, this guy is learning hands and there's nothing wrong with that. If you don't have some constructive criticism other then "Rawr!! You n00b, you didn't spend enough time on it." then shut the hell up.

I didn't feel like working it out so I used this to start my movable windows. You need to make it so the windows have boundaries and cannot get lost. Also make a variable to store the mouse offset``` MouseOffset.x = GlobalX - GUIWindow(i).x ```when you click the window so it doesn't snap to the top corner of the window.

Nice work I've been waiting for a while to see someone release an engine using more modern rendering and input methods. I'll definitely give it a try and likely poke around the code.