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Message Board > Fenix / Bennu / Gemix / DIV > Long time, no see.

September 4, 2008, 19:00
Gul
BSc.
6 posts
Hi all,

Don't know if anyone remembers me (Rincewind, PB, Retep, Dennis?), but I used to be active in div-arena.co.uk community. Hows life? Currently I am majoring in theoretical physics and mathematics, and not in computer science, what I used to think would be my field of study.

The reason I am back is because I was talking to a nephew of mine. We were talking about computer games, and I mentioned I used to create them. He asked me how that worked. I said you have to have a programming language and everything. So, now he wants to try it himself. I pointed him at this website. I want to help him further, but DIV doesn't seem viable (due to competability issues). I was wondering what language (fenix, bennu?), currently seems best to learn to program games in. Is there anything with an IDE that can compare to divīs?

Thanks for your help,

Gul

[Edited on September 4, 2008 by Gul]
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September 4, 2008, 23:41
GINO
None
15 posts
Hi.
Nowadays there are some alternatives to DIV. There are Fenix and Bennu (a fork of Fenix), which are free software, and Gemix Studio that will be commercial software (there are some free betas released at the moment for people to test them) that should be the succesor of DIV Games Studio.
You can download the three alternatives and test them so you can find the better one for you.
Here are the links to download the Gemix betas:
Gemix Studio Beta 5
Gemix Studio Beta 5.3 (update)

Cheers.

[Edited on September 4, 2008 by GINO]
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#
September 4, 2008, 23:48
Fiona
games are terrible
-9616558 posts

Hi Gul, I vaguely remember you. (I was called Ferret on DIV-Arena.)

Yep, DIV is not viable, dead and buried. No one would use it now. Fenix is good if you want to code with the same language, but getting starting is not as easy. (There is a wiki though that will help.)

Bennu is looking nice, it's got more of a modular structure and is actively being developed. Unfortunately there's only a windows version at the moment, and if you ask me the guy whose developing it is not as open to suggestions as he should be.

There's not a nice GUI for them, and the majority of the English speaking community is here. It's all rather fragmented.

I've been having the same problems recently. I've been writing Python a lot (a wonderful, easy to learn and downright beautiful language) and looked into Pygame, which is a nice SDL wrapper for it.
Python and Pygame have huge communities of people, and IDEs you can get. Books written on them etc, it's quite nice to get into.
However, I still found I had to do a lot of work to get things in Pygame doing basic stuff. Moving elements around, colliding with things etc... What seemed very easy in DIV is a pain in the arse in most everything else.

To put it bluntly, DIV and Fenix have spoilt me, my mind is stuck in this "Simple 2D games are easy to code" mentality. To make it worse, Fenix and Bennu are still extremely buggy, I've had to deal with a lot of the problems over the years - The last thing I wrote (in Bennu) has a ridiculous crash that happens everytime in Vista only that I haven't been able to fix at all. Depressing stuff.

So in my effort to remedy this I've been writing a library for Python/Pygame to bridge this gap between easy, flexible and not buggy.

For a basic idea of the code, a simple program currently looks a bit like this:

Python code:
from sys import exit
import pygame
from pygame.locals import *

from fenix.program import Program
from fenix.process import Process

class Game(Program):
   
    def setup_game(self):
        # Initial tasks
        self.set_mode((800,600))
        self.set_fps(30)
       
        # Create process
        mans = Guy(400, 300)

        # Assign a graphic to process
        mans.graph = pygame.image.load('guy.png').convert_alpha()

    def game_loop(self):
        # This function is called every frame
        # For doing things like checking if we're quitting :D
        if self.key(K_ESCAPE):
            self.quit()
   

class Guy(Process):
   
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        Process.__init__(self)    

        # This is the constructor for the process think
        # of it as the "BEGIN" block in DIV
        self.x = x
        self.y = y
               
    def frame(self):  
        # This would be the equivalent of the "LOOP" block.

        while True:            

            # Pressing arrow keys. Notice the DIV-like
            # key() function, key detection is actually
            # a pain in the arse in Pygame
            if game.key(K_LEFT):
                self.x = self.x-1
            if game.key(K_RIGHT):
                self.x = self.x+1
            if game.key(K_UP):
                self.y = self.y-1
            if game.key(K_DOWN):
                self.y = self.y+1
           
            # The yield command is special, all you need
            # to know is that it's basically equivalent
            # to the "FRAME" command in DIV. Discovering
            # the existence of this command in python is
            # how this library started.
            yield
               
               
# This is un-DIV like, it needs heavily cleaning up.
# But it basically just creates the game object and calls the relevant methods to start a game.
game = Game()
game.init_program()
game.setup_game()
game.start_game()


There's still a lot of work to be done, like I still haven't done a load_png() function, so we still have the ugly Pygame version, and the way you actually start the game needs some serious work. But it's getting there.

Either way, even if you don't know Python, I'm sure understanding the code there is not a hard task, and you'll appreciate how similar it works to DIV/Fenix.

Anyway, just saying that if Fenix/Bennu don't look very appetising due to the current environment, Python with Pygame is a great alternative, and for people coming from a background in DIV my library should work wonders.

Alternatively, there's things like Game maker or Multimedia Fusion that people have successfully made some great games in. I'm just a little biased with Python due to how nice it is to write - easy to learn too!
____________
laffo
#
September 4, 2008, 23:49
Fiona
games are terrible
-9616558 posts

That's some serious fukken self promotion there Fiona!
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laffo
#
September 5, 2008, 02:18
Sandman
F3n!x0r
1194 posts

Quoting Fiona:
...and if you ask me the guy whose developing it is not as open to suggestions as he should be.
I talk with him almost everyday, discussing Bennu and related stuff and I don't understand why you said that. What was your suggestion?

Quoting Fiona:
To make it worse, Fenix and Bennu are still extremely buggy, I've had to deal with a lot of the problems over the years - The last thing I wrote (in Bennu) has a ridiculous crash that happens everytime in Vista only that I haven't been able to fix at all.
That bug you had was caused most likely by the old renderer (Fenix and WIP2) and the only known occurrence is with your Vista (there are other people running Bennu on Vista fine). I don't get why Bennu would be 'extremely buggy' because of this. Even Fenix wasn't 'extremely buggy', because most of the time 'bugs' turned out to be the result of a user error.

Note that the latest public Bennu version with a renderer is WIP2. We're now at WIP7, containing a renderer again.
Also note that Bennu is a language, instead of a gaming engine (like Fenix), which means the modules do add functionality to Bennu, but are not part of the language, creating a way more flexible environment.

I am indeed very pro Bennu; keep yer eyes open for a release.
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BennuWiki
Yes, my avatar has grey borders in IE (so get a decent browser)
ROOFLEZ ROOFLEZ
#
September 5, 2008, 02:42
SplinterGU
Whiskered
16 posts
Quoting Fiona:
Bennu is looking nice, it's got more of a modular structure and is actively being developed. Unfortunately there's only a windows version at the moment, and if you ask me the guy whose developing it is not as open to suggestions as he should be.

How can you say this things? You never do suggest me any thing... you maybe first do one suggest before said this stuff...
Several feature (and maybe the most important) in Fenix/Bennu are made by me for user's suggest... You maybe must try talk with me (and know me) before confirm this stuff...

Quoting Fiona:
To put it bluntly, DIV and Fenix have spoilt me, my mind is stuck in this "Simple 2D games are easy to code" mentality. To make it worse, Fenix and Bennu are still extremely buggy, I've had to deal with a lot of the problems over the years - The last thing I wrote (in Bennu) has a ridiculous crash that happens everytime in Vista only that I haven't been able to fix at all. Depressing stuff.


Bennu is extremely stable, if you found a bug, I will thankful with you if you share this information with me...

I do not have any problems with you, not only that, I must say that you like me... but, these comments surprised me...
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September 5, 2008, 08:52
Fiona
games are terrible
-9616558 posts

Quoting Sandman:
Quoting Fiona:
and if you ask me the guy whose developing it is not as open to suggestions as he should be.
I talk with him almost everyday, discussing Bennu and related stuff and I don't understand why you said that. What was your suggestion?

I read the Bennu forum, he's extremely dismissive of things, and the fact that I can only download WIP2 gives the impression of a very closed and arrogant release cycle. Unfinished or not, it's impossible for people to gauge the current state of a program - or even if a particular bug has been fixed. The issue I describe below is one such bug that may or may not have been fixed - I don't know, but it certainly doesn't make me want to keep using Bennu thanks to that guessing game.

Quoting Sandman:
Quoting Fiona:
To make it worse, Fenix and Bennu are still extremely buggy, I've had to deal with a lot of the problems over the years - The last thing I wrote (in Bennu) has a ridiculous crash that happens everytime in Vista only that I haven't been able to fix at all.

That bug you had was caused most likely by the old renderer (Fenix and WIP2) and the only known occurrence is with your Vista (there are other people running Bennu on Vista fine). I don't get why Bennu would be 'extremely buggy' because of this. Even Fenix wasn't 'extremely buggy', because most of the time 'bugs' turned out to be the result of a user error.

Potentially, but this bug was one that I could not track down. I had lots of problems with text not displaying or showing up when I used Bennu for Ludum Dare, and this bug was related to text drawing.
Since I don't have access to Vista at home, I stayed after work on someone machine for a good few hours trying to fix this issue, I ran multiple tests and could not work out why this was crashing. I broke down and tried it on the latest version of Fenix - There was no crash. So most likely not user error.
The code is in the rar file when you download the game, feel free to fix it for me, I'd be most grateful. But I had numerous issues like this during Ludum Dare, I wont be going back to it anytime soon.

[Edited on September 5, 2008 by Fiona]
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laffo
#
September 5, 2008, 09:48
Sandman
F3n!x0r
1194 posts

I would, but I don't have Vista at my disposal.

Actually other WIPs are also available, WIP2 is just the last public one with a renderer. I just don't recommend using them for game creation, as they didn't have a renderer, but this could change with WIP7.

I understand what you mean though, downloads are hard to find and are ill documented. But that's because it's a WIP and not a release, for the release is to be documented properly (most likely I'll do the English part) and advertised properly.
____________
BennuWiki
Yes, my avatar has grey borders in IE (so get a decent browser)
ROOFLEZ ROOFLEZ
#
September 5, 2008, 10:06
Fiona
games are terrible
-9616558 posts

Well, the way things are, I don't think I could recommend Bennu to anyone starting out again.

I would be hesitant to recommend Fenix, but once you have it up and running it works well enough.

By the way, I was up last night doing a lot of rejigging to the library, so that example above is very different to what you do now - Now it's even closer to Fenix. (Also the main game class is now a process, before it wasn't a generator so yield/frame didn't work as expected, very different to Fenix of course. Now it works as expected..)

[Edited on September 5, 2008 by Fiona]
____________
laffo
#
September 5, 2008, 13:45
Rincewind
programmer
1545 posts

Hey Gul, ofcourse I remember you.

How old is your nephew? If he is 15 or older he shouldn't have problems setting up an editor like Context (using this tutorial) to use with Fenix. As mentioned earlier he'll then be able to make use of the Fenix wiki and when Bennu is officially released he can advance to using that. If he is younger than 15 using Gemix Studio could be a good idea because of the simplicity of the integrated IDE.
____________
Personal website: http://www.loijson.com
#
September 5, 2008, 16:09
PEader
お前はもう死んでいる
1486 posts

How could i forget you. ;'-(
____________
I see 57,005 people.
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September 5, 2008, 19:19
Sandman
F3n!x0r
1194 posts

I'll have to agree with Rincewind. So good luck with it Gul - and cousin.
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BennuWiki
Yes, my avatar has grey borders in IE (so get a decent browser)
ROOFLEZ ROOFLEZ
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September 12, 2008, 01:26
Dennis
どこかにいる
2092 posts

Well Gul, I remember I remade metroid with your help or something once. I considered you long gone by now. I was still in high school back then I think.
____________
Kwakkel
#

Message Board > Fenix / Bennu / Gemix / DIV > Long time, no see.

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