Re: World Builder Type Application
Re: World Builder Type Application
- Subject: Re: World Builder Type Application
- From: Loukas Kalenderidis <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 00:17:53 +1000
On 09/05/2007, at 11:40 PM, Mike Burns wrote:
Nostalgia hit yesterday and I dusted off my old Mac II. Browsing
through my old hard drive I stumbled upon World Builder -- an
adventure game creation tool from 1986 that I used to play with in
my younger days.
Now I'm still a few steps away from being able to attempt making a
program like this -- but I had a few questions just out of
curiosity. There are several aspects of a program like World
Builder that are a bit out of my league, but if I had an idea what
direction to start looking in that would be great.
Please do it, I'd be so keen to play with it :D In fact, I'm tempted
to pull one of the old Macs out of the cupboard to play with World
Builder again myself.
World Builder allowed you to build "Scenes" -- a picture window and
a text window, and allowed you to create objects which you could
place in those scenes. It also had a very simple scripting language
that allowed for some fairly complex games to be created. Once you
finished creating your game, it was saved as a self contained
application that could be played without any sort of runtime
environment.
How does that process work? How could I write a program with XCode/
Cocoa that could let a user put all those elements together and then
save it as an mac os x application? I'm sure this is a fairly
complex topic, but any push in the right direction would be much
appreciated.
I'm not sure how it worked with World Builder, but I'd probably do it
as follows:
1) Define a data format for game resources that covered the features
you wanted - scenes, links between scenes, commands, objects in the
scene, etc
- I'd probably use a set of plist files and related resources, as
they are easily loadable as NSArray/NSDictionary
2) Build a game engine application that reads some resources in the
defined format from its bundle and runs the game
3) Build a development environment for building the scenes that saves
out the data in the defined format.
You'd have a copy of your game engine shell app stored inside the
bundle of the development app, then when you want to save a game you
just need to copy the game engine shell application and dump the
resources inside the new copy.
Sorry if that wasn't clear, it's late and I'm tired. If it's not, ask
and I'll answer tomorrow at work :) Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Loukas
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