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[Jolteon]

Hello.

I am soon going to be looking into making a game, a fairly simple game. Mainly a 'see if I can do it' sort of thing, but I do intend on after getting a working proof of concept (as in, proof I can do it) i will probably try to develop it into a full blown game. FIFE is currently the best engine I can find for what I am wanting, an isometric view.

Is the FIFE engine likely capable of doing this sort of thing:
Large amounts of simultaneous animations
Large amounts of AI 'bots' (the 'enemies')
An 'inside' feel, black outer walls, stuff like that. (Like this: Image)
The big one, weapons.
Fairly speedy loading of different maps between levels (if this is even possible?)

I've only come accross one game based upon FIFE (Unknown Horizons), which is the total opposite sort of thing as I am going for (A general indoor shoot em up, similar Zombie Shooter - which the above Image is from)



Secondly: how on earth do you actually launch this thing? I have installed Python 3.2, but whenever I click on anything from the start --> all programs it doesn't load anything. So I cannot try the demo for myself.

[prock]

Hi Jolteon,

Good to hear you are looking at FIFE for your project.  We haven't done a lot of "stress" testing as far as simultaneous animations go.  We have done some tests for large amounts of tiles though.  FIFE doesn't have any AI built in so I'd imagine it's really up to your AI code how many FIFE could handle.   The 'inside' feel you describe should be doable with FIFE if you have the images/tiles to do it.

We do have a few other games using FIFE that you would probably be interested in.  Check them out here: http://wiki.fifengine.net/FIFE-based_games.  In particular check out Zero-Project.   They have made quite the progress with FIFE.  Look at the videos they provide...  that will give you a pretty good feel for FIFE.   Here is an indoor screenshot http://en.zero-projekt.net/files/Galerie/screenshots/1024x_zero_building_dummy_floor.jpg.

To launch the pre-compiled version of FIFE you will need to install Python 2.7.    Check out the install guide:  http://wiki.fifengine.net/Windows_install_guide. 

Hope this helps.  If you have any more questions feel free to ask.  Also come visit us on our IRC channel (#fife on freenet)

[Jolteon]

Well, when I say 'animations', i am looking at having up to 50 - 100 'enemies' active at times each running about firing weapons throwing grenades, and generally causing us much havoc as possible, up to 150 of them on the final zones, with constant wave after wave, and hopefully the player will be going nuts with his weaponry causing lots of simultaneous dying, which I am planning on having several random and length death animations for them, not that they just moan and fall over, sort of thing.

The game I am planning on ending up with, will be quite an intesive non-stop combat game, so lots of mayhem and things generally flying about or being shot up.

One thing you didn't seem to touch on in your reply: How does FIFE handle with loading other maps mid-game? (IE: Zone complete, loading next)
 

[prock]

Sounds like you want a lot of action going on at any given time.  FIFE wasn't really designed for that but I'd imagine it would handle it without much problems especially on newer/faster machines.  The only way to really know is to throw together a quick stress test to see how it handles. 

FIFE will load a level as fast as it can load resources from a file.  It will also perform "lazy" loading which means it will load resources as it needs them.   Unfortunately it cannot do any "pre-fetching" of other maps at the moment.  You could I suppose accomplish that yourself by telling FIFE to load certain resources from the next map before you reach the end of the current map which would minimize load times.

Hope this helps,

Prock

[vtchill]

Hey Jolteon,

I like the game idea, looks like a lot of fun. With the number of animations and AI you want I think animations may be a little bottleneck for the current renderer in fife. We are improving its performance and have a game that taxes the current implementation is the best motivation for engine improvements. I agree with Prock you should start with a reasonable amount of animations and see how far you can push it and then we can provide support on the engine side to help with any bottlenecks found.

The map loading is really up to you. Fife provides a default map loader for our map format, but as clients have more complicated requirements some of them use their own map format which can be paired with a backend database to load game assets. I don't think any game currently streams in map sections, however zero-projekt has triggers on a map that cause the loading of another map, such as entering a building from the street.

[nick561]

Thanks a lot for this kind information................