I just registered my copy and have a few first impressions (and a couple problems that someone might know the answer to)
The system impresses me, there is a lot of room to push it to do things that were not initially designed into it (like item weight, max items carried per player, max weight of items carried by player, etc)
I've only run into 3 annoying problems so far:
1: In the Mac OS X version, when you try to generate a map preview, the program crashes. The workaround is to do that bit with the classic versuion in OS 9. This is not so much of an issue as I have discovered that map editing works much better in Classic anyway, due to the presence of proper floating windows that cut down the number of mouse clicks when building a map.
2: I have had the program delete a bunch of the files (mostly images) from my game folder, causing the games to crash when they are rebuilt. This has happened twice in about 8 hours of use in the last few days, I haven't narrowed it down as to what particular activites cause it yet, but ity seems to be related to the build game process. I'll keep my eyes on it to see if I can narrow it down enough to be a useful bug report. At the moment I am just backing up the game folder after I finish working on it (and before I build it) to avoid hassles and lost data (and pulled out hair after a long editing session).
3: The test game I am working on at the moment won't run on Windows (2000, vanilla install on a decent workstation) It immediately generates a DSOUND.dll error saying that it can't find Ordinal 11. This may be just my game itself, there may be linked sound effects that I have deleted the sound file for.
This third problem leads me to a feature that might be useful, a game integrity checking stage in the build process, that checks if all linked images, sounds, etc. are actually in the correct place and tells you what's missing (if anything) before it will build the game.
I have successfully built my test game after most of my images were deleted from the game folder and had it run, but all of the map tiles were missing, the map preview caused a crash due to the fact that it's image was missing and my character animation was missing, causing me to have a game that consisted of nobody walking around in a vast field of nothing that crashed when you tried to call up the map to see where you were. (I should try to sell it as some sort of a nihilistic experiment in game design).
Checking the game integrity by hand is a slow, repetitious and tedious process. It is really much better suited to a computer than a person.
That said, this is not a blast of the software, I think it is well worth the $50.00 that it cost, and it is after all version 1.0 software and bound to have a few bugs. I am truly impressed with the system and after about 8 hours of fiddling, I have gotten through most of the learning curve and created a workable (if a bit boring) game.
I am waiting to see the graphics library on the CD before I start my own graphics work, but I think that I will probably be creating a fairly extensive library of my own. Once I have my Lightwave template scenes and objects set up, I should be able to fly through character animation setup and create a bunch of character animations with little effort after the initial setup. After that's done, I would probably be willing to do character animations for other people's games (always depending on time constraints, I do have a day job)
The Minister
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