I've used Verge before. I never really got anywhere with my old game (back when Atrus and I teamed up). I remember being excited about the release of Verge2, and was disappointed by the fact that it strayed considerably from the old mission: to create an easy means by which to create an RPG. The appearance of pointer access (WTF?!) drove me away completely.

I am considering attempting to get back into game design using Verge or Verge2. I would prefer Verge2, since it will likely have a much more stable code base. I want one of you guys to sell it to me. ;) What are the advantages Verge2 gives that straight programming doesn't have?

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With the advent of v2k+j, VERGE finally has full hicolour support, and it's decently fast too. Take a peek at this: http://members.home.net/thespeedbump/screenshot.jpg I coded that effect with a bitmap I created in Blender (3D stuff) in 1 minute, and about 6 lines of VC. (for both the light, and the "blacklight") The Windows port is also almost within reach, and it's already plenty stable. (right now, it has ONE crashing bug, that's it)

The learning curve has indeed been a downer for some time, but consider the amount of public domain code available on the VERGE source, and v-rpg. (well, there was a lot on v-rpg, and there will again soon, most likely) I myself have coded a lib that consists of all the "low level" stuff. (it's not really, but as low as VERGE goes) It does 9/10ths of the stuff that v1 does, that v2 doesn't. You simply have to drop it in, make a few DAT files, and away you go. There's also #vchelp, an IRC channel on EsperNET whose sole purpose is to help people having trouble with VERGE.

I agree with your thoughts on pointers. They're poorly implemented as of yet. Unless you want to do higher level stuff, however, there isn't very much to worry about. Just a little clean-up.

int img;
img=loadimage("stuff.pcx");
copysprite(x,y,image_width,image_height,img);
free(img);

Not too bad, eh?

The dev tools are also being revamped. WinMapEd 0.99 is out, and it's fully capable, minus TileEd. (which is coming! Honest!) It lacks some of the cooler features, but there's room for them. tatsumi_oreo is also attempting to make a CHR editor. It'll be swank. ;)

It's stable. A small few people have had problems with the VESA code, but it's been a small amount of people, and on most systems so far, the problem doesn't occur in the Windows port.

What does v2 do that you don't have to do yourself? It's still easier to use, by leagues. VC may be a little complicated at first, but it's nowhere nearly as complicated as DirectX. Moreover, you don't have to worry about cooperating with Windows. (this is more applicable to the upcoming Windows port, but it'll be true when it's done and released and all that)

Lastly, v2 has power. If nothing else, v2 has sheer flexibility on its side. Zaratustra has made at least a half-dozen games, and none of them are even RPGs. (to my knowledge, that is) http://zara.verge-rpg.com (get Zeux's World! It's great!)

Bye!

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'What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.' -Zig Ziglar

Try to pick a good one, just try...
See which one is better yet?

I think you should judge which way is better from your own accuity. I don't know which one is better myself, because I'm making an RPG with verge and 2 people. Fenixblade rocks(I never knew it was out, yet, and would have told you how cool it was before(It's my 2nd favorite game that I found at a verge board BTW)), but verge games rock, and I plan to make my verge game rock even more. It's not as if you're choosing between fenix blade, and the good verge game you tried to pick. I think verge is rocking even moreso, by it's happening scene, but I'm not the programmer. It's all about the engine.

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"Eat phood"

I agree.. Its not realy fair to compare VERGE to a RPG Engine. Fenixblade looks nice but its a specialty RPG Engine, just like Explorationsv4.

http://www.explore-rpg.com

So maybe it would be better to compare FenixBlade to Ev4. (hehe - judge for your yourself) The fact that Verge makes ANY game is awesome, but also makes it hard to improve QUALITY is any 1 given direction. If the Vergers would ALL organize and work together on 1 product engine to make it the best it would improve how people look at Verge. Then work on another aspect of game design.

Explorationsv4
www.explore-rpg.com

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VergeC is a pretty impressive piece of coding, but I think it's also Verge's greatest weakness.

You can't expect people who need a game creation engine to be able to easily wrap their heads round concepts like pointer dereferencing, memory allocation and deallocation. Well, you can, but you'll be disappointed... just count all the "aieee, VC is killing me!" posts on the help board.

My point is, I think the quality and quantity of Verge demos/games released would increase if it used a higher-level scripting language, like JavaScript, that takes care of memory allocation/deallocation for you.

JavaScript would kinda suck for this job (besides, Sphere uses it :p), but there is a great, tiny, fast, free scripting language called Lua that's easy to bind to C code:

http://tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua

No one wants to replace VergeC because of the complexity of compiler design, but there are plenty of free scripting languages out there that would be easy to plug in.

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