The Holy Grail of videogames development: creating good quality content for your games at a fraction of the man-hours. Electronic Arts do it by drafting in thousands of people just to work on the one game. You and I don't have thousands of people, nor the lust for power or blatant disregard for people's welfare that EA seem to have. There is, of course another way of doing things: get better development tools.

Yes, I know: "That's all very well, smart-arse, but where the hell do I get these 'better development tools,' eh?" Simple: use some initiative and make your own. You don't need a degree in C++ and a compiler either; Use VERGE itself to make them.

For example: tired of banging out code for calls to your textbox? Write a piece of VC that allows you to enter a few parameters and type the text yourself before it generates the code for you and outputs it to the log, ready for you to paste en masse to your map's VC file. I've done it myself. Heck, I even built it into the game's codebase so I can use elements of the game to easily build a GUI for my tools and effectively play and develop at the same time. Check it out, it even has a little textbox preview to show you how it'll look:



You don't have to go mad and write a whole system for randomly generating dungeons, just knock up a few utilities to take the hard work out of some of the more repetitive chores that come with making a game.

You'll (hopefully) find the time between having a good idea and being able to use it dramatically reduced.

With a little more imagination, you could take the work out of designing all those individual CHRs for incidental NPCs by writing some VC to produce them to a template: pick clothing, haircut, skin and

clothing colours and then have VERGE drop the result into the clipboard or to a BMP with a MAK and Batch file for converting it to a CHR. I'm working on one at the moment. Take a look:



Yes, I am such a bloody show-off.

Also - in line with this philosophy - I'd like to give a pat on the back to Zonker, who's random portrait generator is a fine example of this sort of niftiness.

I was going to reply with something about generating CHRs at runtime, then I remembered the whole paperdoll thread of madness a while back, and how CHRs are cached and you can't change the source image of one at runtime. Then I thought about hijacking the entity render, but that sucks because I'm just redoing code that has already been done in the exe. Then I thought about hacking the exe, but remembered that I barely looked at the exe yet so I'm going to keep my mouth shut for now.