Little questions on Rev as a game plataform (related to: myst)

[Andre Garzia]

Hi all,

well my cloning of myst like engine is almost over and I decided to 
check up with the revGurus on the list if I am on the right track. I 
cannot present a demo stack now, wait a couple days for my scenery is 
ugly, I am now generating custom ones with terragen (a nice terrain 
generator, free for non comercial use).

There's the main stack and it does nothing, it just show some nice 
splash logo and prepare MLE (Myst Like Experience) stack to launch. 
This MLE substack is the current interpreter. The main stack does have 
two substacks RESOURCES and MLE, the resources substack is just a 
collection of often used graphics and sound. The later is structured 
like this:

In the stack's script there are implementations for default responses 
to game actions. Like if a mouseUp climbs up the food chain, err, 
message path, then it will be handled by this handle and return to 
game, also on the stack script are some utility functions to handle 
game behaviour. It's all done with custom properties. when mouseOver is 
triggered it looks in it targets for a set of custom properties, for 
example if there's a music property the interpreter will change the 
music when mouseover is called, if there's a "lookat" property game 
will execute script inside it when "look at" game tool is clicked on 
that target. Game interaction is provided by clicking on the screen, 
possible actions are: look, walk, take, use, talk. For each action 
there's a related custom property on the targets. Theres a background 
picture of the scene and "hotspots" are defined by shapes that cannot 
be seen by user. Each scene is a card, when card loads (preOpenCard and 
OpenCard) it setups music and other game low level stuff, after one 
second after the card is loaded (so that user atention is now focused) 
a message is sent (Thank You Mr Dar Scott for Message Primer) which 
trigger animation builded with Animation Builder tool.

All game engine functions are inside substack's script, so the only 
scripts inside a card are related to that card/scene in particular, 
this proved to be very readable and easy to manage. Utility functions 
are about music and movie playing. I plan to release this as a 
contribution for others to improve upon. It's easy to create your own 
game, just create a substack of MLE and go creating your cards. 
Documentation will be written and a web page will be set as soon as I 
am proud enought to allow my figment to roam free on the net.

I think it's all explained now, so I as the revGurus out there if they 
have any advise or best practice to tell me. I am too newbie to rev, my 
code is probably bad but I will allow everyone to shout at it later, I 
am trying to get design and implementation advises by now ;-)

Cheers
Andre Garzia  2003
imac2 ibook p100 e uma torradeira....