Topic: Question for the Maratis Creator...

Hello,

My name is Quentin and myself and another individual have started working on a project inspired by the classic Quest for Glory games. We have looked through assorted API's, SDK's and Maratis looks like it has most if not all the features and capabilites we are looking for. And by the way, Kudos for the impressive application!

It will be a third person point and click game with a fixed camera in each scene. The most important question being the support it has for mouse functionality within the game. from the moratis script doc, I see the following functions built in that seem to apply;

« MOUSE_BUTTON1″
« MOUSE_BUTTON2″
« MOUSE_BUTTON3″
« MOUSE_X »
« MOUSE_Y »

What we need is a mouse curser functionality, that we can swap with custom 2d or 3d images for the curser. is this functionality already there but I'm not seeing it?

Also, the camera will be fixed on each scene so I believe I would need to build something resembling an image map for each scene that the mouse can interact with and trigger functions, with compensation for dynamic aspect ratios of course. Unless you can suggest a more precise way to handle this functionality within the context of 3d objects with your program?

If this works out, Maratis is the program of choice we will use for future 3d adventure games, and I believe we can provide you with a following of like minded individuals as well as fleshed out documentation for using Maratis to produce 3d point and click genre games. (which of course means more donations smile )

Any help you can provide would be appreciated.

Thank you!

  • anael
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Re: Question for the Maratis Creator...

Hi !

It's good to hear you are interested in using Maratis, I'm a huge fan of point and clic adventure games,
it's in fact because of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Broken Sword that I wanted to make video-games.

About your questions, some advanced functionalities can be used with the c++ SDK. I hope we can add new lua functions soon but for now the lua implementation only feature basic mouse (clic, mouse position...).

- For implementing cursor and game interface I made a tutorial here : http://www.maratis3d.org/?p=563
- About mouse interaction on triggers you can send a ray from the camera to the mouse position and see if it interact with an invisible mesh (trigger). There is a ray-tracing function doing that in the c++ SDK, I can also give you some code.
Same for the character moving, the ray intersection can give you the 3d point where the character needs to go.

I hope to see your work soon,

Anaël.

Re: Question for the Maratis Creator...

Perfect. Any code snippets you can provide would be invaluable to hastening the production of our game. I previously skimmed over that page explaining game interface, but overlooked the mouse curser portion. that's exactly what we need.

And the mouse position interacting with an invisible mesh is an even better implementation I was thinking, which allows us to use slight camera tricks and still be precise.

Here's my second question. I noticed you said you have been working on Maratis for 9 years now. Lua scripting can be used for some basic functionality. my question is which version of lua does Maratis use?

Lua 5.1
Lua 5.1 was released on 21 Feb 2006. The main features in Lua 5.1 are a new module system, incremental garbage collection, new mechanism for varargs, new syntax for long strings and comments, mod and length operators, metatables for all types, new configuration scheme via luaconf.h, and a fully reentrant parser. The current release is Lua 5.1.4, released on 22 Aug 2008.

Lua 5.0
Lua 5.0 was released on 11 Apr 2003. The main new features in Lua 5.0 are collaborative multithreading via Lua coroutines, full lexical scoping instead of upvalues, and metatables instead of tags and tag methods. Lua 5.0 also introduces booleans, proper tail calls, and weak tables. Other features are better support for packages, new API for loading Lua chunks, new error handling protocol, better error messages, and much more. Lua 5.0 is the first version to be released under the new license. The last release was Lua 5.0.3, released on 26 Jun 2006.

Just need to know so I can properly script in Maratis.

  • anael
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Re: Question for the Maratis Creator...

Maratis uses Lua 5.1.4. I started working on Maratis long time ago, but I'm using Lua only since a couple of years.

It's also possible to extend the Maratis lua functions in c++ from a game plugin,
or by extending this code (where Maratis lua functions are declared) : http://code.google.com/p/maratis/source … Script.cpp