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What prototype tools do you use?

Started by September 18, 2000 06:31 PM
2 comments, last by ukemi 24 years, 2 months ago
I''m trying to find a good prototyping tool. So far I''ve looked at Nemo and Morfit. Does anyone have experience with these? What are your opinons? Any others out there I should look at?
How detailed of a prototype do you want? I''ve heard good things about NeMo, but I''ve looked at Morfit and it was a bit hard to use. If you are doing a 3D shooter, do a search for Pie in the sky on yahoo. They have a click and play FPS maker that is reasonably priced and has been around for ages. Also look at wildtangent.com since they have a java/java-script based graphics engine that offers a bit more flexibility. That engine is free as long as you don''t exceed a certain number of distributions with it. The only down fall with wild tangent is they install this daemon that sucks down info off your computer for ''upgrade purposes''. The daemon doesn''t live in the engine''s directory.
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I''m not looking for too detailed of a prototype. My main requirements are 3-d and network support.
Well, if you are doing a 3d game and you don''t want do networking yourself, try out 3D GameStudio - but its scripting language is quite limited so don''t expect to use it for you final release.

If you don''t mind doing the network programming in some prototype language (like C++ builder, Delphi or Visual Basic) then I think Eldermage 6DX is very good. I am actually using 6DX with my own product (using C++ though) for the final release but it is bit slower than what you get if you fine tune some low-level engine so this is a matter of how many resources you have for development.

Other 3D prototype tools (besides NeMo):
LightCube
3D RAD

An alternative way to go is to write your prototype in java and use Java3D as your environment.

Yet an other way is simply to get your hands on some Quake development tools and try building you app as mod in those. They are free, but you can''t sell you prototype commercially.

You can also go the Basic way and try out DarkBASIC, good for fast prototypes, but quite slow.

And Morfit, I don''t like it. I tried it out and for me at least it was quite unstable (crashed often) and its graphics are quite bad. And it is quite low-level. Not good for prototypes - is more gered at final releases.

Jacob Marner
Jacob Marner, M.Sc.Console Programmer, Deadline Games

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