Demo Virtual Visit Maker (Prototype)

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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Formerly known as "Adventure Window", a super old project of mine I decided to get back to.
Make your own virtual visits and first-person point-and-click games.







With my custom game engine, "Virtual Visit Maker", you can make high quality, cross-platform, first-person, point-and-click games and virtual visits from your own pictures, videos, audio, and cylindrical panoramas without having to write a single line of code. 100% free. My current game project, "Long Live the Ancient Essence", will be using this game engine as a base. The game will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux using Virtual Visit Maker.

See the demo here, and feel free to modify it:
https://samuel-venable.itch.io/virtual-visit-maker-prototype

You do not need the source code to modify.

Simply add your own external graphics and audio and link to them in the "run.ini" file how you want.

-100% customizable - just edit the INI file
-Add in your own 360 cylindrical panoramas
-Link panoramas together by adding clickable hotspots
-Disable/enable hotspots with variables
-Supports up to 10, (0-9), channels of audio files to play at once
-Non-panoramic frames are also fully supported
-Add messages that appear at the bottom of the screen
-Create timed events to keep your players moving
-Supports animated panoramas and frames
-Enable debug mode to see cursor coordinates
-Full screen alpha blending transitions

All I have to show at this time is a demo to give you a taste of what it can do.
More info to come on how to use it, as well as more platforms other than just Windows.
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
Pic's dude! We don't even know what we are about to download here :D
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Added a video demonstration of what Virtual Visit Maker can do in its current state. :)
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Uploaded an Html5 version. Unfortunately, there is no way to modify the resources in use with Html5 without having access to the source code, because the Html5 runner only allows for what was originally imported into included files to be loaded from functions like sprite_add(), etc.

Here's the online demo (transitions aren't working):
https://samuel-venable.itch.io/virtual-visit-maker-prototype
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Would this capture more people's interest if I shared the source code?
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Source code is now available. Beware! It's super messy because this is a very old project of mine and I never took the time to tidy it up. Source is GM 8.1 and GMS 1.4 compatible via importing the GM81 project file. It also can work in GMS 2 if you have GMS 1.4 to convert it to a GMX. For GMS 1.4 / GMS 2 you will need to commnent out code specific to GM 8.1 and uncomment the code specific to GMS 1.4 / GMS 2.

GMS2 will have compatibility scripts on import, but this project only uses 1 object instance to power it all, so it won't run that slow.
 

MeBoingus

Member
Didn't notice this before. Am a big fan of P&C games in general, so I'll definitely give this a go and come back with a proper review shortly.



EDIT:

The whole engine is very well put together. There are only a few suggestions I would make.
  • The addition of a 'hint' system. Certain hotspots in the demo were difficult to find, and it was overall quite hard to tell when the demo had ended, simply due to the fact that I was unsure whether or not I was just unable to find a specific hotspot.
  • Perhaps a simple tool for generating the run.ini files through a GUI.

It reminded me very much of Myst. More storytelling than action. Full of atmosphere, and could be used to create some fantastic little adventure games.



Overall it's a really nice engine, and with a few quality of life additions, it would make for a fantastic tool.
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Didn't notice this before. Am a big fan of P&C games in general, so I'll definitely give this a go and come back with a proper review shortly.



EDIT:

The whole engine is very well put together. There are only a few suggestions I would make.
  • The addition of a 'hint' system. Certain hotspots in the demo were difficult to find, and it was overall quite hard to tell when the demo had ended, simply due to the fact that I was unsure whether or not I was just unable to find a specific hotspot.
  • Perhaps a simple tool for generating the run.ini files through a GUI.

It reminded me very much of Myst. More storytelling than action. Full of atmosphere, and could be used to create some fantastic little adventure games.



Overall it's a really nice engine, and with a few quality of life additions, it would make for a fantastic tool.
Yeah I wanted to make a GUI that is designed after a vaporware software known as Adventure Maker. I feel free to mention its name here because though i own the full version for the longest time now the only store you can buy it from has been shut down and the author has pretty much abandoned it and its community, so with no way to buy it it isn't exactly a competing game engine with GMS anymore, on top of the fact it can only make point and click games.

Anyway since I own that product, this was going to be an open source clone of it, I was even going to add limited support for importing existing Adventure Maker projects with limited compatibility with features.

You or anyone who wants to is welcome to help out with expanding my runner or creating an IDE since it's open source now. You can use the free version of Adventure Maker as a reference for making the IDE. The free version is limited to 20 frames and is inadequate to make any real full length game, so again I doubt I'm breaking the forum rules by mentioning it with the purchasing server being down for years now.

But it's still all you would need for reference when working on this clone I made in GM 8.1.

I can also share the inner workings of the ini file and how to use it's different sections, keys, and values, with anyone who wants to know.

I was planning to make a feature where you can eventually swap at runtime which destination ini file you read from for when a single ini becomes way too much text to scroll through in a single file.

Edit:

Also, thank you very much for downloading and the kind review! The demo isn't meant to really have a "beginning" or "end" like a "game demo" would normally; it's just meant to demonstrate the basic features. If anyone needs me to provide it, this requires a dll for 2 basic math functions GM/GMS doesn't have, it can be written in c++ using one source code file and can be compiled to virtually any platform for desktop and I believe mobile and console as well (UWP, HTML5 would use a near-identical JS file, etc.) without using any platform-specific API's or code.
 
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MeBoingus

Member
Yeah I wanted to make a GUI that is designed after a vaporware software known as Adventure Maker. I feel free to mention its name here because though i own the full version for the longest time now the only store you can buy it from has been shut down and the author has pretty much abandoned it and its community, so with no way to buy it it isn't exactly a competing game engine with GMS anymore, on top of the fact it can only make point and click games.

Anyway since I own that product, this was going to be an open source clone of it, I was even going to add limited support for importing existing Adventure Maker projects with limited compatibility with features.

You or anyone who wants to is welcome to help out with expanding my runner or creating an IDE since it's open source now. You can use the free version of Adventure Maker as a reference for making the IDE. The free version is limited to 20 frames and is inadequate to make any real full length game, so again I doubt I'm breaking the forum rules by mentioning it with the purchasing server being down for years now.

But it's still all you would need for reference when working on this clone I made in GM 8.1.

I can also share the inner workings of the ini file and how to use it's different sections, keys, and values, with anyone who wants to know.

I was planning to make a feature where you can eventually swap at runtime which destination ini file you read from for when a single ini becomes way too much text to scroll through in a single file.

Edit:

Also, thank you very much for downloading and the kind review! The demo isn't meant to really have a "beginning" or "end" like a "game demo" would normally; it's just meant to demonstrate the basic features. If anyone needs me to provide it, this requires a dll for 2 basic math functions GM/GMS doesn't have, it can be written in c++ using one source code file and can be compiled to virtually any platform for desktop and I believe mobile and console as well (UWP, HTML5 would use a near-identical JS file, etc.) without using any platform-specific API's or code.

Hmm... I have been at a dead-end for projects to work on lately. At the moment I'm only using GMS1 for my development, but I may take a crack at setting up some kind of software for this.

I'll take a deeper look into the file structure and source later ont his evening.
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Hmm... I have been at a dead-end for projects to work on lately. At the moment I'm only using GMS1 for my development, but I may take a crack at setting up some kind of software for this.

I'll take a deeper look into the file structure and source later ont his evening.
We can chat on discord if you want. We can use @matharoo's server or simply private messages. I'm Samuel Venable#5465

I can also clean up the formatting, add semicolons, new lines, and spaces, to make it more readable before we get started which I'm sure you'd prefer that.

I technically was going to write a video player extension for it, so people could add videos as transitions, cut scenes, and hotspots on static frames; which I already know how I am going to do it on Windows and Linux. macOS I will need to kinda start at square one, but I'm sure it won't be too difficult.
 
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