Kevin Miller

Runtime Revolution

Posted by Philip Jong.
First posted on 07 August 2007. Last updated on 12 November 2008.
Articles  »  Interviews
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Choosing the right development tools can be a difficult decision for an independent adventure game developer running on a tight budget and with limited resource. Revolution Media from Runtime Revolution is a low-cost alternative among third-party authoring tools that can provide a feature rich gaming or presentation framework for a development platform. Founded in 1997, Runtime Revolution is the…

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Poor

I rated this article as poor, not because it is badly written, but because of the claims made by the person being interviewed.

Really, it is not that I have that negative an opinion of revmedia. RevMedia is a product that has great potential. The problem is that it has had that potential for more than 5 years and didn't realize it (under it's previous branding, dreamcard). There is little evidence that the future will be any different than the past.

Over the last 2-3 years, better alternative have appeared. I consider products like scratch, myGameBuilder, to be *far* better alternatives than revolution when it comes to write adventure games types of utilities.

If you want to give a try to revolution, why not. This may perfectly suit your needs. But please, really, please, don't make a purchase on the basis of claims made in this interview. Make sure you take the time to check that things are really the way you expect them to be.

(1) The version of revmedia or revStudio you would get when if you were to buy the latest release (as of the day this article was published) is not Linux compatible. Have a check on the company page, you will see that revMedia doesn't let you develop on Linux. Have a check on the company forums, under the Linux heading, and you will see posts, some dating of more than a year, asking when the Linux version will be released. You will see as well that their questions are never answered.

(2) "It doesn’t take much though to find educational titles that are primarily adventure-like built with Revolution." Check out the educators list, you will find it *deserted*. Try and find these large numbers of educational titles that are primarily adventure-like... I personally know of Alida and one or two others under development. This tells you how easy it is to run your own thanks to the adventure creator or the animation engine.

(3) "The current template for adventure games handles video, sound and graphics playback - with some additional text coding you could create a Lucas Arts style game". Have a try, download the trial version of revmedia and give a go to that adventure template. If you succeed creating anything with it, I am impressed. Never could. Then this template let you create alida style of games, not Lucas Arts (think lego star wars) type of games.

(4) "There is an add-on for Revolution called Animation Engine that works with Revolution Media. This adds a significant number of routines for simplifying geometry animation (such as you might find in Flash)." Again, don't take my words on this. Download and give it a try. In my opinion, this doesn't really compare with the tools you would find in Flash. If this is a game you want to write, the animation engine wouldn't be of much help. You would have to write much code yourself to write any game.

(5) "Revolution is very actively developed and supported, with a vibrant third party tool market." My opinion, as user, is that the third party tool market is about inexistant. Actively developed and supported? Why not get a second opinion on this and go on the user list and ask the users what they think of that claim.


(6) "Both Revolution Media and Adventure Game Studio have an interface that guides you through the process of creating a game." Again, please, have a go, download the trial software and see what they call "interface that guides you through the process of creating a game". You have an interface that guides you through the creation of a very specific type of game (myst 3D world) but I have no knowlege of anybody having successfully designed a game using that interface. I tried and miserably failed.

(7) "Revolution Media is actively supported". If you download the trial version, you will see that the date of the last release for revMedia is 22/09/06. As at the day of this interview (24/08/07), persons who paid for a year of upgrades (the way this license work) last year have yet not received any new version of the revMedia software.

(8) "And unlike programming languages you may have used previously, once you have written code you’ll be able to read and understand it later much more easily as it is closer to English." This is not my experience. There is no evidence (comparative studies) that I know about to back up this claim.

(9) "The Revolution language itself is so easy to learn that you do not need that extra step at all because what you are writing reads much like that first process the C developer has to go through." My experience as a user is that whatever the language you code in, it is *always* good practice to start with pseudocode and revolution is no different in that respect.

(10) " The Revolution system was developed by a team of professionals who have experience in engine development. " What I know of this is that the engine was developed by a person called Scott Raney, who marketed the engine under the name of metacard and who had *NOTHING* long before revolution was created. Revolution bought the engine, rebranded it as Revolution and focused their effort into fixing problems and keeping up with releases of new OSes (Vista, OSX). If you read the bio of their directory of technology in newsletter 31, it is difficult to find clear evidence that even their director of technology had prior experience in engine development.

(11) "The system is tried and tested and allows you vastly more flexibility out of the box in much less time than it would take to produce even a tiny fraction of the functionality yourself from scratch. " I have a very different opinion. When it comes to game programming, you get a *LOT* more out of the box out of a free tool like scratch, mygamebuilder or mygame than with revolution.

If what you want to do is write games, then be warned that an important problem with revolution is that the english-like language comes with a cost and that it is not that easy to write re-usable code. As a consequence, limited re-usable resources exist. The very limited animation engine is all that exists to support your effort and that you wil need to write the code for the functionalities you require yourself. Again, check out how many games have been created by non programmer, with a development effort under 2 months, with products like scratch or mygamebuilder and how many have been created with revolution.

Great Britain (UK) By sceptic • On 24 August 2007 • From Myst