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Introduction

This game engine was originally conceived of (``LightGAGE'') as a hypothetical game engine on which the interactive cinema game ``The Light Princess'' was to be based. After some considerable discussion, that game moved towards a design inspired by Anime and Manga art, which is partly responsible for the decision to use that model in designing and describing the animation. There are a number of conventions and ``special effects'' that we will therefore be emulating in order to support this model.

I also wanted to distinguish the game engine from the game, in order to make it more acceptable to a larger group of developers.

Most of the development is in Python -- a highly versatile and easy to use scripting language which has greatly improved my prototyping capabilities. So, I will be drawing on that considerably in the design. However, the graphic animation components are being developed in C++ using libraries built on top of Loki Entertainments' ``Simple Directmedia Layer'' library (SDL). In particular, I'm using Anders Lindstrom's ``SDL Graphics Extension'' library (SGE) for most of the graphic display operations, as well as the SDL Imaging Library, which is used for providing PNG and JPG graphics file format support (which are to be considered the native formats for AutoManga. SGE further uses the FreeType library to provide TrueType font support for graphics. It's unclear whether we need this, and certain patent law issues may force use to excise this capability from the AutoManga code, but I'm leaving it in until I'm convinced of the need for this, as it would be nice to have them, and there is a fairly broad usage of FreeType (among other applications) in practice.

Most likely, AutoManga will be a C++ program with extensive Python code embedded into it. I plan to use the Stackless branch of the Python tree in order to support character behavior programming, although that development itself is documented elsewhere (Light Princess Emotive Behavior Character Agents, also the ``Character Engine'').


next up previous contents
Next: Cel Animation Model Up: AutoManga Animation Engine Previous: Contents   Contents
Terry Hancock 2001-04-01