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Frequently Asked Questions These are questions to anticipated questions, if you've got a real question not answered here, you can ask someone in the forums. What is Mad? The Mad Project is an attempt to create an adventure game engine capable of creating adventure games similar to old Sierra games such as the Quest for Glory series, the Space Quest Series, and the King's Quest series. The MAD engine is being developed as an open-source, cross-platform, highly customizeable, script-driven adventure game interpreter. MAD itself is not a game, but an engine that will allow people to create their own adventures with much less effort. How does the Mad engine work? The Mad engine utilizes a free script interpreter called LUA. Since LUA was used by many popular commercial games (such as Curse of Monkey Island), we thought it was an ideal solution as opposed to trying to create one ourselves. Because MAD is script-driven, it's highly customizeable, not limiting it's use to a certain type of adventure game. What OS do I need to run Mad? Mad is being developed as a cross-platform engine. Consequently, the platforms it can run on will only be limited by the libraries it is dependent upon. Although currently only Dos and Windows versions have been compiled (with some slight exceptions). In the future, MAD should be able to run on Unix/Linux, and MacOS. How can I get started making games with Mad? First of all, you'll need to download the mad interpreter and mad utilities from the download page. Then to get started with, download the lambazzo demo game, and either bookmark the online manual or download the zipped documentation. After you've extracted the game's source files, read the lambazzo.txt file included in the archive for further instructions on getting things setup. Assuming your able to build and run the lambazzo archive (lambazzo.mad) properly, you'll want to start customizing it to use your own graphics, dialogs, and code. In the course of modifying the lambazzo demo to better suite your needs, have the mad manual accessible, so that you can read descriptions of the functions and look for functions to perform a desired function. Have fun and post about any difficulties on the forums. :) How can I edit Mad game scripts with colored syntax / formatting? There is nifty text editor I found called "OxEdit," it has a very customizeable syntax formatting engine and comes prepackaged with the ability to edit HTML, C++ and other languages with colored syntax. Its' shareware, but for some reason 1.6.x versions are free -- perhaps I'll mirror the download for v1.6.1 in the future, but for now you can download it here or here. I was able to easily make a definition file for it so that it displays all keywords and functions in special formatting. You can get my definition file here, once you've installed OxEdit simply place the 'madlua.def' file in the directory where OxEdit was installed and it will automatically format any *.lua files you open with it. If you know of any free or cross-platform editors that could do the same thing, let me know. OxEdit is currently the closest thing to an IDE for Mad. Why am I getting this error? "You need a DirectX/VESA compatible video card..." Some video card manufacturers have begun dropping support for 320x240x15/16/24/32 modes in their cards, as a result you probably can't run any games that use a 320x240 with a high color depth. To get around this you can use the safevideo commandline parameter that effectively doubles the resolution and stretches the game screen over it (may degrade some performance as a result on older machines). You can use this like so: mad.exe -safevideoThis works for the windows version also (just change mad.exe to winmad.exe). You can of course add this command to a windows shortcut or a batch file so you don't have to type it in everytime. |
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