Maratis – A Portable and Visual Game Development Tool | Hacker News Reader

Maratis – A Portable and Visual Game Development Tool

maratis3d.org

56 pointsX411 comments

This looks really powerful, the feature list definitely allows making a decent game, and the growing trend of minimal UI in dev kits is a really promising direction; though I can't help but wondering about open source platform beginnings. The way openFrameworks started was kind of similar: "We already know what creative coders are looking for, so we took a bunch of open source libraries and made them work together. Go play" - and that worked fine for them 8 years ago, now it's kinda different, because the open source world is full of decent kits.

Having switched between 3 creative programming kits in the past year, I'm kind of reluctant to give my heart to a new one that starts exactly like that. Maybe, for these kinds of projects, a 'mission statement' would help people buy into it. That doesn't mean that mission statements are for good, but I think it's really important to know more than it's just a good game engine. Please let me fall in love with it.

@omershapira I really appreciate it that you share your prior experiences with us. I have not contacted the author yet to inform him about the HN post, but could you take the chance and tell him about your experiences with similar tools? I believe your knowledge and usage experience will be beneficient to all us. Here's the authors contact info:

     Anaël Seghezzi, France
     anael (a) maratis3d.com

Also check out http://polycode.org for a similar open source project.

Well, I'm a little awed now. I need to check this out!

nice.

Wow, it's like a freeware version of Unity. Very cool.

+1, came here to post exactly that

just added a cask for this so osx homebrew-cask users can check out the project with `brew cask install maratis`

https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/pull/819

@phinze Hey that's really nice of you.

Has anyone used this? I like that I can use Lua. Big plus. But the clumsiness of the "IDE" is pain-point.

I wanted to load a demo project and the open-file box starts at the root of my machine. '/'. Not even my home folder, and not the folder from where I launched the IDE.

You can't paste a directory path anyplace, and you cannot navigate by typing the first letters of folders. So I had to click though about eight directories to get what I wanted.

I appreciate it when people put in the effort to produce tools, for free, on their own time, but if it ends up being a real pain to use I'd want some good reasons not to go learn Unity.

I already donated to this project in the past and will be donating right now. They really deserve it for the hard work and amazing quality. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com