Ecstasy Motion Gets a Free 30 Day Trial, and Awesomium!

Having a free trial version has been an obvious step for us to take since day one, but unfortunately we were held back by a number of factors - mostly revolving around the concern that with our numerous bugs and sparse documentation, we might drive away more potential customers than we would attract!

However, at long last, we are ready to declare Ecstasy Motion "presentable enough for public consumption" - at least with the understanding that we are still in Early Adopter mode, and we will still be adding polish, fixing bugs and smoothing out the workflow as we go.

For everyone who wants to cut straight to the chase - if you just want to run the demo and you don't want to bother with versioning systems - you can download it as a zip file (348 M) here:

EcstasyMotion.zip




The last obstacle in front of us after doing all the work on the actual application has been to come up with some kind of demo that would introduce new or prospective users to the broad range of capabilities the program offers.

And of course, it needed to involve zombies.

We've made a number of tutorial videos by now, and I've done several blogs and writeups on the program, but really it seemed like the most efficient (and hardest to miss) demo format would be a walkthrough level sitting right there in the program, which almost everybody would be guaranteed to try at least once.

So I came up with what you see here. It contains triggers in front of each of the main display areas, which activate animations or other game functions to show off the particular feature in question. It culminates in a game-in-a-day style zombie shooter at the end, that shows how the features all work together.

My initial plan was actually to make six or seven full tutorial levels, the first one being a general introduction and then the others focusing in with more detail on specific subjects... but after burning up a solid couple of weeks just on the intro level, I decided that it will have to do for the initial release. I still plan on doing the other ones soon, however.


Fortunately for me, I had only just begun this operation when I came across Stefan Lundmark's earth shattering (for me) blog about his Awesomium pack for T3D. Until then I had been only vaguely aware of these libraries floating around out there that allowed you to put a web browser into your game engine. I thought that was interesting, but only mildly, since I couldn't really see a pressing need to let users check their Facebook accounts inside my app... but then through Stefan's blog it finally dawned on me that this technology could be used to replace regular game GUIs!

Now THAT opened up a whole new world! I hate to say it, but Torque's GUI system is one of my longstanding peeves about the engine, and I have long wished we could all just flip over to some well maintained open source third party library for our GUI needs, and let the Torque team focus on the engine itself. I've flirted with Qt, but never really settled on anything... never in my wildest dreams, however, did I think the answer would be sitting right there in the form of HTML and Javascript!



Not only is this format "well supported" (being kind of the backbone of the whole internet) and incredibly diverse and powerful, but it's also something with which I and millions of other people are already intimately acquainted. And what's more, Awesomium plugins are popping up for Unity, Ogre, and many other game engines, so work that gets done here in Torque could very well be ported into a whole different engine and survive intact.

Stefan has been incredibly fast at adding features and resolving issues with his pack. I love how I can seamlessly flow between static billboards, which don't require any further processing after initial display, and fully interactive browser windows that can play movies or display interactive content.


But anyway, this blog was supposed to be about Ecstasy Motion! Like I said at the beginning, if you're just browsing then download the trial (which is the same as the main app, it will just turn itself off in 30 days if you don't buy a license) from here:

EcstasyMotion.zip

If you're more interested in getting really involved and keeping updated with the program, and you already know or are willing to learn how to use git, then we recommend you grab it from our new git repo. This will allow you to grab updates without downloading the entire file again from scratch. Also, we plan to use git branches in the future to provide other optional content and modifications that we do not want to merge into the main trunk of Ecstasy Motion.

github.com/ChrisCalef/EcstasyMotion


For those who are still most comfortable with SVN, we will also be keeping our existing SVN repository up to date for the foreseeable future. That repo is still located here:

bag.dreamhosters.com/EM_Client_2011

And that's it for me, for now! Keep an eye out for future updates though - there is much more to talk about... but I'm going to show a little uncharacteristic restraint this time and save some for later! :-)

Happy devving!