verge

Verge

Screenshot of Zeux's World, a platformer game made with Verge 2.
Developer(s)	Benjamin Eirich (vecna) Charles Rector (aen) Joe Osburn (loretian) Brian Peterson (hahn) John Hargrove (tatsumi) Andrew Crowell (Overkill) Ben McGraw (McGrue) Kevin Gadd (Kael)
Initial release	Verge 1 / 1997
Stable release	Verge 3.1 / August 25, 2007
Operating system	Windows Mac OS X (Verge 3) Linux (Verge 3) MS-DOS (Verge 1, Verge 2)
Platform	Personal computer
Available in	English
Type	Game engine
License	BSD license
Website	www.verge-rpg.com

Verge is a game engine intended to allow users to design their own independent games in 2D. With the name being an acronym for Vecna's Extraordinary Roleplaying Game Engine, it was originally directed at making roleplaying games, but as of Verge 2 and above, it is now capable of other kinds of 2D genres. Its latest version is Verge 3.1. It runs across a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

History

Verge 1 was released in 1997 by vecna. Originally it was intended for computer role-playing games, particularly console-style, 2D games along the lines of Final Fantasy VI. Although focusing on RPGs, it did not have a built in battle system.

But in 1999, Verge 2 introduced flexible scripting allowing other genres such as platformers and shoot 'em ups to also be made. This presented a difficulty curve, as all system code needed to now be created by the users, rather than supplied with the engine. But this also gave more creative freedom to its users.

The latest engine, Verge 3 (sometimes referred to as V3), was released for Windows in 2004, and expanded both the flexibility in audio (through FMOD or Audiere), sprites, maps, tilesets, and graphics manipulation. After the release of the first Verge 3 to have map support again, there were several demoes which have around the feature set of Verge 1. An Apple Macintosh port of the main engine was also released, allowing users to play Verge3 games on a Mac, although no Mac compatible development tools have been released yet. Verge 3 is released under a BSD license, making it open-source software.

MapEd

MapEd is the name of the editor that comes bundled with the developer package for Verge. This editor takes care of the design of the game worlds and placements of entity sprites, zones, and obstructions within these worlds.

In MapEd 1, maps were made from only two layers, the foreground and background layer. In MapEd 2, maps could be consist of up to 7 layers. With the exception of maped2w (which was a Windows application), all of the editors up to that point ran in MS-DOS. The editors were additionally limited to 8-bit paletted tilesets.

MapEd 3 uses the C# language on Windows. It is uses 32-bit RGB color, and no longer limits the number of layers. It uses zlib compression on the file data to reduce filesize.

VergeC

VergeC (or VC for short) has been one of the primary scripting languages for writing events and game logic in Verge. It is similar to the C programming language.

The scripts are divided into two sections: system code, and map code. System code consists of scripts that are shared everywhere, and is the section for all data declarations and commonly-shared scripts. The compiled code is stored in system.xvc.

Map code is for writing event scripts that are specific to a given map, and are only in memory when the map is active. Map code may not provide data declarations. The compiled code is stored in the map format itself.

Some limitations include lack of local arrays, local structs, floating point numbers, and pointer/reference types. A few of these features were removed in favor of avoiding complexity. Until recently it was the only scripting language that could be used with Verge, which was one of the criticisms of the engine. As a result, the developers added support for Lua as well.

LuaVerge

In Verge 3.1, there is "LuaVerge", the name given to the script when running Lua scripting support instead of VC. It provides functionality that VergeC API did, but it wraps it in a namespace v3, which contains the methods and variables. The Lua programming language overcomes several limitations of VC, and gives reference types, dynamic arrays, floating point numbers, and mechanisms for Object Oriented Programming.

There is also an object-oriented wrapper called the vx library, which serves as a higher-level abstraction of Verge's internals. It leverages garbage collection to automatically manage Verge's internal resources.

Games

Here are a few notable games released using the Verge engine.

• Sully Chronicles is a game created by hahn that was released for Verge1, which demonstrated the original engine's capabilities. It features Darin and his party in an adventure to defeat the Evil Lord Stan, the dark lord who is oppressing the villages of the game. This game is notable for being an independent Windows game to receive a GameFAQs article. There is a remake of this game for Verge 3 in development, which aims to provide an RPG framework to beginning users who are not familiar with programming.

• Diver Down is an Indie RPG created by Grenideer with artwork by arias and metro. Released for Verge 2, Diver Down works in both. The code in this game implements a custom engine scripted in the Verge 2 engine called PURGE, which was also created by Grenideer. Gameplay is similar to Phantasy Star among other RPGs. It features a dark story with twists and turns.

• Zeux's World is a 2D platformer, made by Zaratustra Productions in Verge 2. It is similar to Super Mario. The "Smiley Standard Hero" is noted to resemble that of a character in Caverns of Zeux, the default game for the MegaZeux engine. The game automatically saves progress after each level, except for the Tower of Dystopia (which connects the different worlds, and features some of the most challenging and obscure levels in the game).

List of all Versions (Official and Unofficial)

These are presented in descending order from recent to oldest.

• Verge 3 - the latest version of Verge for both Mac and Windows builds which includes such features as: high color, networking, mouse, joysticks and gamepads, clipboard, declaration of C-like structures, support for loading common image formats (GIF, PNG, PCX, JPEG), and support for loading audio and module formats (MP3, IT, S3M, WAV, Ogg Vorbis). As of Verge 3.1, it also provides "LuaVerge", the alternative scripting core embedded into Verge 3, which uses Lua scripting.

• WinV2 - a Windows port of the Verge 2 engine with a rewritten interpretter, which utilizes DirectX.

• Verge 2.7 - an unofficial version of Verge 2 which uses the Python scripting language. After disputes with the Verge community, the author eventually renamed the engine to ika.

• Verge 2.6 - a Windows version of Verge 2.5, which makes use of Audiere, corona and SDL and toggleable high-color mode. This version's high color mode enabled additive, subtractive, and translucent blending (as opposed to a lookup table called trans.tbl).

• Verge 2k+j - like Verge 2.5, but with some limited high-color (16bpp) functionality.

• Verge 2.5 - like Verge 2, but with a more stable and efficient compiler, and new features.

• Verge 2 - a new version of Verge which added many new features, such as variable sized .chr sprites, ability for the user to declare variables and functions and pre-processor statements in a C-like manner.

• WinVerge - a Windows port of the original Verge engine. Does not emulate Verge 1+ games.

• Verge 1+ - an unofficial extension to the Verge engine which enabled new features.

• Verge 1 - a DOS RPG engine with builtin item, party, status, magic, and save functionality. Battle system was not implemented, and attempts to make a battle system in the engine were difficult due to limitations such as only having a flags[] array and variables a to z. Its limitations meant it worked as it was originally intended for roleplaying games, but it was very difficult to extend the behaviour of the engine through scripting.

External links

• Verge Homepage
• Diver Down Homepage
• Zaratustra Productions
• Compmike19's Verge Page