About Pipmak

An open-source cross-platform game engine and authoring environment, the Pipmak Game Engine enables you to create point-and-click adventure games in the style of the Myst series, including panoramic ones like Myst III: Exile.

Some of its features are:

• Static “slide show” images or full panoramic views (cubic)
• Image patches can modify part of a view in response to user actions, game state, or dynamically
• Transition effects such as dissolve, rotate, wipe
• Overlays to create head-up displays, inventories, or the like
• Scripting of arbitrary game logic in Lua, an easy to learn, simple, and powerful scripting language
• Directional sound effects and background sounds or music
• Runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and possibly other platforms (both authoring and deployment)
• Freely redistributable and modifiable under the GPL licence, also for commercial projects
• Available documentation: reference manual, demo project that shows all features in action
• Friendly community support on the mailing lists/newsgroups

Making a game using Pipmak is mostly a matter of creating the game’s graphics using a 3D rendering program or other graphics software and then describing to Pipmak how these should be presented and how they should behave in specially formatted text files. Direct graphical editing within Pipmak is planned for the future, but only fragments of it are present at the current state of development. You can, however, edit a project while it is running in Pipmak and immediately see your changes.

As an open-source project, Pipmak welcomes contributions. Bug reports, examples, documentation, community help, code – anything you have to help make Pipmak better is appreciated.