Original author(s) Stable release 1.9.1 / 2010-01-01 | Initial release 2003-01-12 Operating system | |
Wintermute Engine (commonly abbreviated as WME) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter (game engine) primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games.
Contents
History
Wintermute Engine (WME) was designed and programmed by Czech programmer Jan Nedoma, who goes by the nickname Mnemonic on the WME forums. The first public beta version was released on January 12, 2003.
The engine is in active development and several updates are released every year, though irregularly due to the small development team.
Since 2013 the Winter Mute Lite Engine is hosted on Bitbucket and released under a MIT License. Development continues on the repository, latest additions adding Android support.
Features
The game engine provides most of the features necessary for creating classic 2D graphical adventure games. Although originally built as a 2D graphics engine, with a built-in script interpreter for implementing game logic, the Wintermute Engine provides support for the combination of real-time 3D characters and 2D backgrounds, a combination sometimes known as "2.5D", that has become the de facto standard for modern adventure games (for example Syberia, Still Life), and survival horror games.
There is also an active community that, while small, is growing in size and is willing to help newcomers with coding or recommendations. Community-created free book of tutorials went online in summer 2008.
Game design process
Wintermute Engine follows the object-oriented design philosophy. The game developers use the engine tools for building various game objects (actors, scenes, windows etc.) and assembling them together. Every game object is defined by its appearance (graphics, animations, captions, fonts) and by a script, which defines the underlying logic of a given game object and its responses to game events. All those game definitions are then interpreted by the engine runtime interpreter, which is otherwise completely independent on any actual game implementation.
License
Starting with version 1.7, Wintermute Engine is distributed as donationware, meaning that it's completely free to use for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, but if the users find it useful, they are encouraged to make a donation to support its further development. Starting with version 1.8.9, source code of the engine and some of the supporting tools has been released under the LGPL license.
The source code of the portable Wintermute Lite 2D engine has been released under a MIT License and is hosted on a Bitbucket repository. While the Wintermute Lite engine is free of charge also for commercial use, licensing of the included BASS sound library is required. It is also Donationware, as the author asks for donations for continued development. Later the author released also Wintermute 1.x and Wintermute 2 to bitbucket under MIT. In 2012 ScummVM integrated the WME lite engine into their framework.
Previous releases were free to use for non-commercial purposes, but required a separate paid commercial license. The flexible nature, and relative inexpense, of the licence for even large commercial projects has made the Wintermute Engine a popular tool among independent commercial game developers.