

Maratis – A Portable and Visual Game Development Tool - X4
http://www.maratis3d.org/

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omershapira
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.

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X4
@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

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datalus
Also check out [http://polycode.org](http://polycode.org) for a similar open
source project.

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

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

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lnanek2
+1, came here to post exactly that

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

~~~
X4
@phinze Hey that's really nice of you.

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jamesbritt
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.

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klaussilveira
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. :)

