Like a real video game in the store, or an online game (LaTale, Maplestory, Runescape, etc.) Are real games made with Allegro?

Well a quick Google search for real games that use allegro comes up with: why are most allegro games bad?. Maybe that is fairly telling?

Mouse Mash almost made it into Real Arcade.

But seriously dude, Runescape is Java. We don't screw with that kind of stuff. Well I guess not until recently.

Your question is a bit general. You mean:

1) Can commercial games be done with a library like Allegro? or,
2) Are there any commercial games that are done with Allegro?

I'll take that as a no... Does anyone happen to know what Maplestory and Runescape really do use for a graphics library?

@above
Both

I'll take your post as a dumb... Do you know where I can find a better poster?

Runescape is very likely using OpenGL and homespun routines.

Any game thats written in SDL could fairly easily be ported to Allegro. There are lots of games that use SDL (everything written by Loki)

Peitz' old games were written with Allegro.

The question is a bit silly though.

Yes. But it doesn't really have anything to do with the library itself. If the developer's succesful, knows how to get good marketing, manages to make a good & polished product, or even get a decent team, a commercial game can be done. Of course, you can't expect to do something like the latest 3D games done by big-budget companies with teams of hundreds of developers.

But you'll see many of us choose to release our games for free. Have you ever played the internet classic Icy Tower? It was done with Allegro. Would using another library have made it any more or less popular? Probably not, the gameplay was addictive, it was free, and it became a very popular game.

I think some games here are shareware. Others have managed to sell their games with the iPhone. Someone here made an old-style RPG using the latest Allegro 5 Beta(supporting 3D hardware acceleration), and managed to sell it on the iPhone. Most of the rest are freeware AFAIK.

I do prefer to release my games for free though. Be sure to look at The Depot board here, not all projects are added to the Depot category on a.cc.

It doesn't really matter what you choose for a library as long as it suits your needs. If I had the money to buy the CryEngine, and tried to develop a game with it, that doesn't mean it's going to be successful. The engine demands a lot of people with artistic talents, modeling, and animators to make something decent. The engine that Maplestory or Runescape uses is not related to its success. The work, the marketing, the motivation, those are the parts that make a game succesfull.

Allegro is simply a tool... A free tool. It's pretty easy for newbies to learn.

Oh, and this is scaringly turning to a Monday thread.

If you can make a commercial game with library <insert name here>, you can do it in Allegro.
And if you can't do it in Allegro, what makes you think you will succeed with <insert name here>?

Don't blame the tools if you can't handle them.

Everyones advice is great, thanks I'm going to give Allegro a shot. This may be a silly question as well, but can sidescrollers be done with Allegro?

I wrote this in Allegro (also ported to SDL)

absolutely!

Allegro is a library with functions useful for game development (graphics, sound, input etc). So yes.

There are no genre-specific functions in allegro.

Thanks a bunch everyone, I'm going to start now

Mark, which is Beary's Bash resolution? For some reason, any game that tries to start a 320x200 fullscreen mode will lock up the computer in a black screen mode, and I have no other choice than to reset. So I fear double clicking the .exe.

EDIT: Meh, don't worry. I was brave, double clicked, and the program said that it couldn't set the video mode.

Yea, a newer version I am working on fixed that problem. But, the latest version that's available is 320x240 I believe, so you shouldn't open the exe.

I know a couple of games that are sold over the counter that are made with allegro. Nothing top selling or chart busting, though.
It has also been used to prototype some bigger titles, IIRC.

Allegro was really big in DOS days, then it slowed down, and right now it's a good but rather obscure choice.

The library has a nice interface which makes it easy to learn and allows you to code simple games (think iPhone complexity) very easily. On the other hand, getting it to work under windows is a PITA, so potential new users get alienated even before they use the lib.

The previous versions of allegro had some small quirks that made it hard to get production level quality games easily. The ones I recall to be show stoppers where the mouse behavior (sluggish mouse and not behaving like in the native OS) and close button handling and problems when switching to/from the app.

Also, most commercial games these days are either single platform ( PC ) or include platforms allegro is not available for. So allegro's big plus (multi-platform) isn't really a factor. Esp. since the Mac port wasn't that well supported (the last time I checked, this might have changed by now).

Just my 2c.

The Mac port is now fairly well supported, but it lacks a binary distribution (similar to Windows). The 4.2/4.4 branch is stuck in 32 bit because it uses a deprecated API. The upcoming 5.0 uses OpenGL and uses up-to-date APIs.
Still missing a binary distribution though.

Neat! I also saw something about an iPhone port in the change log... guess I'll have to start spending some time with allegro again

You'll need to get Mr. Jobs' permission to use it though. He's made cross platform development illegal for the iPhone.

Thanks

I assume the iPhone port of A5 uses native libraries though, right? So if you included the entire A5 source as part of your game, then could it be said no 3rd party cross-platform libraries were used?

The game itself won't be written using the OSX apis. Basically Apple has added a nice loophole for themselves should any shoddy apps get put up using some cross platform toolkits (like Air or Silverlight, or what have you). They can just point to the rule and say "hey, you knew this could happen" when they reject or remove those apps.

So does that make any function defined outside main() a non-OSX API call (provided it's not a C/C++/Obj-C function)?

The whole concept of controlling quality via regulating third party libraries is absurd, so I wouldn't bother trying to use logic.

The reality is that certain libraries and tools will be put on the secret black list and if a binary check reveals that you are using one of them, it will be rejected. Thus it really won't matter how you embed Allegro... if they don't want you to use it, they will scan for some signature that is common to all Allegro games.

The goal is platform-lock. They don't want you to create an application that works on all devices because it cheapens the value of the iPhone.

(Their official position is that they don't want people developing to a subset of the iPhone's functionality, but that is obviously not true, as they don't demand that every application uses every function of the iPhone. And furthermore, it's not like the iPhone really is all that different from any other super-phone. )

Doubt that, since my iPhone dev license tells me, that I can compile stuff on my mac. There's also unity, Torque, etc.

They rewrote the licence a few months back. The specific part of the licence is:

Yeah, but that's not meant to block out libs that are available on several platforms. The part in brackets only specializes the part before it. So, if you code in one of the languages given above, it's ok.
That clause was only added to kick Adobe in the nuts, so their "flash for iphone" option was doomed.

We can speculate all day long, but in the end it's Apple's arbitrary approval process that will give us an answer (or rather, not give us an answer).

Mr. Jobs' open letter is more telling. He specifically and clearly writes that he is against cross platform enabling libraries that encourage developers to target the shared functionality among devices. Allegro most definitely qualifies as such a thing.

So whether or not the new license officially puts Allegro on the black list may be debated, but there's no doubt that Mr. Jobs would like it to be. And eventually, it will, soon after they release their official iGame SDK.

Another important thing to remember is that Allegro is the first step for many game developers. When they google "game programming library", Allegro can be found in the first link, and it is quite attractive because the link says "contains functionality for almost everything" and certainly looks attractive.

But since game programming requires much more than Allegro offers (not a bad thing, Allegro can't offer everything), and combined with the fact that A5 is not visible enough and so the old Allegro is what people see, soon programmers flee to other libraries.

Speaking of IPhone, some commercial Allegro games are available for it, like this one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monster-rpg-2/id358610619?mt=8

And about approval, on the WWDC yesterday when they revealed that iMovie is going to cost $4.99 on iPhone 4 Steve Jobs immediately said "if we approve it".

So basically, they will approve or not anything just based on if he likes it or not... no matter what it's written in Using Allegro 5 won't be an automatic rejection reason for sure as it's just some extra C code which just as well could be your own. However it's some work to get an iphone app behave right, so just re-compiling won't do... need to tweak a lot of things for the changed controls and OS it runs in. Trent can tell a lot about that

Also the new reference for everything smart agrees
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/90272/game-programming-library-c

Also: I doubt Allegro is proliferated enough for Jobs to care about it. No one talks about it in the Silicon Valley "circles."

If I'm not mistaking, EUO is actually running a small profit. It is an on-line game. Does that count?

Depends whether you mean commercial as is people pay to play the game or commercial as in quality. Runescape has no charge so I can only presume you mean commercial as in full games played by people regularly of a certain level of quality and polish.

Of the Allegro games made by us (http://retrospec.sgn.net) and of the games downloaded only from the site (i.e. there are many other sources), we've had over two million downloads. While this may not reflect actual usage, our online high-score table (updated in-game) shows we are getting 30,000+ updates a week which shows they are popular at least.

So I would say yes, Allegro games can be successful and polished. As somebody said above, if you make a poor game it's the programmer not the tool.

Are all your retrospec games made with allegro? Most of them anyway?

Most, yes. Exceptions are Highway Pursuit (raw DirectX), Blazing Trails (raw DirectX) and KnightLore (DirectX via Delphi).

To further the thread, the old excuse of lack of hardware acceleration, etc is negated with A5.

I am looking forward to using A5, but I am afraid the API will change once more.

Not a heck of a lot anymore. It's officially been frozen. It may not be a strict freeze though, if something really heinous pops up something might get renamed. But I doubt it.

just avoid using al_todo_rename_this_function().