🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

how do i use Popcap games framework engine?

Started by
7 comments, last by frob 2 years, 5 months ago

i cannot find anything online for it.

Advertisement

The name seems related to EA, so likely it's a proprietary engine. Assuming you are not asking about illegal software, I'd expect the engine to come with a manual, and probably support.

@Alberth it is open source, anyone can use it, i tried looking at tutorial on wiki but it doesnt help because pictures are broken

Ah right. It seems you're out of luck then for the easy solution.

One thing you can try is to fix the html pages. Broken pictures usually mean the images are still there, but with an incorrect path. Such things can often be easily fixed by downloading the webpages and images, and changing the URLs.

As for finding a person that knows, I am not sure it will give you a satisfactory answer. Being open source, there is 1 spot where documentation is supposed to be, and you tried that already. There may be other spots, but if a search fails, the odds of finding a resource that a search engine didn't find are pretty bad.

So what can this person you're looking for do for you? Pointing to existing documentation fails, and explaining a complete non-trivial program from the ground up is mostly equivalent to writing a new manual. Do you expect that to happen?

“Open source” literally means what it says, you got the source code. Most projects luckily also provide descriptions and manuals, and are helpful in resolving problems, but that is bonus. Other projects just dump stuff as-is at a public site, and never look at it again.

how do i download webpage and images?

It's old and severely outdated, although if you can dig around enough and find tools and libraries that are long past their end of life, you might still be able to get it to run.

It was released in 2005 with the last official release back in 2009, then basically abandoned a few years before EA bought PopCap.

You'll need VS2005 or the the long-archived Windows XP SDK. You can also integrate it with Flash if you happen to have an old copy of Adobe CS6 or CS5 from before 2013. Once you have all the old software working on your machine, build the demos. They start simple and show the various features of the framework.

There are plenty of newer, easier ways to proceed, but it is certainly possible to revive the long-dead software if you have access to the old tools. Microsoft is pretty good about compatibility for older software.

@frob wait can you please explain how i use framework with those softwares? you only said i need them not how i open/integrate framework/setup. im not asking for tutorial but to have it showing in windows

No, not really. Among the reasons, it is far beyond the scope of the forum posts, and because it is long outdated so almost meaningless. The fact that nobody else maintained it or expanded it means that it didn't have a following, or at least not enough of one to become viable, so it probably isn't much more than the corporate offerings of the time.

Do you have access to all those Windows XP era tools? Getting them in the first place, and getting them to run, is going to be a difficulty. Most of it is 15+ years behind the time.

The open source package includes several demo packages. They start with basics and move through more advanced things. Those are more typically what people use (rather than tutorials) to figure out how to develop software.

There are more modern packages that have current tutorials, and have active support groups to help you learn.

If you're looking for similar frameworks with styles from that era, you might consider MonoGame, although it is C# rather than C++. It was born from the XNA community of the DX9 era. XNA was a wrapper for DX9, but with the progression to DX10, DX11, DX12, etc., the original DX9 wrappers are long abandoned. However, MonoGame has done a decent job of continuing the style of programming despite 15 years of hardware and underlying API changes.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement