arianesoft1

Hi All. I was talking with Alain Deschenes the other day. He’s the lead designer at ArianeSoft. He told me a few more things about their new release PPL 2.0, and I wondered if anyone out there had any comments?

Alain said one of their goals with this latest release was to make it as easy as possible to develop complex applications. So they included an instant help feature. Just hover your mouse over any item, and get instant help. The integrated help engine is very powerful and quick to access.

They also set out to make it easy to install downloaded components and packages in a snap. No confusing steps, just one click.

PPL 2.0’s new tag search engine lets you search for anything using your normal English phrases. For example, "display some text" will show you all functions, methods and properties that are related to displaying text.

Of course, once I got Alain talking about his baby, I couldn’t get him to stop. He quickly went into list mode:

- PPL comes fully loaded with a built in object oriented library, called Swirl, for writing 2D games in no time.

- The core graphics engine allows you to develop games on Windows and Windows Mobile using multiple screen resolutions.

- Support for jpg, bmp, gif, and png image file types is included.

- The sprites engine allows you to create amazing games like never before.

- The sound engine natively supports MP3, OGG, MOD and WAV file formats but there are also facilities for using FMOD, which is a solid, time tested audio library.

- Add new levels of interactivity to your games with the built in physic engine, and top it all off with some fancy special effects via the particle engine.

- Develop your games visually with the powerful level editor that comes built-in with the Game Edition.

- A powerful Find Wizard, that lets you search for anything, anywhere.

- Create project templates very easily, to re-use later or distribute with components.


PPL 2.0 is available via ArianeSoft’s website.


Comments? Questions? Debate?

arianesoft1

Any comments out there on visual versus the old tried and true manual coding?

PPL 2.0 provides for incredible development with nary a line of code typed. You can drag and drop objects or components into events. You can mouse over any function or component to get instant help. You can call methods or functions, you can assign values to properties, all with no coding. In Windows or Windows Mobile.

Any comments on this?