Before diving into another engine, could you give me some idea what the differences (other than cost) you expect to create between DF and BGT?  I'm pretty comfy in BGT, but if there's a compelling reason either already in the engine or to be added in future, I'm very willing to spend time learning.

At the moment i wouldn't recommend someone who has never seen a programming/scripting language to try this, DFE's manual doesn't explain all the basics step by step like bgt's manual does, so someone who is completely new might want to stick to bgt for now.  It does look simpler in some ways, no braces, semicolons etc, but it is also more complex in other ways, for example, in bgt you can just call the exit function and everything will be cleared, but according to the manual in DFE you have to unload things like sounds and the tts with their free functions.  Also, where bgt has included classes to make things like menus easy, dfe doesn't have this, not yet anyway.  It is of course possible to create a menu, it's just more complex than in bgt.  But if you can handle it, then it's definitely worth looking at, you might prefer the simpler syntax.  Plus, it's only the first alpha!  It will improve, a lot.  The first bgt releases didn't have all the features bgt has today.  I think this engine has much potential.

Well, with some background with BGT myself, all be it not much, i know enough to probably comfortably switch languages. I think the DFE manual could be expanded a bit to include using classes and such, and i'm sure that will happen in the near future.

Stewie,
Could you list what voices you have on your system please? If you do not wish to do so in public, you can send me a PM, that's fine as well.

Thanks,
Rob

hi,
i have a question.
So i tryed to open a window to play audio like this.
ui.showwindow("audio testing")
audio.load("music.ogg")
dfe.sleep(50)
audio.play(1)
key.init()
key.pushed("enter")
ui.closewindow()

It didn't play the audio and closed the window straight after it opened. Can you tell me why?
thanks,
kyle, kc-ds-g
check me on skype! kkylec13k or twitter @kylecunningham5

Hi,

You forgot to initialize the audio library with
audio.init()

Also, you might want to initialize the keyboard at the beginning of the script. It's best to initialize everything at the start of the script in any case.

So, your script should look like this:
Note that I had to modify it heavily to make sense, let me explain why.

audio.init()
key.init()
--Those 2 lines initialize the keyboard and audio.
ui.showwindow("audio testing")
--This opens the window.
sound = audio.load("music.ogg")
--Here, you forgot to give a variable that stores the sound handle. I set it to sound. If you don't give a handle, the sound will be loaded but you can't do anything with it. Basically like creating a door, but no door handle. You can't open it normally then, right? Maybe not the best comparement but hey.
dfe.sleep(50)
--A sleep that sleeps 50 ms ... For whatever reason.
audio.play(sound,1)
--Here, you also forgot to pass the handle. In this case, sound, because that's what I set it to.
while 1 do
--Before, you didn't have a loop. If you don't have a loop, the script will run through only once, and then exit. This means that it will only once check for your key, and not wait for anything before it reaches the end and quits. -- The loop will tell it to keep checking, until you've pressed the enter key and it quits.
if (key.pushed(key.enter)) then
ui.closewindow()
dfe.exit()
end
--To check if a key is pressed, you need an if-statement. Otherwise, the script will call the function, but not do anything with it.
dfe.sleep(5)
--This is just to give some processing time to other processes.
end
--The end of the loop

I hope this made sense. if not, please let me know and I'll try to write it a bit more descriptive.

Hey gorth/erion, is DFE going to support object oriented programming? That's 1 thing I have really come to love with bgt. If so, what about inheritance? I know that lua already supports metatables/operator overloading too.

Hi,
Lua supports classes already, via tables as you said. There is a chapter in the Lua book we recommend, which speaks about inheritance, too.
I think I can say that we are not really planning to expand Lua further in this direction.

Rob

Awesome! I've been waiting for this thing to come out. Now I just can't wait for the beta phase! Gonna try it!

Folks,
This is a wonderful moment, which is worth celebrating. Even though Alpha, Kyle made the very first public steps with DFE! Go check his ship sim, it's fun!
As a reward: Kyle, tell us what feature you'd like to see in alpha 2. Clipboard handling is already coming, but whatever feature you feel you could use, I will personally see to it that it will be in A2.
Btw Alpha 2, it's coming out on next week, friday.

Cheers,
Rob

Gonna start work on a mortal kombat based side scroller i have been kicking around for a couple of years now. Hopefuly i will get more done with DFE.