[gameprogrammer] Wild Tangent first impressions

In my course of trying to make a web game, I've been looking at Wild Tangent and want to give my first impressions.

The demos do a heck of a lot - everything from a level editor to a skybox sample to loading models.

Installation was polished. But when I went to look for a C++ sample and C++ documentation I spent a long time looking and began to wonder if C++ was supported.

My first impression is that Wild Tangent has abandoned C++. There are numerous java samples but only one C++ sample, that doesn't compile, because no WT header files are included. This is obviously a huge problem since

A. I can't compile
B. I have no way to know what functions are exposed.

There is no C or C++ documentation. To interface with wild tangent you have to use COM. I'm not sure if it is possible to run a C++ app in the webbrowser at all, since the sample itself only includes an exe. Since that is the most critical issue to me it is bothering me quite a lot, since I don't want to spend a lot of time investigating this if it cannot.

On the other hand, if I choose to go with Java there are a lot of samples and documentation. I really don't want to use Java because I then won't be able to use my C++ network library. I tried running one of the java .sln files but it didn't open, with some warning about something not installed that I don't understand. This is probably not the fault of WT since I haven't done much with Java before.

There is no email or phone support. There is forum support, that seems to get a post every 4 days on average. That is pretty sorry considering the commercial license is $10,000.

I will do further investigation since Wild Tangent is my best bet at the moment.


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