I want to knock together a few very simple, very short educational games for primay school kids. I don't want to have to get a degree in C++ and DirectX to do it though, are any of those easy 3d game maker programs like gamestudio/easygamecreator/DarkBASIC any good for creating a resonably professional looking simple 3D game in the 1st or 3rd person perspective? I'd prefer it if the packages had some way to interface with a database also, since lots of questions, answers and fact snippets will need to be stored, as well as scores of people. This information will need to be displayed in the 3D world somehow. Any ideas? Or should i just migrate to Tibet to live with a group of C programming monks for ten years and then give it a try then?
I gave DarkBASIC a go when it first came out and you could make it do something like this and there are probably a lot of samples doing most of what you would need, but it would be a lot easer just to read from a text file as I doubt there is any way to interface to any databases. However I would just you an old game like quake 2 or 3 then just mod it.
darkbasic is easy, relatively powerful, and cheap. HOWEVER - there is no object oriented programming which was a HUGE minus for me. Java is also good, just gotta find good graphic libraries (depends on what type of game you want to make). And C++ takes a long time, and directx even longer for me, but it is well worht it...
you may want to try VRML--a little known and rarely used cousin of HTML that was supposed to launch the web into the 3D realm. It works like a web page, but uses a 3D interface of sorts. Navigation would be limited to clicking on links and going to those places, much like the original MYST, but for younger kids, that may be a good option, as they don't need the distraction of roaming through an immersive 3D universe at will.
I remember hearing about the level creator/game creator for Serious Sam. Supposedly, it's fairly easy to create a customized game that is runable without having the game installed.
