Any opinions of 'Mission Maker'

[Geoff]

Has anyone come across 'Mission Maker' by 'Immersive Education'?

immersive education - missionmaker

My school is looking at buying it. Presumably they've got fed up of failing to teach the kids flash.

[seanmh]

We did the trial for Mission Maker Beta about two years ago. We used it here with our Gifted and Talented kids (There is quite a steep learning curve), who managed to produce some quite good games. It's not really a multimedia package although there are elements of this e.g. you can add your own sounds etc - it's a 3D Maze/shoot-em-up games designer.

It's good at promoting logical thinking and is quite powerful, you need half decent PCs to run it on though as it's quite 3D intensive.

I believe that the version out now is very different from the Beta we had which was part of a LA pilot scheme for both secondary and primary schools in the area.

We haven't bothered with it recently (the LA were on about buying licences and releasing it to school - but nothing happened), as the fully released version was simply too expensive and outside the scope of our budget for the limited number of kids that we would use it with.

I'd see if you could get a working demo version first to see how useful this software would be, before parting with any cash.

[DarkLight]

'Unless you have dedicated Direct3D capable hardware, it isn't going to run happily.. It doesn't like Intel 945G chipsets at all, despite Intel stating they are capable, so we have several rooms that half work and half don't work.

Likewise, I've never been able to get much support out of them...

I would go for the demo too, since we never had the demo, it just got bought and thrown in my face with a deadline of "next week."'

[Geoff]

I have requested a demo.

[Sirbendy]

We've got it...not poked it myself, just installed the thing.

[MrsGrinch]

I had a first go-round last week with the viewer and some pre-made games. I couldn't get it to run at all on a set of machines with one particular graphics card - the renderer wouldn't run despite the fact it's a 3d gaming card.

Loading the pre-made games frequently made the machine freeze, but randomly, and it didn't seem to matter what size the game was. We had a terrible time getting a copy of the "Fairy Detective" to run.

When they do run, they are really good. And for a graphics development package, it's reasonably priced.

Some primary juniors had been away to an activites week and came back with their games on disk. They really didn't get much done in a couple sessions. I think they'll be disappointed in what they can come up with, compared to the professionally developed games they're used to. It could be useful with a small group of patient kids with good concentration (T&G or a computer club maybe) who have some extended time. It could keep me away from useful work for DAYS.

Cheers.

Michele