The Vision of Macao

Macao is build to help you tell interactive animated stories with a minimum of effort. You can make the stories available on almost every PC without installation. Put your Macao story or animated web page as a static web site to the Internet. Every user can explore it with most state-of-the-art browsers. No plugin is needed, because Macao works with dynamic HTML.

Using Macao, you can make a visitor explore your homepage rather than just view it. The visitor can steer a character or drive a car through your page. These objects can be used to communicate with other characters or objects. You can give the visitor the opportunities to collect items, use them on other items and discover hidden doors or treasures. Your Macao site may consist of a single page or of a large site of linked pages, which work together. You can animate your web shop, let tell characters about your hobbies or you can tell an epic story. You can build in puzzles or just build a landscape-like diorama to walk through.

As Macao consists of HTML, you can use your HTML-skills to design your page. Use your digital camera to take pictures, convert them to transparent GIFs or PNGs and put them as Macao objects to your page. With a few commands you can define paths at your page, which an object can use to walk along. You can use the Road Editor to create roadmaps for cars and other vehicles. By adding Talk-Items to objects you can define conversations and make the characters act on objects.

The Macao Tutorial shows you the construction of two basic types of pages. You will see how few functions it needs to build rich interactive applications.

Macao consists of an object oriented API written in JavaScript. The API is documented in Java-Doc-style. The number of classes in the API is kept small, to make the programming clear and simple. The distribution contains a few controllers, which you can put at your page. The controllers are serving as inventory for collected items or helping the user to "talk" to the characters.

Currently Macao comes with a set of images for two characters and other images with objects, which you can use at your own pages. You can build new characters by only a small number of images (at least one) or you can create characters with many animated features. A little tool helps you to rotate images to animate vehicles.

Macao is Open Source under the terms of the GNU General Public License. So you can use it for free on your homepage or in any kind of distribution.