Does A7+ABT make A7 superior to Torque?

Hi everyone,

Eek, another 3dgs vs torque thread, but this time in the context of A7's new features which seem to go beyond Torque's current feature set.

I have been looking at Torque very seriously for moving my project to take advantage of their Xbox 360 port for a possible commercial production, and seriously, ick, they just have BSP scene management and questionable polycollision.

Could 3DGS with ABT be a torque killer? with the new scene management, and other new features, I cannot find much that Torque can do better than A7, other than its excellent terrain engine (which I do not need).

In fact, A7 really seems the superior option to me, as someone with no interest in creating an RTS as torque is originally oriented towards.

For me, arbitrary level geometry and ABT scene management seem really superior features. I know there are fans here who religiously take one side or another. Trying to be objective here. Can anyone take my observation further, or point out some other reasons why one is better than the other?

Am I seriously missing something or does A7 seem the better choice?

I am very interested in your objective, lucid opinions!

I'm a long time Acknex user, so I might not be that objective. From what I have seen, A4 was a huge step ahead when compared with A3. From what I know, A7 will be another huge step ahead when compared with A6.

For one, torque's networking engine is way better than dplay used by 3dgs.

yep if you want to produce a network-shooter/rts, torque is way better and will probably ever be in that field.

everything else is just a matter of how much you like the tools in my opinion. features of a7 are probably a bit better then those of standard torque.

It is still too early to make such conclusions.

From the view of an artist we can only compete with modern games with modern shaders and lighting. A good working soft-shadow is one very important point.

Here you can find a fantastic article about that topic:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2193.asp



The new render system with ABT and new arbitrary BSP, new light-management really sounds promising. But it is still to0 early to make up an objective mind. First it should be finished and tested with shaders, lights and realistic shadows.

I would like to create a few demos when time comes and feature-set is up-to-date.

By the way: The new shader concept of Torque is very advanced. And don't forget that the Torque-community gets some kind of WED very soon, called "Constructor":

What ABT is exactly and why is it a superior scene management system ?
Any other engines have already implemented ABT as scene management system ?
If so, which one

Just one important detail

3DGS still accept skinned models with one vertex per bone only
This is really an oudated feature
I do hope that A7 will fix this problem

One Torque feature that GS doesn't have (dunno will this be in A7, atleast haven't heard that it would) is crossplatform support. Cross platform products are becoming more common, especially in open source industry, and I think that commercial products should break into the non-windows markets too. Actually garagegames sells more games to mac than to windows and linux together. (atleast they did some time ago, dunno the current statistics...)

Indie-games sell much better at the Mac-platform because there is not so much competition. But that might change very fast since Torque and Unity are great game engines for the Mac.

The windows platform is simply overcrowded with high-quality budget games. So competition is simply too hard.

It is what I claimed some time ago
Mac is as important as Windows platform for Indie programmers

And since Acknex is popular among indies, it would be nice to have it ported to Mac (and possibly Linux) also.

Doesn't Mac run Intel and Windows? If that's so, then what would the point of porting it to Mac be... the users will eventually use Windows through time anyways. If there going to spend time on a port, it would probably make the most sense for the 360 because it is directX native, supports indie development, supports larger games, ties in with Games for Windows, and it's a console.

Quote:

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the users will eventually use Windows through time anyways.

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On what basis are you saying that?