Is 3DGS dying?

Hi all,

I just bring up this question because I have been working with 3DGS for many years and I have been working on a major release using 3DGS for like 3 years now.

I look at the current projects and they are all cartoonish, very simple games. It seemed there was a time when there was some more serious games being created with 3DGS.

I have been with 3DGS for, I dunno 6 or 7 plus years now. At one point of time we decided to use 3DGS as our engine, which in hindsight might not have been best choice, but too far along to change now.

The problem is we have ended up doing like 45% of our game in dll's we wrote to make stuff work, look nice, and run at a decent fps.

I won't go into everything, but things like multiplayer, 3d sound that really works, SpeedTree, etc. The list goes on and on.

Now we are on A8, we was hoping maybe the game would run faster with better bone functions, better shadow frame rates, etc, but the fps is still all the same.

I would like to, but not going to mess with trying to improve bone animation speeds in a dll, but obviously going to have to write some shadow code that doesn't drop the fps by 1/2.

Notably, this game was always pushing 3DGS to the max, but we hoped that as 3DGS improved it would improve our performance, but every update hasn't improved performance at all, performance only happens when we write new dll's unfortunately.

Anyhow, just venting tonight, but in about 6 months 3DGS will have a nice title under it's belt, but we probably won't be using 3DGS again. For a big game, it just takes too much dll programming, etc, to keep it running at a decent fps.

I thought I read stuff about new instancing and all with 3DGS, but SpeedTree instancing actually works, 3DGS not so much, I just don't get it.

I was really hoping to see some fps improvements changing from A7 to A8, but there was absolutely no change with our large game.

Later,
Loco

What are engine are you going to use in the future? I have looked at C4, and Unity as possible options for myself.
I wouldn't say 3dgs is dying, but I do think things could be going better. Just a couple of things:
- Basic GIF format support that could remove the need for code
- New Shaders such as realistic 3d water, etc (the Shaders that 3dgs supports are truly horrible with only a couple of exceptions that usually increase memory usage a lot)
- Skyboxes (I wont even go there), there is so little choices
- Basic weather scripts that don't kill your FPS
(the new 8.10 snow script looks pretty good but kills ur FPS)
- Numerous FLAG issues already mentioned
- Most games look cartoonish like you said and the range of games possible to be made with 3dgs is very small, it's like only RPG games are really supported
- Basic features that are needed for some games are missing
- Multiplayer functions could be improved
- Many other features could be implemented to make 3dgs a whole lot better than it already is

- Basic GIF format support that could remove the need for code
not needed

- New Shaders such as realistic 3d water, etc (the Shaders that 3dgs supports are truly horrible with only a couple of exceptions that usually increase memory usage a lot)

3dgs doesnt create shaders, it give sthe possibillity to create and use them. So supporting is here the wrong word.

-Skyboxes (I wont even go there), there is so little choices
maybe

-Basic weather scripts that don't kill your FPS
not needed

- Numerous FLAG issues already mentioned
ok

-Most games look cartoonish like you said and the range of games possible to be made with 3dgs is very small, it's like only RPG games are really supported

WHAT do you expect? Its a community with people new to programming. Cartoonish games require less "photo realistic omfg" most users cant produce when they start. And by the way: Shooter/Rts etc are possible too o.O(as example)

- Basic features that are needed for some games are missing
agree some things like a tracelist from a c_trace could be usefull

- Multiplayer functions could be improved
maybe

things i marked as not needed are not needed cause
a)useless (gif for example)
b)can be produced by youself without much effort(weather script)

Keep in mine before asking for things like weather script, i agree to Locoweed that engine nees to be improoved. So script and gif things are completely at the end of ToDo

Ps: I wish integration for Classes for real OOP(Lite-C).
PSS: I Bet Sid would go nuts with an improoved compiler^^
PSSS: Never understood why rangechecking for arrays in debugmode should not be possible. Delphi for example can handle that o.O

Greets
Rackscha

I would have to disagree, the engine should have the option to create better games not just mostly cartoonish ones. I mean if you pay so much, especially for the PRO version the engine should be capable of doing some big, high quality games too. And new Shaders could be really useful for simulator type games even though you could make them yourself, some easy add-on already made shaders would be nice. I mean look at Unity's shaders and how many more, and better ones there are compared with 3dgs. Also GIF support should be an easy feature to add and would remove the need for old fashion track based sprites and unneccesary code. The weather script part, I'd have agree with you, but still the FPS shouldnt drop so drastically when you use them.
Otherwise the engine is pretty good, I liked it from the beginning, since it teaches you lite-c and then the transition to c++ is much easier. Great community and support also.

The interesting part is what exactly needed to be replaced by DLL... and the question is what does the DLL differently to the engine core.

At that point it gets interesting to share detailed information, but I guess this is a question of how much money Conitec is willing to spend at that point.

Yes, thats right...
Hadn´t thought of it at all.
Why don´t you give the Speedimprovements to the GS-Community as some sort of "Good Bye Game Studio"-gift?
That way, we could all take advantage of it.

gif is not necessary since png is supported i think. or do you mean because of the animation support? i don't think gif animation is easier to handle than putting the frames next to each other. rather the opposite.

you can't just create cartoonish games with gamestudio but for small developers it makes a lot more sense to keep the graphics simple no matter what engine they use. take a look at the most successful indie games like for example the ones in the recent humble indie bundle #2.

about gamestudio dying:
http://tinyurl.com/2fah7h7


i don't think it is dying though. but since marco and doug left, jcl is the only engine developer and he said that he only works on it part time. ok, george works on new templates and every few weeks wlad seems to spend a few hours on wed. compare this to that: http://unity3d.com/company/people/team

this still wouldn't be that bad. gamestudio gets advertised as "lightweight authoring system". i like lightweight stuff. but i think with such a small team they should concentrate on being even more lightweight. do less but do it right instead of halfheartedly. i would prefer if they got rid of some of the old ballast. an opengl ES renderer would be really important too since there are so many more interesting platforms now than windows.

I have to disagree, windows, although annoying and crappy as it is, has a strong foothold on the world. This makes it the most viable platform for the casual PC gamer.

this is more USEFUL than NEEDED, noone NEEDS this Totally agree, this holds some truth though i dont have a problem in the shader department thanks to ShadeC
honestly, this is VERY easy to code
NEEDED, this needs to be addressed
Sorry, i STRONGLY disagree, be careful not to mix your personal potential with the engines potential, theres no type of game in my mind that i cant realize with 3dgs, only thing i wouldnt touch is an MMO and that maintains difficulty over any engine you choose
I agree with this SOMEWHAT but i think those features arent big things like sound and physics, but some little things such as the flags that need to be addressed.
Improved, yes i agree, though i have been seeing more and more MP projects though most of them suffer from some minor annoying MP flaws but theres also Anet if you want stability.
This is true


This is also annoying, we atleast expect better visuals IF we dont get a performance boost but to be honest i think there might be a few useful performance boosters, personally i see the new sprites and the portal regions to be helpful in gaining performance.

WHAT i HATE about this engine's development is, the simplest things are what causes problems, such as flags and we always get some excuse about doing workarounds, we all know theres ALWAYS a way to find a workaround but the time it takes is what kills development, for example, i coded my TPS using c_ignore and it took about 5 minutes to write what SEEMED like functioning code, then i ran it and it failed, which resulted in an hour of me checking if i made mistakes, soon a day was wasted then i learnt it was a engine problem, i then had to code the workarond and several methods couldnt work because they were already used as workarounds for other things and thus made the code VERY messy. So, that entire system took about a week to address when it couldve been done in 5minutes if you guys had lived up to your OWN word with the c_ignore

The main annoyance with me and this engine is its lighting system, lets be honest here, its alot of work to make a sexy level using GSonly elements and then theres the little minute annoyance bugs, i wont switch to A8 because i dont see it offering anything that i cant do in A7

We might say things like gif support, weather isnt 'needed' and alot of little features but truth is, i think alot of us would use them, we dont because its not there and we cant be bothered coding it, even though its simple, coding all of these simple things is why alot of our games dont get finished, sure one might say, hey youre a hobbyist so time isnt a factor but i believe it is especially when finishing a game relies on your motivation, coding workarounds for everything significantly kills that I have a weather system to code for example, i know its easy but havent started due to tasks with more priority, so in a case like this, a nice working template script would be nice so i dont have to pause important tasks but i guess as said, project wont be cancelled because of this.

My team and i do have a huge project comming soon also, ofcourse it hasnt been showcased yet for several reasons, just know you'll be quite impressed ;), i think there also alot more projects being developed but kept behind closed doors LocoWeeds project sounds promising also, theres also CSiS and i think Zapan's zpmbie game is still under development, so i do believe theres some work going on.

Yes i really really hope for those games by Locoweed and Darkinferno to push it^^.

Less people are searching for Gamestudio, cause there is no marketing and less mouth to mouth propaganda. With some games that could represent the engine, it might rise again...might.

Serious question: If JCL is the only engine Dev atm, isnt it possible to (maybe) find another guy to help out? I mean its the same with writing text: You write it and think: OK
Someone else reads it: "eehh".
at lesat 2 people means different point of views for constructing etc. Could be alot more helpfull.

Maybe focusing on Team rebuilding?


Greets
Rackscha

To my information Conitec is not really depending on Gamestudio. It is more some sort of toy - a good toy - but the money to run the whole company comes from elsewhere (Galep and co).

Not sure if "my information" is correct, though.

If it wasn't someone like Locoweed I didn't payed attention to this thread since too many newcomers are easily blaming things not being aware of their own shortcomings...

Well, I don't think that Gamestudio is dying since there are obviously way too many visible and invisible users. Who says that it is not vital just because there are less big commercial projects out there? I admit that through the "big" engine-licensing paragdigm shift forced by Unity some people were going elsewhere but that is just because these are engines have a total different background in money, dev team size and professionals, using it.

That is the point,.. I think it is way too easy to blame a company with lower user base and lower budget for their engine while comparing it with high priced middlewares (e.g. SpeedTree) and/or higher priced engines in mind (obviously) for which their developers has tons of people as human resources and for which they put tons of $$$ into exclusively licensed middleware (e.g. Unity3D with Umbra Occlusion Culling, Beast Lightmapping, FMod - to use this you pay min. 1000$).

I would like to know what is exactly faster with your dll programming. And what you did to your visuals with dll's that is not possible with Gamestudio. And what -reasonable- features you (I mean Locoweed, not the others!!) really want to have into the engine. The Lite-C compiler compiles obviously slower code than a VS compiled code, so, let's do not compare this.

Best regards,
-Christian

P.S: @Rakscha: if you want OOP, do it in C++!

@Rackscha, ive always had that dream also, which is why i tend to love seeing big projects that seem as if they'll be completed, i just hate seeing when they ask for assists and they get a "how much can you pay me" by the same community thats saying they want to see completed projects

@Firoball: doesnt sound too surprising

I just dont wish to show our project until we are personally pleased with it, so far the comments on screens have been great but, we see the flawsm we're our biggest crits lol

Don't get me wrong, I really like a lot of things about the 3DGS engine. I just wish they could make an update that improved the performance up a notch some how.

As far as other engines, the Unity engine seems quite intriquing to me, but until we finish our current game I don't have a lot of time for engine testing at the moment.

or d, or c#, or if you don't need super duper performance something like python.

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/picture.html

@ventilator: haha.. yeah. I don't like C++ too, and personally, I would like to bind a JAVA app to my Gamestudio app because I love JAVA ... but that is another story. And I fear the overhead... but it would be so awesome!

yes, a java binding would be nice.

this c++ fqa (and also the c++ faq) is very interesting by the way, also if you like c++ you can learn a lot from it.

That's obviously a stylistic choice and depends on the artists, not the engine's capabilities. My game KarBOOM has a kind-of cartoony style, but you can see it also has unique multi-texturing, environment-mapped normal mapping, sharp shadows and particle shadows, too (how many games have you played where the particles cast shadows?). I look at other engines and think how much harder it would be to write the same effects for those engines, and what kind of cost to performance/visuals it would be to just use their built-in effects. Online will be released to GS users soon, and so far everything has gone very smoothly.
Have you tried mat_bones? On my old PC with a GeForce 9600GT I had nearly 5 million bones-animated polygons on-screen at the same time with diffuse lighting and textures.
What shadow system are you using at the moment? I would not recommend using a built-in shadow system in any engine. They generally sacrifice performance or visual fidelity for generality, but most games could really benefit from shadows made with the game itself in mind.

Jibb

About cartoonish, it's beacause the major part of users are
passionnated coders, and they don't target realistic
last next gen graphics .
Even if they could use better models and textures some times

And don't forget there are kids alos using the engine, so they are happy when they successfully make a playable game even with basic models and textures !

They have been amazing games of 3DGS in the past
Good looking games on A8 only relies on people behind that
make an effort to produce good looking homogenous levels and models.

Some links :
RPG Action game

Galedor

A8, is not hold by 10 or 20 people behind, like Dark Basic Pro, but it works really well, if you know what style of project to do and if you know your limitations in game creating

You'll neven create Oblivion game, so much much work on it,
so much hours and hours and thousand of people and indirect
paid people to do all the assets, textures etc ...
and all testing.

Be realistic also !
For casual games, if you know how to do it , you can go very far with A8, but are you sure to be strong and keep working on a project without discourage yourself ?
That's the main question also !

I kno how to do Next Gen models, i have the license and tools,
i oculd do some FF7 style game with next gen characters
and fixed/travelling cameras for 3D levels , with a simple
combat system !
the challenge would be to have fun tactical fights, vey good HUD look, good story, etc ... lot lot lot of work !


I already said it for A8 what i would like would better be :
- WED complete terrai editor like in Unity
- .Net programming of the engine directly for commercial version
- Integration of another free multiplayer API that would work
lot better
- possiblity to program easily your on additionnal panels
for your own tools that would run on WED (like Unity tools)

The last bad point :
Forecast things take more than one year without being made
Well i know there is not 4 or 5 people under the engine, but
why not putting or pay some people to create tools or program
some forecast things ???

Appart from that A8 is good for all beginners and lot better than others packages like Dark Basic Pro for example that is lot more slow and that don't have any world Editor to create
your world and attach script !

And the recent adoptio nof Nvidia Physics is a really good thing.
A library for collision detection using Nvidia Physics is on forecast.
I think it will solve lot of problems, and will allow
to use collisions in a lot more easy way !

Even more :
You can see on Iphone games that looks incredibly good and lot better than A8 !
And Iphone don't have all the power of a PC and all the PC shaders also !

so why it is possible ?

Simply because they use talented 3D artists to make the models
, textures, choose and appropriate lightening etc ....

And don't forget if you use clever LOD , you can have really good performances with A8 !
LOD changes all the performances

It's like some AAA games on PS3 using really good tricks like shaders on some objects , and baked normal map and lightening on others (Drake 2 on PS3) !
Lot of times the floor is simple textures baked on some areas also !
And i have other game examples where you are tricked
and don't see it caus you are running all the time !!

So use LOD, bake textures and lightening some times,
and use tricks also !

Well A8 is what is is, for programmers first !
And with a talented 3D artist if your game target is not too much like to compete with last AAA game you can really get somewhere and make a good game with it !

mat_bones? I personally didnt know about it. Okay i dont need it, cause my games are low end :P(visual)
But interesting.

Gretes
Rackscha

Maybe because the engine core has a lot more features then the DLL. Locoweed used his own DLLs for a specific purpose but the 3dgs has to be programmed to fit for any game in any situation meaning that c_trace for example generates a lot more data than you might actually need.

So basically it is just the decision between a lot of comfort or a lot of performance.
And since 3dgs wants to support all the noobs it has a lot of comfort in scripting (and still people are whining that it hasnt got enough features).

LOD is not always that important as you stress it. Current hardware even does not care much about LOD. It can "eat" polygons without any problems. The number of draw calls and the size of textures are much more important. When I am testing my sci-fi and fantasy scenes in different engines I often realize that downsizing textures and reducing shader quality affects the FPS numbers much more than reducing polygons.

Although it is important to reduce polygons for collision detection, physics or other CPU-related content. In these cases it makes a huge difference.

But this can differ when you are on old hardware, consoles or mobile devices. I am still learning with our latest projects how they behave.

Baking can make a difference if done right. But it always comes with higher memory needed for all the baked maps. So you need good asset management, maybe streaming and a good memory manager.

Maybe... but especially c_trace allows to set a lot of IGNORE_ flags which make c_trace remarkably faster depending on your needs...

Hi, been long since I post here, I mostly just lurking here.
Okay, so the thread is "is 3DGS is dying?", well I guess(or hope) not
But I do think that it seriously need some game to show the teeth. I know that there are some game recently released but I don't think it really represent what 3DGS got.

I dont want to compare it with other tool but it can't be helped, take a look at Unity free version. It give you a full support of shaders(except r2t and shadows). And even can make MMOG with that too I guess(though I'm not sure bout this). In 3DGS, the free version can only make games that look like was made 10 years ago, although this really depends on the user, but how can people get interested? And unless you're using the pro version, people can see your game resource, although there are some good packers tool but only if people can find it. And the list can still go on...

Now I know that I havent touch 3DGS for a long time since I switch to flash games, but I must say that conitec took a wrong step by stopping A7 and starting A8.
Why not just improve A7? Give it more support like mobile platform capabilities and stuffs?

Well, long story short, 3DGS doesn't let people create game easy(like it used to be in the previous versions), there's too much effort to put in that now can/should be eliminated somehow.

A8 was the only way they'd get some money in their pockets thats all... to be honest i dont even see why people are buying it and its incomplete, though i do see alot of useful features, i think we can all agree that it couldve been added to A7... theres no SIGNIFICANTLY different feature that makes the versions standout, unless you count physX

now, i in no way want to hate on the engine but personally its obvious that 3dgs is slowly dying, keyword: "slowly", look at this what happened to me:

[in class, logs on to 3dgs site]
teacher: hmm, what a ugly site, you need to change how it looks, its just horrible
me: ahm, its not mine, its the gamestudio site
teacher: oh..

That alone tells you what others first impressions are, lame gallery, no videos? wtf?, lame 2d work, lame presentation.

I've bought A8 (for 50% off of upgrade price) as soon as it was possible, even though it almost didn't have any new features. Why did I buy it then at all?
Because now I get at least 2 years of free updates and meanwhile I can shape the engine to some extent myself, I can request little but (for me) important features like the new d3d_entsort mode.
You don't pay for a finished product with feature ABC when you buy gamestudio but rather for a 2-year-free-updates-licence.


The page is really horrible and by far the worst part of the product. :<

The previous page was a whole lot more horrible. Hard to imagine...

Regarding the Google statistics:

Search results do not always reveal a programs popularity. When you know the places where to get answers to your software there is no need to google it.

In particular, Gamestudio offers a nice hand book and has - with this forum - a "single point of truth". If you know this, you do not need Google!

Unity is new and interesting but the knowledge is rare and scattered all over the net so that you need to search for it.

... my theory


EDIT: What might upset people in this forum - me too - is that there was no visible improvement with the A8 update. When a company does not invest in a new version which is up to date and comparable to other products in a higher price segment will look like "Hey let's get the rest of cash we can get and then close the store". This is very pesimistic but it is just a personal point of view.

Here's The Answer
http://www.supercanoyun.com

These guys Rock....

Is this the Acknex-Engine? Looks nice

not sure(%50) if the game is made with 3dgs. Wikipedia says it's 3dgs but wikipedia is not a reliable source. but PROABABLY same guys that made the Kabus22 and c4robot are working on it, but SOBEE is relatively a bigger studio, they have several games engine may be different or written from scratch.

http://www.conitec.net/english/gstudio/gallery.php

well then it's awesome! there will be Marvel characters in the game they have officially licensed with marvel.

See, it's not about the engine but who is using it.
All features people are whining about is available on UDK, go use UDK you won't do any better.

I hope that they release an English Version coz I want to buy....



Totally Agree

It appears game will be free, and the publisher is a Turkish Telekom... They may not release the game in English, but then the game seems to be arcade-style, so it's all about scoring high and getting to top on the list:
http://www.supercanoyun.com/BestofUser.aspx
(free registration on site, login on game start kind of thing)

That game looks just awesome, not only the graphics but the game(play) itself, too (except for the slow movement).

On GS Download Page, they say that there gonna be a free demo and $9.99 full version....

it also says it's made by dejobaan.
the description is copy&pasted from AaaAAAAAAAAAa!

That fits to the 3dgs website style

oh dont get me wrong, i'm by no means saying that this engine cant do great, honestly, i think i speak for everyone who has seen my game.. when i say, with the right people, this engine can do GREAT things...

however, my point was, that the change from A7 to A8 didnt bring much VISUALLY to the engine, atleast from a noobs point of view... think about it...



this is very true and one thing that i like, they do tend to add little features when asked for which is great...

but the point of this thread, is 3dgs dying, is because of the following:

lack of alot of new users [comeon now, if you were just about to start game developing and looking at all the engines, what are the chances that you'll start with GS]

lack of DECENT looking projects [alot of this is due to the dev time but i know for a fact that theres alot of games being worked on behind the scenes, mine included]

yeah that point is true, it does not visually changed at all. But how much could it change really? I mean the graphics renderer.

Revamped lighting and shaders, i think thats the main, i mean, i know they added shadows which is good ofcourse but for example i wanted to light a level...

flat shaded surfaces+lights+dynamic shadows alone wont give a great overall look, this is assuming youre using blocks and not models

If you do go the models route, then you get shadows+shaders and you lose lighting[except sun], unless ofcourse you bake, which is another thing that increases dev time.

We paused scion because of this problem, will resume when we have a secure and decent level lighting pipeline

Ofcourse this limit also depends on the game youre undertaking, not all games need alot of local lights, sun light is enough sometimes..

I think when someone hears of an engine update, the first thing that comes to their minds is better visual/immeditate speed increase...

I don't know why so many people use google analytics lately, i think it's hard to spot what's better.
My search terms would be like this:

http://tiny.cc/sn37b

I doubt anyone really searches for "unreal development kit". They usually use "udk" so you get way more requests.

Also for unity 3d, i usually never use unity 3d as term, just unity. The engine itself isn't called "Unity 3D". Just the website (i forgot why it was like this). The engine is just called Unity. (Many people don't know that actually).

There is (or was) another engine called unity3d which had nothing to do with UT (unity technologies).

As for 3dgs, i often use gamestudio and when i first tried to find an engine many years ago, i used gamestudio as term as well, and found 3dgs. So you get more counts there too.

Anyway, i really doubt 3dgs is dying. It has a lot of advantages for newcomers and you still keep hearing about it (and i'm saying this as unity user :P).

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=349759#Post349759
i just copied the link from this other thread.

of course this doesn't directly correlate to the user numbers but it isn't totally uninteresting either.

maybe you are right about the others but "unity" without "3d" is useless. it's just an english word unrelated to game engines and there is no change in the graph even before unity did exist.

Yes unity is "useless" taking it as a result, i forgot to mention that. Obviously it gets so many searches because its a common word.

But that was just my point, that i think those search engine analytics in this case are hard to evaluate.

This is absolutely true but keep in mind that a professional studio has a lot of options. They are more open to different scripting languages and to different technologies compared to a hobby user who is often afraid to learn a new technology or to learn a new programming language / sdk. So they often use the tool that fits best to their needs or they use the tool that supports all the needed platforms that are suggested by the publisher.


This is also true when you have a beginner or a small hobbyist in mind. But even advanced hobbyists or small indies will realize very soon that this actually depends on your project. When you want to make a huge indoor world then you will see that zones and portals are a big advantage. You will test a prototype and you will see that there are differences. Indoors work fine in C4 because of zones and portals, they work fine in Unity because of the Umbra Occlusion Culling and they work even better in UDK because of the great level compiler culling with the help of the good old CSG techniques. I also tested Vision3d from Trinigy and they use manually created portals as well and they even create zones automatically from the given potals.
And if you want to make it pretty you will see that you can combine static lightmaps with dynamic shaders easily in Unity, Vision3d and UDK. You need a lot of workarounds and researches to do the same in C4, Irrlicht or Gamestudio as an example.

But when you want to make a platform game, jump and run, puzzle, match-3 or and adventure on Windows only, then it is a complete different story. So it really depends on your needs and on your project.

What I want to tell: Dont generalize something like that! A team can really perform much better with UDK when they create an FPS shooter with large indoor areas. And they probably will only suceed on iPhone and Android when they switch to Unity (or when they create their own tools for that). But they can also create something great with Gamestudio when they accept the limits of it, though the same counts for everything else like Ogre, Irrlicht, Darkbasic, Neoaxis and co. And as you see from the list of available alternatives: A technology has to be competitive to attract more users than the other ones.

have you tried LightFrog?

Does not work with A8...

[This was more meant to for me, than for darkinferno ^^]

yes, but darkinferno has A7

look at it:

block based: local lights + sunlights + shadows - [no great shaders for blocks] + pp effects

model based: model shaders + sunlights + dynamic shadows[thank god for that] - no local lights and shadows from local lights + pp effects

lightfrog: local lights + sunlights + shadows + model shaders - [no pp effects YET]

models plus baked lights - sunlight + model shaders + dynamic shadowns + pp effects - [problems with models being affected by baked lighting]


personal need: sunlight + local lights + shadows[static or dynamic] + pp effects + model shaders


ofcourse you can still accomplish greatness with these for MOST games but note i'm only writing this based on what i need for our game [scion] and ofcourse i know there are workarounds for alot of these but what may seem like a simple solution may increase devtime by months.

sometimes maybe as independent devs we tend to focus too much on insignificant details hence our projects take forever to finish

Looks to me like all you need is to learn how to write shaders. Add good shaders for blocks and "block-based" will fit your personal need perfectly. It's easy. Believe me. Just try it.

Countless times 3DGS's shader programming has been cited as one of its biggest strengths. I've written deferred shader chains (100 dynamic lights on-screen at the same time? No problem) with god-rays, soft particles, fur shaders, multi-texture shaders, fast shadow mapping, fire and water, sub-surface scattering, atmospheric scattering... and what's my training? The 3DGS shader workshops. And I'm far from being the most prolific shader programmer in this community. In the end, I find shader programming the easiest part of game development. I've never used the built-in shaders.

Improved standard shaders are something A8 needs for newbies, not for experienced users/teams making the "next big thing", IMHO. Maybe I've just been raised on GS and know nothing else, but it generally meets my needs, and I've never needed plugins. A8 introduces a lot of features that I looked at and said to myself, "Wow. I've got to get this."

Jibb

well, i have two A7 projects in work. one would be already finished if achaziel would find some time to do my skins. and the other one is progressing nicely, i work on it in my freetime so it will take a few weeks. still, if anyone is doing me models from THIS THREAD it will take way less than a few weeks

While i do know that this is true, however it does increase dev time if i have to be start looking at something else rather than working on the game itself, which is why having someone dedicated to shader programming is a huge asset, i mean, even with what i just listed, i am doing quite nicely with my project, graphically

One of the major selling points you see for most engines is: "focus on your actual game and let 'engine name' do the heavy lifting for you"

so it really increases devtime when you have to be at the core of things even though this does give you the ability to write exactly what you need, maybe i'll look into shader programming after i've released our current game, even thinking of learning now would increase the devtime too much which is the concern.

I dont really blame the engine for much, most times i can see my inability to accomplish certain tasks and yes i do see alot of cool little features for A8 but the topic of this thread is about gs dying not about if upgrading to A8 made sense... and to be honest, from a NEW PERSONS point of view, theres not alot to attract them to the engine...

the sad reality is and it applies to games, movies: MOST people come for the eyecandy and stay for the content

GS doesnt have enough eyecandy to attract the majority, thats how i see it

Its true people come for eyecandy. But that's not something this engine lacks -- it's not something an engine provides in the first place. The assets are provided by the user, and I still stand by this engine being one of the best for shaders.

It's the website that doesn't present itself well. There are ugly projects in every engine, and great looking ones in most. But GS's website cries out death.

Jibb

oh yes i do agree with you on that shader topic.. sometimes it really does look nice to tweak and see how some shaders behave and i know there are beautiful projects but the GS site doesnt bring them up front, also, i know i can accomplish good looking games but i wonder just how easy it is for a newcommer to do the same, since attaining those nicer graphics tend to include using usermade content not highlighted by the site/engine...

maybe reworking the website shouldve had a higher priority, i mean, i thought it'd change for A8, i was looking forward to it, even when A8 was released i still didnt notice a change on the page, then i noticed the ugly 7 just changed to an ugly 8 and i was like... thats it ? lmao

@DarkInferno: True words.
HEY we had a shadercontest with nice looking results. A frontpage with those results + a presentation video for 3DGS with those Demos would help.


Gretes
Rackscha

Yes. Unity3D ftw!

Yes it would.. but who's gonna do it ? this idea has been up for Quite some time, i even remember JCL starting some post asking for good looking videos, i guess i ASSUMED it was for a new video gallery but god knows what it was for

I totally thought the shader contest was for the purpose of making show-off screenshots for the engine, but nothing was done with it. I was linking to the GS website on my website, and was actually hesitant to do so -- I wanted to say "It's not as bad as it looks!"

So yeah, I agree, website should have a higher priority.

@darkinferno:
I was in a rush before, and didn't mention it, but I guess it does make sense that you're not trying to learn shader programming in the middle of a big project on a schedule. I'd seek involvement if I didn't already have my hands full.

Jibb

@JulzMighty: i thought so about the shader contest too, maybe it was actually for that epic fail of a game project that JCL took on, dont recall the name

oh and just the thought that my project could get the attention of someone like you even though your busy with karboom [which i must say i look forward to a race mode]

i think we're doing greatly with shaders and our game, however we wont show until we believe it will drop some jaws.

the strength of this new game lies in its features though, hint: 'online map creator anyone '

The other point is that all 3D artist target Unity than 3DGS.
Juts go on Unity showase or best screenshot thread to find
what means good looking projects.

3D artists prefer Unity, that'w why you sse great looking games on Unity than A8.
Unity RPG
A8 is lot more programmer engine, so that' normal.



Unfortunatly A8 have less good looking projects, less 3D artists jump on it. It's a mainly programming engine dont forget it.
So people shuld stop asking for eye candy things or top notch looking projects !

It's like that.
But like Dark Basic Pro, and Ogre 3D or TrueVision 3D ;
A8 have is own people ,
and people that stays with t caus, it suits their needs and they are happy with it.

To attract new comers, indeed, A8 should have some site lot better presenting tools and features somewhat like Unity 3D,
simply and efficiently.
It would need top notch screenshots also (even if it lacks
top notch looking games).
And a real Showcase 2 , with only top notch looking games a little like in the A6 days

What it lacks is more people making it, oen or tow is not sufficient i think. Each addon or forecast thing takes
so so much time when it's not that huge thing sometimes ??


Well like some other 3D engines that have still their
people, long life to A8

A dying engine is when you find that on forums :

Dying engine thread style

Sad causd it had good potential, but people behind already left
the buyers one time (i bought it when it came out) , i think this time it's definitive.

It is a shame
A great engine in my opinion , not inferior to the super celebrated Unity3d
For a programmer even better than Unity3d
Artists may have a different opinion but I dont think that they can dislike this engine
They made a lot of marketing mistakes, in my opinion
Some members have been shouting like hell for some bugs which were not that serious , not at least for a brand new engine
I am talking about Beyond Virtual
Unity was even more buggy at the tima
On the other hand the developer's reaction was absolutely not acceptable...denying the evidences...insulting etc

I'm not sure that GS is dying, not yet. It'll live till this forum will have 60 on-line members each day...
They will squeeze each cent out of the GS... That's what I think, and this is just my opinion.
And yes, some one here said that isn't easy to make games with GS (not like it was), I can fully agree with that some one.

TRACER

Personally, I think it was harder to makes games with Gamestudio in the past. A8, compared with A6 - which relied solely on C -, is awesome!

Don't take the steep learning curve of Lite-C into account, it is just a programming language which you have to learn as well when changing the engine (it enables also LOTS of new features and ways to code your game!).

And: don't take the claim into account to make super-graphics, that is just a pitfall even big commercial studios are struggling with - that has nothing to do with this engine. Other engines are more shining because they provide more shaders and stuff, but they *require* you to deliver suitable graphics, so, that is also not a proof that developing is much harder.

I even remember that in even older days the manual was a gigantic PDF. Hello? ^^ nothing comparable with that super awesome nice to search with CHM. And you can always look into all available files you include while including acknex.h -- also very informative.

So, what is harder, then?

"Harder" isn't the right word which I need to use I think. And even so, not harder to learn, but to make games... In the time back then, when newcomers were using A5 ready made templates, which were up to date at that time to my mind, making simple shooter was easier and faster then now. Cause the result which users were having with A5 was was good enough at that time not a half life killer, but still good. If we look at the current templates, we can see that they do not look up to date, and new users will need to start learning lite-c or c-script, to make good looking game... You can make simple shooter with current templates in 5 minutes, but it will be hard to call it shooter... Not like back in the past... But even so, yes learning is much easier then it was. But what I said was about making good looking shooter not to learn how to make one.


TRACER

Well in my opinion 3DGS will degenerate into insignificance if there's going to be no changes to adapt to a niche or special target group. It may have been THE indie engine in the A4 to A6 days but it took some wrong steps in my opinion. I don't want to talk about some bad decisions like the too late integration of shaders which then also was half-assed in the beginning. Back then it really aimed at Indies and people totally new to game creation. It was perfect for that purpose because of it being a full development suite offering modeler, world editor and a script editor (later on) in one package. Together with the nice templates you really could achieve some basic things very fast (i.e. in comparison to other engines)...

I just think 3DGS didn't see the signs of changing times then. For example: Back then it was cool to have MED because besides the extremely expensive big 3D suites like 3D Max which were no option for most people. Things have changed though and now we have many good free modelers like Wings or Blender. Instead of keeping MED around while trying to make it somewhat useful they should have scrapped it a long time ago. Just a tiny & nifty piece of software for animation is what really is needed (which would have been great in a WED revamp we didn't really see either)...

I also never understood as to why there had to be Lite-C. I mean besides this totally strange thing of having one guy code which apperently nobody did really care about just to find out that all comments were written in Chinese when he left or however the things did turn out. Ok, Lite-C added more features and options and that's great. Still it's a self-made language you cannot use anywhere else and which also isn't THAT much different from like a full blown C++. I never understood as to why the decision for such a more complex language was made. It totally worked against that main target group of Indies and newcomers. Experienced users were able to make things work with their .dlls and nowadays also can include the engine in C++, C# or whatever else they're using. What in my opinion would have been a good idea is to include an easy language like Java(script) or Lua. That's also where I see the big advantage of e.g. Unity or Shiva (apart from talking about the feature lists): When you're new and no experienced programmer you just can use those easy script languages like Javascript for Unity and Lua for Shiva. As experienced user you still can use some of the more powerful languages. I don't see where Lite-C fits in here. Ok - it is a bit more easy than e.g. C++ but it's nowhere as easy to use (and learn) as e.g. Lua...

And that's why I say 3DGS is going to lose more and more importance and the market as it never really got used for really big projects (and it might never be) while making itself less and less attractive for all the Lone Wolves and small Indie teams. Especially nowadays where everything is about minigames or casual games it starts to get obvious how bad things are for 3DGS. Ok - part of the problem is the lack of platform support but still - 3DGS once was THE engine for such small titles. Like for example Pong or Krokmania or even that game where you play that mouse and collect the cheese. For some reason games like that stopped from popping up here although there currently seems to be quite a demand for such games. Not that nothing good is made with 3DGS nowadays but I think 3DGS lost focus on what it was good at and had a real chance to be good at. I don't see a real perspective in being a rather "programming heavy" with the lack of a great gear in terms of editors, features and performance...

It's sad because I like 3DGS and had my first steps in the 3D world with A4 but it made its way down on my "favorite engine for creating a game with list" further and further. I still wouldn't call 3DGS "dying" though but from my perspective it's heading in the wrong direction where other teams which much more manpower and a more well thought out product strategy will just always be one or several steps ahead...

My 2 cents - 3DGS is a decent engine but the number of starting positions where 3DGS should be the engine of choice really is shrinking...

I for my part don't understand your point about Lite-C, IMO it still is easy.
I still program the way as I did with C-Script. If you don't use the complicating parts of Lite-C, no problem, you don't have to.

I remember such threads since ages...
First it was Torque, then it was Gamecore...
And even before that 3dgs was dying every day.

Acknex has survived them all.

So I think it´s no wonder that jcl can´t hide his smile.
Because we absolutely don´t have any clue how big the sells are. We are just guessing.

i also do not agree with the lite-c vs c-script comparison, imo Lite-c is alot easier to use with mote C like features. When i first got a6, i really felt absence of some features. Probably because i was already using C/C++ for years...

I have to agree with Toast. Actually there are not only free modelling tools, there are also free programming IDEs with very good debugging and highlighting capabilities. And there are tons of free help documentations for it.

Actually a game engine is about, guess what: a game engine. This is the part that renders the world, that does the culling, collision detection, scene management, loading and playing sound, memory management, streaming, object management, input management, lighting and so on. The only needed but very important tool for such a technology is a good world editor with decent import capabilities of models, textures, strings, fonts, gui-elements, sounds and whatever I forgot to mention.

Actually I am a fan of having as much tools as possible in a software package. Because of that I like to work with complete modelling, rendering and animation packages like Lightwave or Modo. But I just experience in this moment that Lightwave gets separated more and more. Earlier it was Modeler and Layout as 2 separated tools (connected by a tool called Hub). Now it is Layout (for animation and rendering), Modeler (for modelling), Hub (for data exchange) and Core (as a new generation modeller and renderer). Modo on the other side has everything aggregated into one application and it just feels better integrated.

So from my own experience it would make more sense to aggregate tools.

I also agree with Toast about the niche idea.

By the way: I would not classify my post as a rant. I hope I just mentioned some constructive points and ideas. This in mind I find the name of the forum section not a good choice. Maybe mentioning this is somewhat of a rant though

I think programming and feature wise the engine has evolved quite good.

Earlier I often had the problem: "How am I going to do this!?".

Now I look into the manual and there often is a function for doing exactly what I need - because someone else needed it before and it was added.

I agree that Lite-c is nice, I just wish it would abide to the ANSI C standard better. It seems to implement some features and discard others for no good reason.

gamestudio will die only if jcl wants it to die. since like firoball said, it doesn't seem to be the main business. as long as he has fun doing it, it's no problem to continue making small updates.

but i also think that toast sums it up pretty well. it very likely will become more and more insignificant.


yes, we don't know what is going on but some happenings certainly make a strange impression. like marco and doug leaving (did they leave a sinking ship? :p) and never hiring true full-time replacements.

i'm optimistic as well ... hopely jcl will never stop
of course more developer would be likeable ... but in the meantime (since 3dgs became more flexible) the community can do some great improvements as well

Some misterious sources say that JCL has 41 clones. So, better update till you drop.. A99 4 life!!11eleven

What 3DGS could have done is improve a lot it's BSP system, with lot more tools, alowing any shapes, with lot more fast compiler (even if it has very progressed nowadays).

It was the speciality of 3DGS , no modeling package was needed on the old days to make levels, apply textures, lightmap all that on WED.
If it had improved this BSP system a lot , and made shaders applyable on BSP easily like you apply textures.
That with the lightening engine combining Lightmaps and shaders; it owuld be a big winner , even today.
I think they would have a very successfull engine today

(we can see Unity users asking for some BSP system in the forums, one have begun to be made , but have been somewhat abandonned )!

Too bad ; they don't have kept that direction in priority.
And actual 3DGS BSP system is really outdated, don't support easy to apply direct shaders, modeling with BSP tools of ED is not easy at all and friendly (specially for complicated stuff where tools like Extrude, Cut loop , divide , push vertices by brush etc .... would have been helpfull) !

Caus very big engines use BSP like Source or Unreal Engine.
Perfec Dark Source

Source Engine
But the last updates of A8 that uses some Users contributions like the new GUI system are for me the new big positive orientation
One guy can't program all things needed for an engine, too much work, debugging etc ...
E can just hope users to bring up lot more addons to A8
to make it better each time !
Next , why not a complete terrain editor for WED ? (i'm kidding )



What it lacks for me is a real solidsite like Unity site.
Up To date, even the dark and red theme of A8 looks not that pro.
Why not using some lot more white site, more clear with black character texts ?

And why not some month quick newsletter, showing what is going on the engine and forums (different from AUM that is
not news , but more tutorial oriented).


I think it's like Dark Basic Pro or Irrlicht free engine that have there own people
3DGS have his own people also.



Just my point of view !

Yes, I said that a long time ago. The biggest changes to improve GS were made by it's users!
Newton (best stable physics in A7 for me)
Shade-C (best stable shaders with hight FPS for me)
LightFrog (best lights and shadows I've ever seen)
Anet (one of the best and stablest plugins for Multiplayer games)
GSNet (an other great and stable plugins for Multiplayer games)
IntenceX (best AI I've ever seen of GS)
SSAO (great looking shader, which will give to your games more ambience)
LBGUI (great and easy to use GUI tool)
HED - Hitbox Solution with Editor (the easiest way to make your games more realistic)
And so on.. If we dig deeper, we'll see that rabbit hole is deeper than we think
And I'm sure we'll find a lot of other great tools!
(Sorry if I forgot some ones an other great tool )
But even if GS is "dying" (I really don't what that to be true) we need to be optimistic!
If GS gonna be closed, I hope Conitec will realize free PRO version of A8 and all previous versions

Have you read that they are working on a new WED?

Exciting

It's so exciting!

Until JCL said that they are working on a commercial gamestudio project, I've believed they were working on a new WED, so I'm glad they really do.

I thought these are two different topics...

Hopefully it's possible to integrate the new WED directly into a game for live editing. *dreams*

I am using Unity for my next project due to the need for a web player. I wouldn't say 3DGS is dead though, it does many things right. But it also lacks in key areas(multiplatform, art pipeline, performance). As Frank said, if your planning on doing something more basic for windows use 3DGS. I do miss Lite-C with Unity too, I still think 3DGS had the best scripting system.

i wonder if there will be a gamestudio port for the upcoming nvidia ARM cpus and ARM windows. looks like platform independence will become more and more important.

3DGS is just great in its features, but the weak point is

WED:
- very difficult to use when placing many models, no workflow, not user friendly at all
- todays levels are levels in which you use models only, so there must be some easy handling for models, appliing predefined materials and shaders and easy lighting system, a preview system (todays pcs are fast enough)
- everything what is used in a game has to be insertable like sounds, scripts, menu system, terrain editor, etc

so everything depends on the access you have got to the engine. The engine itself is not the problem at all, I guess

so WED is the key

Well my bet is that before that will happen they'll switch to OpenGL in order to get additional plattforms. As I see it that should be way more easy to do than writing (and maintaining) another branch without x86 from the ground up...

Yeah, that's maybe the most important thing: Making it runable on other plattforms. Especialy mobile phones.

I want a Nintendo DS port.

3DS port, please.

Porting means lot of devs to port all the stuff.
Lot of bugs also.
And it would need indeed programmers, i don't see one man doing all that stuff, even only for OpenGl version.

I think like some people , that an improved version of WED would be first priority.

Well A8 is what it is by now, and like i said is programmer
engine mainly and it fits great on that side.
And it's perfect for small indie projects.

porting does not mean that, for mobile platforms maybe, but for mac/lin porting means JCL ports the engine, we only press a button and change the working platform.

I do not think writing an opengl renderer and porting the engine to win mobile/android/mac would be hard for JCL, only needs time.

I also agree a better WED shold be at higher priority, after all if engine were to be ported, editors need to be ported too so it would mean a WED-from-scratch because WED is heavily based on windows spesific libraries, anyway.

i also think that an opengl port wouldn't be that hard. the shader system of the engine maybe could be a bit of a problem? how would the two different shading languages be handled?

Cg is pretty much HLSL, but works with both DirectX and OpenGL, so if they used Cg we'd be all set

Jibb

Yeah, and small indie projects are great for the mobile phone market.

(But right, this not that in hurry and wed probably should have higher priority.)

If they want to keep their market share, mobile phone market is VERY important imho. At least as important as a new WED.

Yes, it is. The mobile phone market might be larger then the PC market soon. The Android software market as an example is the fastest growing software market today. Many developers jump this ship. EA brought Need for Speed to Android. Popcap is working on Plants vs. Zombies on Android and other publishers and studios are woking on projects.Thousands of small apps enter the market each day. Waiting too long is a very large mistake just because the big guys will rule this market very soon.

Just look at the iPhone market. Epic already released a game and sold 1.5 millions just in the first week. This platform now belongs to the big guys.

And there will be a new SDK for Android for native programming. Many C++ coders are waiting for that and will jump this market also. Up to now it was more of a Java domain.

I don't think that 3DGS should aim for the mobile sector though. They lack manpower in order to get such a millstone round the neck. I mean they already struggle to stay somewhat on par on the PC sector - when trying to also always keep iPhone and Android support around at the same time that would be too much in my opinion...

I was sort of surprised by the impact of that market. I did assume quite some possibilities for the usual minigames but the mobile sector managed to really pull off a trend even towards more serious / complex games...

jcl already announced that they want to head towards mobiles. The question is how fast and good they do it.

Yes, it is really astonishing. Even simple casual games like "Angry Birds" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds) sold 10 million units only on iPhone and are now available for Android, Symbian and Windows and are told to be converted to consoles too. Something like this is a money printing machine.

But this works only in the beginning that way. Later it will be harder. There will be more good titles and only the ones with a good advertising budget will sell that much.

History repeats

We had this with the early PC market, we had this with the early mobile market, and we had this with the flash market.

Yes, but what does it teach us? The early birds, the first ones on a new platform are always winners. So it pays off to be open for new technologies. These were always the growing markets and will always be.

angry birds is no original idea (there were many games like that before) and it's a very simple game. the only reason for its success is the marketing machinery behind it. it got done by a huge marketing company.

And still Angry Birds works very well on the iphone and is very good designed in my opinion. At least I accept its success more than the success of doodle jump .
Though, I still don´t understand the fail of iAtoms .

keyword here: "marketing"

Aye - the reason for my statement concerning jcl and Conitec.

It's not that easy to pin down though. I mean it's not like people didn't try. We had Nokia and N-Gage which failed and we for a long time had Java etc. handy games which were a niche market at best though. Then the iPhone happened to be some sort of catalyst and poof - the market growth skyrockets...

Maybe JCL wants to try to get a slice of the pie but I have to say I'm not very confident that this will be a good idea. Others have been on that sector for too long and for engines like Shiva I even have the feeling that the focus sort of has drifted in that direction (considering that 90% of their showcase is filled with mobile games and even their initial orientation towards small to medium games with e.g. their very early browser plug-in). Without wanting to repeat myself for too often I'd say 3DGS needs to specialize to a niche rather than starting to broaden their target group...

The N-Gage was too early and Java games could not compete with what people were used to play on handhelds. Also, N-Gage had a big problem: it was neither a proper gaming machine, nor a proper telephone. It feeled like a compromise, and was destined to fail.
The MIDP stuff at that time was supposed to be mutli platform, but mobiles were too different - so you had to adapt your game for 10 or more mobile phone types.
iPhone is one big thing where you know if you app runs on one, it will run on millions of iPhones, and the release time was placed very clever - when everybody was talking about Apple and iPod.

N-Gage tried to compete with handhelds, which of course had to fail.
Handhelds were superior to anything a mobile could offer game wise back at that time.


But already at times of N-Gage there was a lot of money to make with mobile games. Just two years later you either needed some contract with TV commercials to get you product sold at all, or you needed a real killer. Too late for lone wolves, as mobile game studios already had their frameworks set up and were able to release games in next to no time.

Apples Appstore centralized the place where you get all your apps, which made it easier again for indies. Before you had stuff like Jamba, and what do I know. You had compatibility problems, and endless amounts of CRAP. Mean contract stuff, pitfalls and all the like. Slower web access with mobiles.
All this reduced the impact of the mobile game market.


And you wonder why the interest on iPhone and Adnroid is even bigger now?
Easy. Platforms like PS3, X360 or PC offer huge hardware power. For the smaller studios and lone wolves it is hardly possible to keep up with visual quality of their games. It is a lot more time and money consuming than just a few years ago.
So the iPhone and Android market is perfect as place to get games sold which are less effort and less cost intensive.

The big studios?
Wherever there are indies which make their money, the big studios can do so too. With the payoff that development costs are a LOT lower compared to PS3, X360 and PC.
Once indies make no money anymore in that section because the big studios more or less blasted it, just look where indies go next...

Yeah, someone will come up now with "But what's with XXX? It sold a million time and was programmed by a single guy". Get real, those are the very exceptions and are not really representative for the common indy developers.



All this is "IMHO" and own experience I had while working on mobile games.

Once indies make no money anymore in that section because the big studios more or less blasted it, just look where indies go next...

It will always be people making games even more if they can's sell them they make it for free, for fun, for pleasure to
share big things
I remember when i prorammed on my CPC 464 with basic than assembler.
Lot of joy to see sprites you could control

PS3 and 360 have indies section where you can find very original games.
Big game company don't invest on making small games a lot.

Sometimes people flyw from big companies to make their own
successfull game with tehir own experience and ides :
TorchLight (using ogre 3D) , Torchlight 2 is coming with multiplayer also

Their are lot of japanese indie shootem up, or RPG also.
I played this week a great indie turn nased RPG on PS3;
i had fun and satisfaction ,even if i got FF13, why ???

Because teh universe, characters, monsters ,design are all original with new ideas even on a standard turn based system.
They stoen also some time bar ides form FF13

Well great original games will lot fo time come from individual people having their own ideas, with no constraints
or obligatio ot produce from Big companies.

I really like to play Two Worlds 2 on PS3, really great.
But sorry, the story is original, apprt form that
it has not originality , always magician, warrio, orcs etc ...
again same fire , water powers etc ...

This is the main problem, big companies can't take the risk of putting millions of dollars on original ideas, they don't know if it will success.

Even more little studios make great things also :
Grass Hooper : Killer 7, Okami , No More Heroes !!
I really like a lot thid studio !

Well indie or lonewolf people making games will never disappear indeed.
Even more they have all tools like Blender, 3D Coat, Sculptris, Free and affordable 3D engines ....

Or they can make 2 or 2.5D games also.

Gameloft a little company growing big and sepcialized on
Mobile 3D games :
They make succesfull clone games like some clone
of God Of War, or Halo, racing game.
Their last creation is a Zelda Clone
Zelda Clone

Is 3DGS Dying ? I don't think so. After a while i came back to
3dgs and noticed many changes. Pfew I had to start all over again.

One thing does not change and that is the lack of getting started without programming skills. Sure you have template stuff but learning from it is hard, figuring out what all means and how stuff works, all those separate scripts combining. For a noob is this very hard. ( I still am) small easy questions are rarely answered. The same for easy to use simple code snippets
However it gave me a boost to start my own book (always wanted to do that) teaching 3DGS the realspawn way. (older memebers will remember) it will include complete from scratch coding and will have video’s and text information how all works. I got help from Helgast and Slin so even i am learning all over again The main goal is to make people enjoy creating and learn in a fast but most simple way. (if i succeed you all have to await)
I still am convinced that it is the artist that makes a game cool or not. Engines are fun but graphics, models, game play decide if a game succeeds or not.

Just my 2 cents

Will be waiting for your book dude

looking forward too
and right, engine gives you a potential, but concept makes the essential part

Hah! How many times I used the Gold Library in my early steps! good old times!

I dunno whether good or bad, but we have contract with publisher now, I hate the spring release date, but that is what bossman signed on to. Going to be in Best Buy, etc. Anyway, hope we can pull off a good game with 3DGS. A little scared with the timeline, especially with multiplayer game. I don't want to be the next Jumpgate Evolution, but the publisher doesn't have any kind of investment like millions of dollars with us, so we should be good, even if a little late.

Wish us luck all.

Oh yeah, will need some beta testers here soon.

Oh, by the way, spent hours on testing everything with a RTS plus FPS game, bones, lod, skin size, dds compared to tga, poly, and your momma, I have tested all that shit out beyond belief, just fyi. I didn't just make up is 3DGS is dying. It is like, bossman ask me should we get A8, I said yes because it is advertised easier publishing, which I doubt is true, but want to believe.

Love ya,
Loco

I wish you luck, for sure!
Hope, you get a good release and good sales!
Keep us informed.

Nor did I make up that I was busting out nearly 5 million polys on-screen all bones-animated with more than 60 frames per second on my old computer. The way you wrote your original post, it looks like you just played the exact same thing in A8 and expected huge performance boosts. That's the wrong way to go about it. Features have been added that allow us to improve performance drastically.

But, hey, good luck with your game. I really do hope it goes well.

Jibb

Good luck on the book!

I remember the "Realspawn way" of teaching well. It was always good, useful, and easily implemented. For those of us that concentrated on shaders, or any other niche, it was great to have instruction and resources to try to build on a level and then be able to integrate fx's into a level.

There's been bickering about Acknexes viability ever since it came into existence. If Acknex does not seem to "cut the muster" it has always been our failing, as users. That is, in failing to take the templates and optimize them to our uses or shit-can the templates and build new. I play the hell out of Xbox360 and see the same effects, quality, and FPS in it's current generation that we had at our disposal in 2005.

Art, "eye-candy", is the thing. "Drew" was a good conveyor of that. The artist is king.
E

Hey Steempipe! I am very glad to see you again here! Much time has passed but still i remember your great water shaders before 7-8 years .

Anyway about book, this is great news and i wish good luck with this!

Wow... this is like an old-timers reunion in this thread.

I personally hope Conitec adds at least Windows 7 mobile support since I suppose it would be easier for them to port too(DirectX Based maybe?). I am using Unity with another project right now, but I don't think they support the Windows7 Mobile platform, so that's a niche.

I want to put Silas on mobile phones in one form or another after I'm done the PC version. So hopefully there is a way to port 3dgamestudio games to the mobile platforms soon!

Support for the Xbox360 would be very helpfull as well since there is the IndieArcade on there, and XboxLive arcade for big games.

A8 is a great engine, with solid parts and Lite-C beats other languages I used. It's just that the editors are shameful(WED, ect.). I really learned this after using Unity. All it needs is a new editor and art flow like Unities, and the ability to port to additional indie centric platforms and it will be just as good as what else is out there.

Honestly, I wouldn't know how to develop anything on any otehr engine. A few years back i sat down with Sebe and tried out Torque. We realized that we would have to learn this thing for years to reach a level of similar work we have now.
A few weeks ago I instlled Unity3D and tried it. And once again, I had no clue what to do. Unity may be a great tool for programmers or whatever, but for a guy like me it is pretty much useless.
I will stay with GameStudio for the time being. I developed almost all my gymes with it and I will continue that way. Be the games good or not

Haha, Slin told me once that it is vice versa

Yes A8 rocks, it's very accessible for new people coming to it.
Unbeaten AUM magazine ,lot of tutorials and docs.
Fun and pleasure to use, fast prototyping.

The big weak points like already said :
- Outdated editors, that should be rewriten to today interface (like Unity where you access to textures, models, properties etc ... dircetl from the editor)
- Will it have an integrated terrain editor one day like others 3D engines , serioulsy , it's not that hard to program , even simple coders have pprogrammed terrain editors on other 3D engines
-Where is the vegetation editor ?
- Bring the workflow more flow : you import direcly some FBX model, the world editor , converts it to MDL directl behind the scene.
- More templates ...
- Do like some other engines, bring on a panel to adjust general game options: HDR,Sun, Skybox etc ...

- Lot more real today 3D scene demo with today 3D models and shaders , something like Torque 3D ocean demo, i mean with quality assets and effects to really power up the 3DGS image.

Well good news, mobile seems to be planned for people that can wait a year or more !
And new interface seems to be planned also.



-

Just my opinion:

- Outdated editors, that should be rewriten to today interface (like Unity where you access to textures, models, properties etc ... dircetl from the editor) (Also, new wed is being made atm)

Yeah, okay, there are not only programmers around, so - accepted.

- More templates ...

You cannot make serious game with templates, seriously...

- Lot more real today 3D scene demo with today 3D models and shaders , something like Torque 3D ocean demo, i mean with quality assets and effects to really power up the 3DGS image.

Why? You already bought it, and more customers would have no effect, cause i dont think jcl would hire people..

Why? You already bought it, and more customers would have no effect, cause i dont think jcl would hire people..

No but good demo can attract more people, and it can mean JCL could think in paying some skilled programmer to do some time limited job ! Not specially hiring !

I forgot some feature request : Deffered shading would be coll and great !

Thats what I meant; He would not hire/pay anyone, just a guess though.

I don't think that jcl will hire anyone even if that will be possible from budget side. GS stucked in old A6 times (all of editors, templates, models, textures, etc), and it can't come up to date by itself. All neat things are made by users, not by jcl. But it seems that he tries to get something new and up to date f.e. HDR, new WED (hopefully it will be better then GED), OpenAL, PhysX (implementation of which I don't really like). But still, GS is outdated, if not it's easy to use and learn Lite-C, a lot of users would already leave it, and there wont be new people buying it and starting with it.

exactly my experience aswell!

I don't think 3DGS is dead!
It has some unique features, not found in other engines (for example it can manage a lot of objects very efficiently, using ABT).

I think it needs only a "lifting", something to revamp some area:

1) more flexible world builder (wed)
2) more shaders simply to be used and ready-to-go (many engines supply cartoon shaders, bump, normal map, deferred light, decent water shaders, etc...) to be used with one single instruction.
3) More affordable price (aligned with other engines).
4) better network support
5) day-night cycle
6) road/river editor
7) etc...

Take a look to the tools supplied by Torque: there are a plethora of tools ready-to-go.

Lite-C and the engine self are really amazing (I love lite-c), but I think we need more modern tools "around" the engine.

Low priority: iOS / Android / Mac (and maybe Linux).

I would love Android support, and I would love Mac support (most of my friends are not gamers, and a lot of them have Macs, but they'd really like to play KarBOOM).

To me, those are the most important improvements (Android taking the cake).

Just for fun, I'd really like DirectX11 support as well (as an option).

well of course it takes time to get familiar with Unity but it was the same for me when I switched from Blitz3d to 3dgs

Also 3dgs is not a user friendly engine , you dont realize it simply because you are used to 3dgs
The only simple engines as far as programming is concerned are the traditional engines such as Leadwerks

Efficiency is of course an other matter

Unity and 3dgs are natural multitasking engines
this is s great plus

No other engine allow to directly script an entity as simple and fast as 3DGS , this is the main winning point !
No other is so easy to pick up and learn as fast.

The bad points remains the interfaces, and editor that is slow perhaps, and the workflow where we should be able to view all assets and use it / apply them to any model in the scene like Unity.
That's the bad point it lacks better workflow and features like :
- standard shader list applyable to any model in the world editor
- Textures view and some basic standard textures slots when viewing a model in the world editor : Diffuse/Spec/normal/glow
- Terrain editor : the only last "studio" engine that don't have a descent terrain in the world editor ????

But well ... in the future perhaps

I have no doubt if it is adapted like it works now to Mobile ,
so we would use the same script system, it will be successfull also !

I suppose that sPIKe was talking about scripting not the editor
Unity editor is good no question ( also 3dgs )
Do you think that 3dgs scripting is user friendly ?
never got those bloody "empty pointer " error msg ?
that's typic of component based engines whereas data exchages among components is an issue
Go through a traditional engine , ex Leadwerks , you can see yourself how clean the code is vs Unity or 3dgs
As I said power or efficiency is another matter

You really think Lite-C is easy to pick up? I'd prefer Javascript, Lua or something like that over Lite-C any time. When it's about fast learning Lite-C suffers from both it being a sort of more complex language and being a "self-made" language with very limited learning resources...

I never dig very far in Script and used lot of pre made code !
So perhaps i'm wrong ?

3DGS should do like Unity in a next WED version : Allow custom panels easy programming.
Like that we could find all amazing custom plugin tools you can find with Unity 3D :

2D Toolkit

Visual Scripting

Rage Tools

Easy Raods Tools Video

And theres lot lot more tools ...

For someone wanting some specific task for making a game ,
Spending from 5$ to 99$ depending on complexity and aulity of the tool, if you make money that's a good investment.
And it avoid you to re invent the wheel each time : productivity.
If it existed the Sprite Tool like it exist in Unity, it is so complete i would buy it for sure.

I think A8/A9 future will depend on that for survive.
We could see lot of different tools appera like sprites, terrain etc ...

Perhaps i'm wrong ?

you are not wrong, simply we are talking about differnt topics
You insist on artworks tools, I speak of gameplay
You admit that your are mainly using templates
well try to code a rather complex gameplay
as Toast said Lite-C is not the best option, javascript or C# or LUA are much better
Aside from that a component based engines such as Unity ( and in my opinion also 3dgs) may be flexible but ease of use is not their strong point
in an other thread someone quoted a gamasutra article
The author was on components side
a member replied that for small / mid size project traditional engines are still the way to go, being more intuitive even though (maybe) less flexible and efficient
I agree with that

Any C resource is a Lite-C resource (although the occasional enum and union must be worked around). And as you get experienced in Lite-C it's really easy to pick up straight old-fashioned C, which is fast, rich, and ubiquitous.

I love GS's simplicity. I open up SED, write a few lines of code, and hit "play". I don't have to connect nodes, objects, scripts, or anything. I can write a prototype with no external resources thanks to the built-in primitives (for a simple example, the first working prototype of KarBOOM was a bunch of player-controlled cubes driving around a plane bashing into each other).

I agree with the fast prototyping !
But i rather would prototype using models.

And that's because you don't use an animated character or a space ship or anything wher you don't have to manage the animations.
Caus when characters are used in the game, you must have the animated characters at some moment to test the animation code and gameplay, and mixing them is a goo bunch of code sêcially if you blend animations.

Well all that depends on the complexity of your game.
The user wantiong terrain, grass, trees in big outdoor and assign standrad shaders just by choosing them on a menu :
I think he will go more to Unity or other engines.

It's also a matter of what productivity you want, fast with ready to go tools (complete terrain editor, grass/trees painting, ready to use camera templates and character controller all that visually) : i already talked about that

--------------

One time here i made a demonstration : Ok it just used premade Unity Character and grass, trees, but i assembled a
3rd Peron game with standard commands in a big terrain, with grass, trees, multitexturing in 10 MINUTES starting from Zero!

With A8 i could'nt do it , i know programming C SCript, but it's really far from intuitive :
-Find the right multitexture shader on docs
- Find on what channel you must paint textures and thats' borring and nono accurate as in real time
- Place grass and trees by hand : no tool
- How to manage LOD performance of displayed trees and
- Camera is not visual selection : youi must dig on docs,
and change code to try another camera
- No Visual adjustable character controller, you adjust in
real time , no need to change the code each time and
relaunch to test !!!
- No good quality default assets in simple selection list :
Quality terrain textures, normal mapped character , grass,
trees ...

Well for me putting a running level in some 5 or 10 minutes is important caus i can after that concentrate on :
- working in character and ennemies gameplay
- Import and apply shaders to my 3D assets on terrain :
houses, rocks ...
- work on Gui system
etc ....

My goal is productivity, and don't loose time in task that are trivial.
Like UT3 ,if you want to make an FPS game, the basic templates and terrain/World tools are already here for you to
import your textures and 3D models/characters to make a fast test. After that you can change/add code to make new gameplay.

Well it's my personnal point of View, but Unity 3D took the right way by giving tools to game makers, simplifying their life ! Specially with all custom Plugins in the store now

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A9 should take Unity example of plugin system to really be boosted: anyone could make custom plugins for the editor coudl it be : Sprite tools, painting tools, positionning tools, terrain tools, river/road tools , any other task tools ...