What if we Kickstart A8 development.

Maybe this is only a good Idea to me. But what if we started a kickstarter to raise the money to "hire" jcl and team to dedicate full development time to work on the engine? A kickstarter could be a good way to show off the engine and bring in new blood. Also with a infusion of cash jcl would have a hard time taking the money and not turning conitec time into real time .

OK fire away (I'll duck)
Mal

An interesting idea, we would have some fierce competition though. Other hand, I think it would be hilarious seeing Gamestudio 3d on kickstarter with a not too serious campaign. Like making fun of unity etc.

But to be serious, perhaps it could focus more on a niche market. Like it being easier to learn than other engines? New editors that are super easy to use while still being fairly advanced/modern?

I don't think this is a good idea, if anything, it has to come from Conitec or with their explicit consent. Unless of course you would rather stage a takeover and just outright buy Conitec.

The biggest issue is that you need a lot of money. A lot a lot. Modernizing Gamestudio requires a heap of fulltime work for at least five or more people, it requires funding a research and design phase before that and of course you need testers. And kickstarter money is subject to taxes, so you can take a good 40% away simply for that. We are talking about a good 2 million easily, probably more.

And to what end exactly? Does the world really need Gamestudio? I suspect most people would love some backwards compatibility and not have to throw their code and knowledge away, but that would not make it a good or appealing engine. The whole legacy baggage that Gamestudio drags with it is what I assume is seriously hindering the Android version (that and underfunding, of course). There are engines out there who are modern and have excellent tooling and you would need to beat all of that. That certainly won't happen with Gamestudios legacy baggage, and there are modern game engines out there already which are given away for free.

Yes but so far on my examination of these Engines - I see a year learning curve. Nothing says "Hope" like having to learn a whole new system and spending a year to gain the skills of a amateur.

But I am sure you are correct. This is the only REAL indie/solo developer engine. The rest are so modern, you need a modern team to build with them.

All i want is a new LLVM base lite-c compiler and an opengl renderer.

Drop backwards compatibility where necessary, old projects does not need to work out of the box.

, testers are easy to find, still plenty people on the forum

, haha, not really. That's probably the biggest challenge. Though I personally really like GS3d's to the point documentation, but perhaps I am the only one in that . It also quite stable so far, but maybe that's just me again. Last I don't think I could have made some of the stuff I made in this engine, so far, in other engines (like a fully fledged map editor I am working on).

What is your favourite (game) engine actually Sid (besides Rayne ofcourse, and obviously besides GS3d )?

Plus multiplatforming support and different collusion shape for OBB (capsule at least!)

@malice - the learning curve with most modern engines actually isn't that steep. At least not for all of them. I've seen artists with no programming experience pulling of fantastic gameplay systems with Unreal 4 within a few months of learning, and Unity is even easier to grasp. It takes some time, sure, and maybe Lite-C is easy to learn and Gamestudios overall structure simpler to understand, but that is mainly because Lite-C comes from C, which is a very minimalistic language compared to C++, C# and the like (which is why there are many who prefer C over these languages, especially in the lower level departments of the professional game development world). Once you understand the basics of a more modern language like C#, which seriously takes just a few weeks to get on quite an usable level with, you can pull off pretty neat stuff with Unity for example, and learning their tool suite isn't too hard either.

The problem with Gamestudio is simply that it is a dead project, there is no active development to speak of, and the development we've seen in the past was ALWAYS behind modern standards, always behind the competitors. Now, Gamestudio simply is no competitor on the engine market. It's nothing more than a curiosity from the past, suitable for hobbyist games with no commercial intent.

And honestly, even if there was funding for a refreshed, active development, even if this development would transform Gamestudio into something that could compete on the market, what would be left of it? Only the name - and, let's be honest here, the name isn't really something to be taken seriously in competition, is it?

I do not agree on "hobby games with no commercial intent".

Point is, whichever tool you feel is the best for your project and team. What matters is the project and your teams ability/will to finish it, not the engine. *Though i do not deny that engine plays a big part on those*

case in point: http://www.zulaoyun.com/

it's mmofps made with a8. And actually has fighting chance among it's competitors in the genre.

I'd definitely donate some money just to see where it goes. Nevertheless, I'm not sure about the reaction of JCL since we once asked if we could help somehow and he replied we should keep making games. Nothing more.

Probably it would be useless. I agree with JCL, our task is to use and create great games with 3DGS, their task is to maintain it, and to develop to keep the engine profitable. It is a mutual dependence.

Unfortunately, I don't really know why 3DGS development stopped shortly after A8 came out. At that time it was a good engine, and it still has a good potential. Of course, its editors have been outdated comparing to Unity3D-3, so it was a fatal error not to finish new WED within a year after the announcement. I could have been a fine position to upgrade to latest DirectX too, and to modernize the renderer slightly, and to drop backward compatibility together with non-shader graphics (ffe) of free/extra editions.

Without new users no income comes due to the licensing system, and the competition has become really tough. JCL said licensing can change only with new engine versions. Probably they don't expect too much income.

I personally expect only minor new features and slow bug-fixes. Only community tools could help a bit, artist friendly solutions, basically editors, what you can make even in lite-c, I know at least one nice example.

But isn't there some niche GS3d could focus on? It is not a bad engine (see Quad's example for the potential), it just needs some love.

Just purely speculating, but if the kickstarter goal would be something like 200.000 euro/$. Let's say 50% goes to taxes and other costs, so you keep 100.000 which would mean that JCL could appoint about 3 fte (/3 full time workers) for 1 year on the engine. Which would be enough time to finish some major things right?

Even better, for things like editors and some plugins etc. he could let the community do the bulk of the work through some contests where winners could get some reward as cash and/or licenses. This would save him lots of time and would be interesting for some community members, I quess if the rewards is enough?

That being all said, even getting 200.000 is not easy peasy. So there needs to be a good focus on a niche group (which could still be fairly large just as long it does not compete to much with engines like unity and unreal4). In order know that we need to look at the strengths of GS3d, perhaps being able to run on older rigs? Stable? Other more experienced here with the engine are better at answering this than me.

Even I make more than 33k a year and I am not working full time...

That would be huge! The tooling you would get essentially for free from LLVM is unbelievable, and it should be possible to pull of co-routines in Clang with your own fork quite easily. If this were to happen, things would get so much more exciting for Gamestudio.


Rayne 2.0. Seriously, besides the fact that it is completely headless and without a renderer, it shapes up nicely.


But here is the thing, if you don't modernize Gamestudio and throw away the old legacy stuff, you will never make it appealing to anyone. And switching systems is easy, once you know how one thing works, you can easily switch to another.

I would love to see some good updates and new tech , but on the flip side , one of the reasons I love using the engine is it's low requirements , if there ever comes a huge change in n tech I would really love to stil be able too keep the old gs or stil be able to meet the low requirements with the new tech with optional setting's ,however I am pretty sure a huge change would mostly push up requirements.

in my opinion the strongest thing gs has going for it at this stage is the c# wrapper ,although not perfect in every refard , its the only real usable language for the engine outside of c .

now if only the rest of the engine tech would pick up and follow along .

, that's fast, a second one already . That is like the complete opposite of conitec time.

, modernizing is good thing I think, though I think it should be an upgraded Lite-c version that is similar to the newer languages (e.g. c#) but also easier to learn (sort of a middle-path between them). In a perfect world I would imagine it being something easy to learn but still similar to the other main scrips (e.g. a lite-c# or lite-c++). Besides that it would be ofcourse cool if you could also use c# or c++ right away in the script (as with visual studio you can select which language you will use) but I don't know if that's a hard thing to implement. Anyway the reason for keeping the Lite-part is that cause if GS3d would entirely use c# or c++, what's the point of using GS3d than? It needs that to keep that easy to learn stuff otherwise it will just horrible fail vs Unreal 4 and Unity 5.

, yes I agree with this. If the requirements are pushed up to much, this engine becomes more useless.