Torque 3D

Have you all seen how Torque3D is coming along.

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3D


Light Rays
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Pfv0jqk8Y&feature=channel

Wetness and Precipitation video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5qho-Qhzcg

Soft Particles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3psxXSE_4DM&feature=channel

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYoGJP5z_U4&feature=channel

Advanced Lighting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0f57J4Tjf8&feature=channel

Depth of Field
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffFEb15Z630&feature=channel

River Editor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7D0RhNm4jU

Road and Path Editor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoYQkcxkRfI&feature=related

Material Editor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbUKWyvBA0E

Web Deployment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=479SOfFUtLE

And of course , the beautiful in game editing. Could we ask for more ? Looks like GarageGames implemented EVERY feature we have kept on asking conitect to implement into gamestudio , and more. All I can say is , WOW. This is definitely then end of gamestudio for me. We now have Unity and Torque , Torque even has support for Xbox XNA with TorqueX , I don't know , but gamestudio has been left WAY WAY WAY WAY behind if you ask me , and truly there is no reason for anyone to even consider using it anymore , not with these other very affordable and MUCH MUCH MUCH better options. That is , till we see how A8 comes out , but I HIGHLY doubt it will come anywhere close to where Torque and Unity are. But we'll see , still , in my eyes , Torque and Unity are a must have for any developer out there , they are just such rich engines , one would have to be a fool not to get a copy.

[sarcasm] yes because none of this stuff has ever been done or could be done with a7. [/sarcasm]

Have a good time with your new game engine.

Some time ago their users had to pay extra for shaders and networking.
They have different prices for indie and commercial developers, so check if there is more restrictive in their EULA.

I don't think all gamestudio members will drop their gamestudio license, just because they can buy something different.

You are a registered member since 2005, I guess you learned a lot in that time and it might be easy for you to transfer your knowledge to a new engine.

But how easy is it to script the new engine after you created this nice level with all your mentioned tools and features?

Best wishes
slacer

while (%user.infiniteHorizon == false)
{
%user.currentHorizon = "static";
%user.Engine = "A7";
}

My source looks like:

if(game.match('static framework')) {
use_torque();
}
if(game.match('racing game')) {
use_torque();
}
if(game.match('shooter')) {
use_torque();
}
if(user == 'fresh meat')) {
use_torque();
}

i owned all prior versions of torque and all available books but i still have the impression it fits very well if you want to produce a game like the games torque was intended for but it is very hard to achieve anything different.

For me i realized that a lot of engines are very good on the first look but if you really dive into you experience the complexity and the limitation which you cant see on marketing movies (i owned LeadWerks, C4 and Torque).

Different engines fit to different people and needs. e.g. if you are a really clean, structured developer C4 is a great choice. If you are more a prototyping person (like me) who is more interested in immediate results than having a clean code base C4 is a really bad choice.

So it is very dangerous to recommend any engine just from the marketing videos with the conclusion other engines are now dead.

I am personally really interested in any news about other engines but only on real - personal - experience instead of conclusions where i get the feeling they are only based on marketing information.

So i strongly disagree with the conclusion and still see a market space for the conitec engine.

Here are many persons which defend A7. Thats the reason why i wrote a snippet about "Horizon".



Correct.



More than correct. Super correct.



Correct.



Correct.




Wrong. Torque is definitively not a engine for a novice.

I agree 99 % on what you are saying however it is also a matter of fact that A7 is losing ground
I am testing Unity3d and Game Core 2.0,they are miles ahead
Probably nowadays, you need a big development team

I agree 200% wiht wicht

And some simple questions before buying an engine :

have you a real solid, constant team (even if little) ?

Have you skills to make models with AAA textures with normal maps and specular maps (can you make some characters looking AAA) ?

Even if you had talent and time to make that, the engine won't bring out of the box , the AI and gameplay, camera like you want etc ...

Caus , even iff torque have some cool tools or specific shaders,if you have talent , with other engines having shaders you can make great things as beautifull

One simple example:

You want to make a FPS. OK, fine. In a FPS you need Outdoor and a lot of Indoor.
What about Portals? In Torque i can set Brushes (like the Blocks in WED) and give them the property "Portal". Thats the difference. I dont need a lot of time to let WED calculate the "Visibility". Instead i set the portals manually and it works great. Same with LOD. I can set the LODs for each models separately (Pixel Size, not a distance). The advantage is... i can activate the next LOD-Stage of unimportant models earlier.
These two features are very important for me.

But Torque has also a lot of disadvantages and is far from perfect.

@tkunze:


Advantages
- Ingame Terrain Editor
- Ingame Terrain Texture Painter
- Portals
- different LOD-Values for each model
- Ingame Lighting and Shadowing ( Lightmaps )
- a very good ModelViewer (ShowToolPro)
- a good ScriptEditor (separate product)
- Multiplayer ( blessing )
- TorqueScript ( complete object oriented )

Disadvantages
- Mounting
- Prototyping ( it is the hell to create a new project )
- bad Documentation ( looks like Dresden '45 )
- SourceCode of the Engine ( a little bit confusing )
- animated collision meshes are not detected
- entity movement
- handling of the camera

This is my assessment after two years with Torque (only TGE).

You have to buy this tool as a separate product...

Wrong: ShowToolPro ist part of TGE 1.5.2

You can still buy it for $ 34.95 from their shop...
So it depends on the version you bought.

I bought TGE 1.4.2 around December 2004 and the ShowTool Pro 3 years later.

Yes, this is true. You will get ShowToolPro with TGE 1.5.x. (but not with TGE 1.4.x). The same with Torque Lighting Kit (TLK).

Indy game develpment is all about usability and a stable engine. And its a matter of fact that gamestudio is loosing lots of ground at the first point.
Not having a wysiwyg editor, realtime shadows and proper file management/exporters todays is a big big big minus point for any engine.
Throughout the last 1 to 2 years all other engines developed and closed their weakpoints more and more, GS on the other hand didnt. And as much as i like the engine if they dont get the grip in the next 6-9 months it will be dead meat.

Everytime i talk with other developers i hear "yes, if you want to prototype somtheing pick gamestudio. Once you see it works pick the engine you want to create this concept with".
and prototyping engines will die sooner or later, since other engines are closing this gap as well too.

I dont know if gs is selling lately any good. But it doubt it. Since i am here i havent seen one single smart marketing move from their side. this website still looks like crap, new features are in now way presented or transported to the users and possible new customers and and and.
Hell the reason i get to know about the new A7 was reading a small post in this forum!!!!!! nowhere nothing else!
you couldnt even sell drugs, sex or eternal life the way conitec doest this engine.


maybe 7 editions of a software are enough?!

cheers

Well, in fact A8 would need a remake total fo some fundations :
Like a totally new World editor with totally new graphics ,lot faster, cutomizable interface , and all tools integradted like terrain editor etc ...

For example all MED functionnalities should be integrated in WED directly.
And panels for managing physics like in Gamecore or Unity should be here in 2009 ?
Well A8 would need an improvment on workflow an world editor !

You could read such postings years ago, too.
Lots of users wanted to switch to torque, they talked about stencil shadows, cool editors, etc.

There was a big hype when gamecreators announced FPSCreator. Lots of videos about editing levels, multiplayer, etc.

Maybe we see A10 in some years, but the competitors will always be different.
You should know this - Conitec is not the leding edge and never will be.

Some artists create great artwork with free tools, while others use a cracked Max/Maya, etc. and create trash.

The artists, developers and teams create great games.
Finding work-arounds for problems is part of the job. You think unity is a great engine without problems? Maybe there are different problems to solve, but there is nothing like a problem free zone in game development.

Once you have your tool pipeline ready, workflows are established, responsibilities are clear, all members of the team have the same vision...
... you should be able to create great games with all engines mentioned in this thread.

Well, even if you use Max, Maya or Lightwave for model creation, you will have to find work-arounds for issues with exported models in the given game engine of choice.

You will see these kinds of threads in other game communities as well, it is not a 3dgs only thing.

Sorry for this long text but I could not stop...
-- slacer

well i've worked a bit with torque, but at least, i've found it realy hard to be used, specially if you like to play with the code.
if you just wish a wyswyg editor use click'n play :P

i've purchased BlitzMax, but i think that, actually A7 give me enough for what i need,i know c# so, i've to admit that i'm in trouble with some part of the coding, but thnx god this comunity is populated by good guy, so, eaven the new torque intrigue me, i' think i'll give my trust to Conitec for more times

and sorry for my english ^^

I own all Torque engines except Torque3D, but quit using them some time back. It was bad enough that there were always 'Early Adapter' versions coming out that were never really finished before they moved on to the next great thing (how many variations of engines do they have now?), but when they trashed the EULA a couple years ago I had enough. Almost anything you want to do costs extra now, and the EULA is so ambiguous their standard line is "get in touch with us and we'll let you know how much extra it's going to cost you to publish your product". I bought commercial licenses so I wouldn't have to worry about that, then they completely changed it.

After they were bought out things changed so much the original founders eventually jumped ship and started a new company called Pushbutton Labs because things got so screwed up. The new people even decided to create a whole new community area and forums for GarageGames, and screwed that up too.

They're making the same promises for T3D they did about all the other engines, and T3D is basically a partial rewrite of TGEA with a few nifty new tools. And they're charging $1,000US for it. Forget the lower end version, it's virtually useless.

I switched to GS a couple years ago (give or take) solely because I wanted a system with a EULA that was simple and straightforward, and that I could work with. It's not just about what the engine can do, it's also about what you can do with the product you make with it when you finish it...

this video is a proof that ins't about engine but about talent and know how

Exactly...

Well, I will never dismiss Paint again, that is patience and persistance for real!

The comparison does not work because paint provides everything you need to paint per pixel. Imagine the paintbrush size was limited to a minimum of 20pixel for some technical reason and you have to use a 600/600 image frame. This makes it unnecessary harder to create the same image.

Imagine a car without a reverse gear. Would make parking a lot harder.
nothing is impossible, especially when its up to games. But would you buy the car or the paint tool with that limitations, if all other dont have them?

you pay for tools when you buy the engine today. all of them can display pixels onscreen. thats like selling a paint tool with the features "colors". this days are gone!

indy game developer face another point: manpower. we dont have huge teams or you wont find the needed specialist for a field you lack.
its a lot easier to paint the mona lisa with photoshop (layers, filters and so on). therefor you will find a loooooot more teammembers you can hire or you can create it yourself.

Having a spoon to dig out a hole makes it harder to survive if all other competitors have shovels or machines.

I am sorry but its not that easy. Its not all about imagination, detication and talent. those things help for sure but this is not what i am paying for when i order gamestudio. this is not what i get from conitec.
all they need to deliver are tools. tools that can compete with the market.

nobody will use paint if he can have paintshop. nobody will pay 1500dollar to get paint if he can have photoshop for that money.
and nobody will pay 800bucks for an engine that can not compete on the market.

no wsyiwyg editor, no multiplatorms, no working phsyic, no realtime shadows, no exporters/importers, no material editor, no AI, no multiplayer, no up to date lod system.......


where is the progress? A6 A7 Adifference?

cheers

That's a good argument, but the thing is that a lot of people don't have $800 to spend on PhotoShop, or $1,500 to spend on an engine. So, if they want to try to make a game they have to make do with, and learn how to work with, less expensive products.

If you go to the link below and click on the License tab, you'll see the price of the Indie version is $295, but you'll be quite limited in what you can do with the Indie version. For instance you can only use script with it, among other things. To really benefit from the engine you have to buy Commercial, which is $1,495.

But, check sections 3 and 4 of the license. You have to be very careful what you make, and what platform you make it for, or it will cost you another undisclosed amount. Your game can't be construed to be a simulator or virtual world (isn't that what a game is?), and you can't even make a starter or tutorial kit without extra charges.

If you're a team planning on putting out a AAA product, then you'd expect to pay that. But if you're a hobbyist or would like to try selling some little $5 game, that may be way out of your range. GS, and other products like it, are what those people will likely be buying.

So yes, they'll be doing their best to make the Mona Lisa with MS Paint, basically. It will take more time and effort, but if you want to dig a hole and you can't afford a backhoe, sometimes you have to make do with a spoon...

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3D

uh.... A7 has all of that... except maybe for the inclusive AI, but im not quite sure what your saying it doesnt have.

Quite agree, all you have to do is script them.
Then you can have endless terrains, ingame editors and so on...

or you could write everything in c++ and have your own engine.
i thought the basic idea of buying an engine is to make your life easier and not more complicated.

as for the points from above.
wysiwyg editor: you cant even see the ingame ammount of albedo in WED. not talking about shadows, materials, animation, lights.

physic: not talking about a few crates falling down. if you have ever tried to use a cylinder for example, gs will make you kill yourself. turning ph objects on and off is a mayham and trying more then a few of them at a time.... not nice.

multiplayer: even managing a simple 32p game is hell. mmo is impossible. though you can cancel this point. multiplayer is a pain in any engine and i dont want to be too picky here.

having poping up lod stages nowadays might be ok for you but i doubt its anyway near state of art. lod in general is done very poor. you are not flexible enough here. but at least gs has lod.

...

gs has shaders for example. but using them on borad scale like needed today is still not working.
gs has shadows for example. but using them ingame for more then 2 models is impossible.
having a whole level shaded correctly cant be done by gs in realtime.

i am talking about issues people complain since a5 and those are still not fixed or anywhere near ok.

wanna know what the only big fix was since a5 that work at least a bit: collision detection.


compared to all the new engines gs is loosing ground very fast. every engine has issues. no need to talk about that.
but none of the others is changing thaaaaaaaaaaat slow like gs does.

who the hell needs bsp today?!

you can pick any change and addon list from 2007 here and i am sure not more then 20% of the suggestions made in it where realized till today.

talking about pr and marketing.
having a upcoming feature list that can be compared with nostradamus novel doesnt sound like a good marketing plan to me.
without the "magazine" we wouldnt even know about changes.


i know that all this ranting aint new nor does it help since conitec will probably ignore everything like this, but if you are honest no other engine copareable with gs hast changed that less in the last 3 years.

sure is gs stable and working. no new features no new problems.

as far as i am concerned torque beats gs with every new update a lot more. and torque aint even the best indy engine out there!

have a nice cheese

quote]or you could write everything in c++ and have your own engine.
i thought the basic idea of buying an engine is to make your life easier and not more complicated..[/quote]



Thats why WED isnt considered a7's wysiwyg editor, GED is.



Works fine for me and many others


not great in many engines (most actually) but there are several adequate solutions to this third party wise.


If you have decent lod it's not an issue in the least and shouldnt even be visible in difference


What exactly are your talking about? shadow mapping is done exactly the same in this engine as it is in any, using shaders and its not that complicated, Being not even closed to a shader guru, i was able to make (albiet, not great) ssao:

(looked much better by the time i was done with it) , and I was able to modify the shader workshop to make this
:

not to mention, if its not possible then how exactly do you explain shade-c or slins dynamic shadowmapping solutions?

Bottom line you get more bang for you buck with a7 imho. you can do anything the Torque 3D, Unity, etc. can do for $200 as opposed to the $1500 you need for both those engines to still have those features. So yeah, if I had 1.5k to throw around, I'd probably get Unity3D so that I can have many plug and play push 1 button to create features, but until I am rolling in the dough, I'll stick with A7

In fact some of us , don't want to spend code in things done , done and redone !

For example, there has been lot of terrain tools made in lot of 3D engines : Blitz3D, Ogre3D etc ... there is not secret about how to create quickly a terrain editor !
Terrain editor should be included in any 3D engine

Why A7 don't have that directly in WED ?

It is so much work when you make 3D characters :
- Hig poly model with all details (hours and hours)
- low poly model
- normal map
- lot of time getting rids of normal map sometimes
- texturing good
- specular map
- rigging
- lot of time tweaking animations
- make objects or clothes for the character

Well is just a tiny part of a RPG game for example.
You have all other things :
NPC,Buildings, outdoor plants, trees etc ... etc ...


I don't think you wan't to spend time writing tools or functionnalities if you have alreday experimented how much time is needed to make serious 3D art.


Example :
Why do you think Square Enix have baught Unreal 3 engine for their titles ?
It's a prooven ready to go engine , with all tools you need, already Next Gen (Unreal Tournament games are only advertisements games for the engine to sell it to companies).

In fact there is lot of people that LIKE TO CODE here
At this people i would like to say :
Forget coding for some time and try to make all 3D art complete next gen and perhasp you'll understand ?

It does not have all the tools you need an that list of stuff that you said you want a7 to do has nothing to do with an engine. creating art isnt the engines job, why do you think if you look at professional artists for level design/ charcter design on youtube, etc. they are always using 3ds max and maya. Art is not the job of the the engine.

EDIT: gah!!!!! wrong post, haha

@lostclimate :
I never said i wanted A7 to do that list
Read better : I said it's the job of the 3D artist and its LOT LOT LOT OF TIME CONSUMMING !
That's why we don't need to code a terrain editor or a shader !

Square ENix have choosen Unreal 3 to gain lot of time caus they have with it :
-Terrain editor
-Shaders
-Physic editor
-wysiwyg Editor
That way , square Enox need less less more programmers caus they have the engine and the tools in int like the complete terrain editor.


FOr Unity try it's physics !

Without tutorial :
I drop physics features from a list on some cubes and i could change mass or check some flags on the physic properties panel of the objects.
It worked as a breezze : THIS IS WORKFLOW

No coding. When you make more sophisticated things and event you'll need to code, but you put basic physics,constraints etc ... quickly and visually : you gain lot more time.

For shaders, i seen the code , but im' interested at 0% to invest time in writing or coding them.
Unity just propose a list of shaders in object properties: you choose one and here you go

i am talking about realtime shadows for entire games. not advanced predfined blendmaps.
ever tried to apply those shader on entire projects and not only test models and small scenes. this is a whole different story.


and pricing aint a big argument since there are cheaper engines available as well.
the point is not if 800 or 1000bucks are a lot. the point is: do i get enough for my money. are the tools worth 800bucks?
sure, if you have the time to write every single tiny shitcodepiece your own and money aint the issue, then you can also get any crap engine you want.
if on the other hand you are mortal and time has some value for you i would have to make decisions.

if i pay a modeler by hours and provide him with crap tools, then i cant complain about the high price.

i am not talking about hobby gamemaking or some testing most people do with gs. i am talking about releasing games that are worth to be bought.
and as a matter of fact the list of released gs games aint that good compared to the other engines. so the price cant be that much of a reason.
there is still no meassureable improvement within gs compared to all the other engines. and this also has nothing to do with one click button trashtalk argument.
this is called workflow and if every single change you wanna make takes endless setups, preparations and lots of time it simply harms the workflow.

you can create everything with gs. but you can create everything with every engine on this planet as well. so this is not what we are talking about.

the question is: is gs worht the money?

and i say no. and with every updateless month even less.
compare it to other engines to see what you get there and decide if its worth it.
i am not a big torque fan to be honest for a lot of reasons.
but i am losing more and more reasons to like gs.

i liked this engine 2 years ago quite a bit. but its the same engine like 2 years ago! and thats just sad.

no wonder the community is dead. at least compared to what it was just a few years back. being ofline for just one week back then ment thousands of new posts, projects, ideas, contributions and so on.
now its less then hundred.

this are things that shouldnt be ignored.

cheos

I was talking about realtime shadows two, and I was using those shaders on entire projects.

as far as $800 Im not sure how many smart people buy the pro version when the comm. version is almost just as good and can compete with engines like torque3d and Unity3d (engine wise, editors are better 3rd party in my opinion anyways)

@JustOneOldMan:



Wrong. They changed the license. So now you can make and distribute also other types of realtime applications.

But you are not allowed to distribute their editors ( without to pay a extra fee ). Alternatively you can write and distribute your own editors. This is allowed.

Actually Gamestudio's collision detection is a bit weak too. Like the physics engine it uses ODE/OPCODE, it is limited to ellipsoids (support for other convex shapes would be nice) and it is very hard to achieve a character controller which doesn't suffer from gliding jerks and getting stuck problems. In most other engines I know a good character controller is much easier to achieve. There also is bad design like c_trace() using the mesh of the first animation frame for collision detection which can lead to a lot of problems.

Yeah, the community doesn't seem to be that active anymore. And not only that, jcl also doesn't seem to find new employees to fill the positions of the people who left. Or did he? Having George and the son of the WED author working on some stuff part time doesn't seem to be a real replacement.

Doesn't look too good to me. Which is a pity because I really like(d) Gamestudio.

PS: I still would pick Gamestudio over Torque without thinking twice. GarageGames' business practices are despicable. Their products never have lived up to their big mouthed marketing so far.

The real Gamestudio alternative for people who want an engine with easy scripting is Unity.

@Losticmate : don't be too fan boy for 3DGS

Try Unity, see how easy you put shaders, physics, try the World editor, put and pait/deform a terrain, look at object properties.
And how great is the interface : you drop a physic feature and you see the panel physics on teh object properties.
You can attach a camera to an object visually etc ...


And for game making : casual games or others , go to their site, to see that they're very good ones.Even more Iphone version of Unity sells lot fo games and artists using it , said , they've never could do it without Unity
I can prototype some capsule FPS with physics, smooth camera
in some minutes.


Try it (follow some simple tutorials)
Im' not fan boy for Unity 3D ; i like A7 and Blitz3D and some.

And Unity it's not also the best 3D engine, but it totally different in terms of Workflow and it shows A8 would need a
lot of rework and totally new Wordl Editor (All in One).

I target Casual/arcade games and i don't want to waste lot of time in code other than necessary game logic.
I don't need all latest shaders or shadows, but some basic like water, normal map, toon, specular, reflective ...
And i want an all in one editor, powerfull and advanced that make me gain lot of time.
Unity Indie brings me that

My impression about A7 where tools like GED are made by users, it's like a software in maintainance to survive some time before disappearing.
I hope not,but it needs a totally rewrites of WED : a new editor all in one with modern interface , smoother , faster and All in one in the world edior (enought of MED or GED).

Go Conitec, break the editor, supress BSP,MED,GED , and bring a new shining Wordl Editor with new interface

Just my personnal thaughts.

"And Unity it's not also the best 3D engine, but it totally different in terms of Workflow..."

And that´s nice.
Imagine every engine relies on the same basics - this would be pure horror to me.
Mostly I do it the other way around: Prototyping in Unity, production in A7.
Why?
Because I have access to some low level functions, that are as much as important as "AAA+" grafics and workflow.

As example: When you want to make a simple breakout clone in Unity, the community advise you
to use physics.
Wtf? This leads to a lot of overhead in the final product, just for a bouncing ball...
Not very staightforward if you ask me.

Same goes for some rather basic challenges. Insteat of giving the direct access, a lot of engines are using nested objects.
They take a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Some time ago, a lot of users were crying about the fact that you can use realtime reflections only in A6 Pro. Now they are a commercial feature. And nothing has changed.

In fact I like Jcl´s approach not to jump on every bandwagon.

Bsp is another example. For one of my current projects, I can´t think of a better scene management.

It´s like saying: No one needs a PC, just because there are some Mac users.

I don´t want to defend any engine - just consider different requirements.
A lot of developers don´t use engines like T3D, GS or Unity - insteat of that they are writing
their own. And guess what: Often this is the best solution for them.

My conclusion:
!Each Master to his own technique!

i agree
i think i've lost about 2weeks on the camera / movement coding, and actually i've nothing on my hand. (i mean i'm still learning )
but it's also true that i wanna know what the code doing when i press a key :P
so i prefear to code it by my self.

i've purchased bitzmax too
i like it 'cause it's easy to code, but the engine is.. frustrating, so i think for the eye and programming satisfaction, A7 is the right choise.

i didn't know Unity 3D...

Torque is a pile of crap...

www.abyssalengine.com
this is a real solid engine... and so is Unity.. but most people are too stupid to know how to use professional engines.

Oh I'm not, as said before, if i had the money I'd get unity3d pro instantly. Granted I'd still use a7 for some projects, my thing is everyone acts like a7 is a horrible engine when in reality they just don't know how to push it to it's limits correctly, and are looking for a "click here to add shadows" button. seeing as how you can do everything with com that you can do with unity pro or torque 3d, at `1/8th of the price it is a pretty damn nice deal.

Use the engine that can do what you want to do with it for the budget you have.

@Arkonsail :
The engine looks pretty basic and the price are really hight :
450$ for the first price
I target causual/arcade market, i'm not sure to sell and win money, so 450 $ is too high.

If i had no choice , i would start learning programming and using Ogre3D !

@fogMan :
!Each Master to his own technique! Indeed

But users paying each update of an engine , want to pay real
improvments over the time also !

A7 is a good engine, not the top workflow, not the best physics, or collision system (we would need precise collision ray detction on animated characters not approximative),
some problems, but A7 still can produce good things when users put hard work in it.

Hope a lot A8 to make really new and shine

If you click on the link I posted earlier, or just go to GarageGames and the Torque 3D page, then click on the license tab, you'll see that stated.

Section 3, paragraph g. It's very clear. You can make them, but you can't publish them or give them away without paying extra fees...

@JustOneOldMan:

Brett Seyler ( GG Employee ) wrote this in a post.
When T3D is released they update the licence agreement.

We'll see
Perhaps like Gamecore , the price will do a big rise up

I(m waiting to see if some people can pull out really new or cool things with it.
I don't need a clone of FarCry or Crysis !

It would be nice if that happened, Wicht, but I've heard all the promises before. And found out how easy it is for them to change things whenever they want. They can say something one time, and the next minor point upgrade they can change it completely. Then, if you want the updates you're stuck with the new license.

It's not worth $1,495 for me to take a chance on being burned for the 4th time. It would be kinda dumb on my part.

But, as I said, it would be good for their community if it happened. For now, the license is what it says...

You all have to be INSANE to be defending gamestudio. Yes , some of this things are possible with it , but have you all seen how complex proper implementations of this things are in gamestudio ? Usually you'll eventually get a developer dedicated to implementing ONE of this features properly and user friendly , and it'll take over a year , and usually never fully working (Sphere? , Intense Ai?).

Now , gamestudio supports shaders , sure , but implementing them is a PAIN. Just having some normal mapping with bloom will pain your life. Usually , you have to have a developer specifically for shaders , or be a shader guru yourself , to manage the shaders. It's garbage.

Shadows , the gamestudio shadow system is putrid , it's no good , it's of amateur level, useless junk.

Gamestudio lighting system , primitive pile of garbage , but in the other hand if you implement per pixel lighting it's decent.

Ingame editor, none-existant.

Cross plattform , only in our dreams.

Web deployment , again , in our dreams.

Support for console development , only in our wildest fantasies.

Case and point , is an indie able to create a next gen game with gamestudio , NO. You would need a full dedicated team working on all aspects of the engine to realize that , but if you manage to get funding for such , why in their right mind would buy gamestudio ? Obviously you'd buy a real commercial engine. Gamestudio is an INDIE engine , with it's professional edition costing $800. It's actually a very nice engine , but in this last 2 years MUCH BETTER engines have come up , and Unity 2.5 , and Torque3D are FAR FAR FAR superior to gamestudio , and both engines have console development versions , gamestudio has NOTHING on this engines , and if gamestudio doesn't step up it's game , I can't see it lasting another couple of years.

I used to think learning torque was too much of a pain , but now , it's the opposite , because learning torque will open the doors to being able to develop for pc , mac , xbox360 , wii , and even Iphone , I would have to be a mentally challenged person to think learning lite-C is a better investment of my time.

c

Bull, it takes about 5 minutes to set that up.



No, you just don't know how to make dynamic shadow mapping, blame yourself not the engine, and maybe study shaders a little instead of expecting a one button, 1 style fits all setup.



That line is hilarious......... wow, so you dont need a full dedicated team to make a next gen game with torque. Actually I can do it myself, in my basement. They have this button in the file menu it says "Create next Gen game" and then it has a few radio buttons to select the console your publishing to


Why is everyone comparing the pro version to these. pro doenst really add shit. It adds bsp, file packing, extra mp which is better 3rd party anyways, and a 6 month support ticket, if your comparing anything it should be comm to these engines with the addition of the mp plugin of your choosing. not to mention torque 3d will be almost twice the price of A7 pro and almost 8x as much as A7 comm.

Bottom line, again, use what suits your project best with the budget you have.

@JustOneOldMan:

Yes, you are right. GG can change their licence with every update.
But who cares? Do you fear? I would do what i want.

GG can be glad when good games are made with torque.
I have only TGE... so i have this restriction. But i dont care about.

Really? Is it possible for a beginner? Just keep in mind that we are talking about a studio. A software with all tools included, not a Lite-C software construction kit.

And keep in mind that we are talking about games. I mean: try to setup these shaders plus shadow mapping for a real game if you want to compare with other engines. Try to apply shadows to a complete outdoor scene, not a house and 2 trees (e.g. multi resolution shadow mapping).

This is what they are talking about and there is a lot of truth in the postings above (available platforms, ease of use, real-time editing, production-ready software).

But you are right if you mention the price. T3D and Unity are just more expensive. So Gamestudio keeps the best solution for kids and students. And I think this is easy to see in the forum as well. This is not a bad thing.

So you just have to distinguish if you are talking about learning 3d programming with very low budget or if you really are making something for sale with lots of platforms and efficient time usage in mind.

Gamestudio will not die because of the price advantage. But finished indie games will be published in greater amount with the use of Unity and T3D. And there is no doubt that there will be finished games made with Gamestudio as well. But it will be a smaller amount and they will be Windows only.

very well put.

but,
although those features arent beginner functions (of course shaders arent hard to set up after already made) but that doesnt negate the possibility and soon shadows wont be much of an issue either with chrisB's dll, shade-c, and the iridium engine.

But you are right if you mention the price. T3D and Unity are just more expensive.
Not that much more expensive

Unity Indie $199.00

Unity Pro $1499.00

Even though the Pro version is much more expensive , the indie version is still very complete , and still includes web deployment and shaders.

what it mainly doesn't have is render to texture, post processing, video playback and realtime shadows. So , in that sense , the pro version is indeed the one you'd want for a full fledged game , but for $199 you can use the indie version until you gather up enough money for the pro. And , $1500 for such an engine is actually a steal. I mean , in the real world , what can you buy for $1500 ? A medium sized television ? A lower end PC ? Some rims ?

Torque 3d $1,000 per Developer

That's too expensive ? And for the people against their licensing. You have to make over $250k annually with your game. So , if you bought the $1000 dollar version , and you make a kick ass game that makes over $250,000 that year , then you contact them about their commercial license , which is only $3000. So , $250,000 - $3,000 = $247,000 , not that big a deal if you ask me. Specially considering you'll have to fork over around half of your entire profits to the government in taxes , LOL.

GameStudio is becoming obsolete , and that's a fact , until we see A8 , as A7 was a MASSIVE GIGANTIC disappointment.

From the viewpoint of a professional programmer, which I am as I earn my money with programming, Gamestudios main advantage is the engine API and lite-C script. I have found in no other engine this possibility to write some little 3D app that almost instantly works, in a couple of minutes. Especially with A7. A7 was a big step from A6. Also shader programming is very powerful, much faster than with any other engine that I tried, because of the shader building blocks that you have and the fact you instantly see the effect of your code on the screen while you type.

For quick solutions that do not require lenghty level design Gamestudio is unmatched IMHO. Another advantage is that the engine improves permanently, updates are more often than with most other engines, a couple of times I found that I requested a feature and it was there two weeks later.

As a professional programmer you have to deliver solutions fast, time is money, thats why Gamestudio is my favorite tool for 3D apps until another engine comes out that offers the same fast and easy programming, but I have not seen any yet. When you compare it with vehicles, Gamestudio is a fast motorcycle and Torque3D is a heavy bus. Sometimes you need the motorcycle and sometimes the bus but when I had to choose only one I would take the motorcycle.

That said, there is one big disadvantage of gamestudio and that is that its not a studio. The name is misleading. Its not good for click-together kids and not good for only-artists. The editors are merely converters and the templates are not good. In fact the templates are awful. You can not really do something useful without some programming. This is a big marketing fault and I think its the main reason of complains of disgruntled kids in threads like this. They have no clue and just bought the wrong product. Gamestudio is ok for kids when they have some understanding of 3D engines and are willing to enter programming. If Gamestudio wants to become much more popular they should not put more features into the engine, but at first make better templates for many sorts of games.

Just my 2c.

I agree to both of you. So in the end GS (actually Lite-C) is a good multimedia-programming language. You can learn a lot on different levels (from easy coding up to shader coding). This can be good for prototyping as well.

But all this becomes another story if you want to finish something. Engines like C4 don't let you program shaders for good reasons. C4 delivers a graphical shader editor with nodes. The reason is simple: If you use this tool then all shaders are cross-platform and work with shadows, all lights, fog, post-processing and whatever feature else appears. Hand made shaders in a language like HLSL easily explode in their variations and numbers to support all this. And this is not a task for a game developer, it is a task for a specialist.

This is only one example and the same counts for the tools, real-time editing, shading, physics and scene-management.
It is a great relief to have such tools at your side.

I also agree that it might be easier to start with Lite-C than with C++. But in the end you lose time when you have to write shaders and when you write a lot of procedural code without classes, without inheritance. If you reach a certain point of complexity then the final game code becomes difficult to read in a C language. That is the reason why they invented the object oriented approach and why every modern language uses it.

So what is left is a nice multimedia language in C-syntax with a few old-school tools. Not bad for this low price. And even better for free (the free Lite-C edition). It will help many people to learn and to jump later to some other tools, to switch later to advanced programming languages and to get into 3d applications. It is a nice transition stage and you can finish some small games.

But to come back to the original topic: T3D is clearly directed to the professional developers. They try a lot to optimize the engine. They include ready working shaders, shadows, post-processing, scene-management and other needed functionality. And - this is very important - they make games themselves with this technology. They find the weak spots early and can do something to improve this.

The same counts for Unity.

I think you did not fully understand the thing with the shaders. One of the advantages of gamestudio shader method is that they dont explode in variations. You use shader functions like light sampling or ambient calculation from a library, and when something is changed with overall lighting, the functions change but your shader does not change. The same shader works for models or level blocks with or without lightmaps and so on. So you only have one shader for one effect. When I write something like lets say a surface wobbling effect, I knowthat the shader works everywhere and with dynamic light or sun light as well, I do not need to write 10 shader variants. The shader is very short because it mostly only contains my code, the rest is from the library. This is much better than a graphical shader editor that does not allow you to write own shader effects.

http://aras-p.info/blog/

@WhyDoIDie:
I agree in lot of points and Frank_G Have well resumed the situation.

In fact there are some people that want to work only on 3D art and game logic.
And that don't want to learn or spend time learning/writing standard today shaders, and that don't want to spend time coding other things than game logic.

@losticmate :
And shaders, sorry , it's no simple math operation like + or - , and you must know about lightening etc ...
And 3D artists don't matter about Math Lightening , we just want the shaders.
It's like buying Windows and having an incomplete Explorer where you would need to program things like search function
Programmers like that, users not !




3D artists know how long a game can be long to do, and if you add coding lot more things , the game will never be out
We don't want to spend time on writing standard terrain tools or physics.

3DGS is good for people that like programming a lot
Each Beta of 3DG brings lot more programming things, why not bringing panels and visual settings instead ?
Lot of coders like that , 3D artists don't mind !

And a big point, we can't compare the Unity team that have some bunch of people compared to 3DGS.

There is enought lot lot of time to create models, animations, textures ,effects , game logic, or good camera.
So we want today tools , and ready to apply shaders, to GAIN LOT OF TIME and CONCENTRATE on making games NOT CODING

It's a 3D artists point of view (even if i'm a bad artists)

No, it does not. I see this often in these forums. People have problems to get shaders to work in several situations. They have to exchange uv-coord-sets and other shader code to let it work on models or on blocks.
So you might be right in a few areas.
Yes there are some functions to offer world pos matrix or lighting information. This is the same for every engine. It works exactly the same in Ogre 3d.
But it is not at all complete in 3DGS and it is not thought till to the end.
Even coders often get headaches here. Very skilled people like Fogman search for help in this area.
So it will be impossible for beginners and artists.

That is what we are talking about.

Don't you get tired of all the Torque/Unity/etc vs 3dgs threads? You always have the same arguments.

Currently i'm only a hobbyist programmer. I like to code shaders and other complex stuff and i really like Gamestudio. Its simple but has many usefull functions (yeah really), though its closed source but it is still easily extensible.
What in my opinion 3dgs really need is better template models and good looking template levels you can use in your game. Man i really don't have the skills or time to do all the crazy artist stuff, so i think conitec should provide a package with nextgen models/textures/levels.
What i want is a simple editor (simple clicking some nodes together) to build a good looking house, a street or a complete city. It needs a simple editor for building trees, humans, cars and whatever. Seriously!

Fight all you want, but i prefer the graphical building of games rather than coding because coding is boring and tedious.....Now give me drag and drop anyday and there my friends you will have a friend for life.

It's not the difference in game revenue for the licenses that's the problem. That's understandable. But most of the devs over there that actually produce games will tell you (look through the forums) that the Indie version of T3D is pretty much useless for creating a decent game. It's primary intent is for use by the content people on a team to test the pipeline while the coders use the Commercial version for the actual game creation.

Sure, you could make a simple game with the Indie version, but it's not really meant for that. And it's not just me saying that, as I said, check what all the actual game making Torque devs are saying over there. Then there are non-disclosed additional fees for making a sim, or virtual world, or porting to console or iPhone, or almost anything else.

For the people saying "Who cares about $1500 and possibly much more in non-disclosed amounts if you want to make a game?", I think you're in the wrong discussion because apparently you have so much money to spend on game engines you shouldn't even be arguing for or against GS. That's like saying "Why would anyone want to buy a moped when they could buy a Volvo?".

People are buying a $200 (or $49) engine because generally that's what they can afford to spend on an engine. Or that's what they figure their hobby is worth. Sure there are people who spend thousands on their hobby, but there are also people who can't. If you can't afford to throw a couple thousand dollars at your hobby then arguing for or against it is simply a moot point. There simply won't be a lot of hobbyists buying T3D.

Discussion about which engine is better or which one does more stuff is good, but most people are using the cheaper versions of GS because that's what they can afford for their hobby. If I'm wrong, then that means I'm in the wrong discussion here, because apparently everyone pushing the bigger money engines in this discussion are commercial game devs with commercial products already on the shelf. If that's the case, I apologize for jumping in here...

You want some facts?

1.) This is yet another Torque vs. 3DGS thread
2.) The usual suspects are posting here as much as in no other thread
3.) The impression remains that some people seem to scan this forum for any unity/C4/torque vs 3dgs stuff only and ignore most of the other parts.
4.) This is just too funny as everything always goes exactly the same way every time such a thread pops up out of nowhere...

Yep that's right, T3D is more for a real team having real project to do, not hobbist (even if some buy it).

@ChrisB:
Man i really don't have the skills or time to do all the crazy artist stuff, so i think conitec should provide a package with nextgen models/textures/levels.

Well here is the point : So you can undestand how MUCH LOT OF WORK from 3D ARTIST is needed
And i htink you can understand 3D artists ,are okay to do game logic, some camera , collision code but that's all ,not more.
3D artist don't want to spend HOURS, MONTHS palying with code !

Thre is enought time so spend on creating the models, textures, animations , tweaking lightening, effects etc ...
Even the better 3D engine with all ready to go shaders
without some real 3D artist you can't produce anything good.

For people that like programming shaders and tools here :
SHOW US THE BEST Next Gen MODEL with Normal and specular map
(it's standard today) you've made
Make us Laught a lot

just making a few points:

i absolutely adore programming with gs, its rather easy but everytime i read the updates thread, all i see is, NEW programming features...

why is it that we have to wait on USERS for giving us basic stuff such as a particle editor, GOOD sound engine, useable shaders and models for goodness sake... WHAT IS THIS? THE YEAR 1998?? i've seen better models in n64 games than these dumb a$$ C-babe model...

i love the engine but come on, i played n64 games and got pissed at gs because i saw a feature that gs lacks... the engine needs an overhaul, NO, NOT MORE PROGRAMMING syntaxes, useable tools... oh, lemme list some:

---particle editor, dont bother telling me abt ex particles... am talkin about sytems that should be INSIDE the box

---stable physics engine, i would have no probs with ode if it wasnt unstable

---better audio engine, do i even need to say it?

---faster renderer, yaya, i kno we can SCRIPT optimizations, but can we all, for a simple crap like lod, you have to get pro to get some ease of use

---terrain editor, MED is a joke...

all in all, why limit features to different versions, pro r comm? what? looking some cheapa$$ way to get ppl to buy pro? am sure there are other ways to get us to pay $800 without limiting features...

you know what was the first thing i learnt? and i dont care if anyone agrees or not... developers behind GS arent passionate about making games and thats the simple answer to all these probs..

yes, i AGREE, show us something next gen... i've NEVER seen a scene made with gs that looks nextgen... and maybe thats the reason behind the lack of faith

firoball coming your way firoball haha "the wildwest shootout!" yeeee ha!!!

Well, it does not work with pure developers or pure artists.
Artists are not happy with game construction kits where they only need to import their models.

Pure coders cannot create outstandig art...

Now this thread switches from engine features to personal skills, dedication, vision, team, leadership... everything beyond technology.

Lets use our energy to create something cool and maybe some additional tools which makes live easier...

Exactly...

The energy , no one has stealen yours

And that's the point some people here like a lot coding , making tools, 3D artists don't mind about coding.

These tools should be in the World editor , an All In One world Editor like Unity or Torque : that is the main difference also !

Well all that have been said , lot of people know it.
It is said to improve 3DGS to perhaps in future find it more WorkFlow/3D Artists oriented

I own Unity and i like also A7 even with it's problems and lacks from a point of view of a 3D Artist that program only game logic.
Who knows perhaps i'll succeed making something under A7 ?

I just dream of a new A8

Don't wait for future improvements! If you are not satisfy you should switch the engine.
Its stupid to think that A8 will be a super artist friendly toolset. There are so many programmers here that dont mind about the artist stuff.

Well the artist side i have it lot more in unity
But i keep A7 , caus i can even wihtout coding shaders or tools you can produce some good things.
Yep even if A7 is pehaps lot more programmer oriented.

It could evolve to Artist advantages and Workflow with more visual tools why not :
- LOD Tool in WED
- Particle Editor directly in WED
- Import models directly In WED
(and change shaders ,textures, normal maps etc ..)
- No more MED
- Visual Physic Editor ??
- Shaders variables exposed to a panel for visually tweaking
them like in Unity

this list is only some things from a lot
that i dream for A8

I dream because a simple example :
Terrain Tools could be in WED (no plugin or whatelse)

Torque have all in one editor with terrain tools from lot of years , and you don't have to be a genius to make terrain
tools.
That's the point that make us think that 3DSG team is not big enought or lack a good programmer, and that we will have to wait A8

Just seeing some 2009 improvments show A8 will be great

why does everyone keep saying that should be in WED. That is a GED feature and its really annoying to keep seeing people saying that it should be in WED, WED is strictly for legacy work/ block geometry building, all realtime editing should not be in it but in GED.

ummm.. you know that makes sense but its just another add to the workflow, so now instead of having, med,sed,wed and w/e other programs i'm suing i now have ged to that list... just what i need more clutter... i love the idea of ged, i mean we all do and i dont expect this to be implemented nor am i saying it should.... but wouldnt it be better to have a rewrite of wed where you could build the geometry then run in edit mode for example and make realtime changes.... oh well... i have no problems with the engine's editor, lol, i just want better scene management, nothing else

@Locsticmat :
Well , when you have on your desktop :
Gimp,Xnormal,Blender,Silo and 3DGS its a lot already.

Unity is All in One editor : one application, Torque Also.

why with 3DGS should we have to make a game to launch a bunch of applications ?
Switching between Med and WED is annoying a lot already.
I can't imagine switching now with WED,MED,GED ...
What it will be next ? DA ED? BORR ED ??

It's time perhaps for A7 to follow the All in One way.
Perhaps A7 fundations are too complicated for conitec team to make it All in One, or they don't have enought programmers !

@Losticmate :
I think you're lot more coder and don't spend lot of time in 3D art making. That's why for you A7 is ok !

Show us some the best 3D models you've done with specular/normal map ?

Well, yeah, but this switch to an emphasis on personal skills, teams and so on only makes sense!

The pure artists really shouldn't complain about 3dgs, it was never made with only them in mind as a target group and STILL it's probably one of the best choices around for pure artists.

I'm not joking when I say there's no engine that doesn't have a learning curve or need for actual programming if you want to make a unique and more advanced actual game, instead of minimalistic showcase projects which are effectively only rendering your models. You can use any engine for that, so why bother complaining if you don't really use the engine anyways?

Apart from that, most people regardless of engine choice, really should simply team up and take on projects together, finish them.. get rich (read: experience and results, not necessarily money) by combining their talent, not stubbornly wait until the and all be all perfect 'make me a DirectX14 game'-buttonized engine appears that will ruin the fun for everyone anyways.

Perhaps pure artists shouldn't try to make games, but paintings? Perhaps pure programmers shouldn't try to make art? Games obviously need both graphics and programming to be created, but it's really not an engine's fault that some people can't program or are lazy when it comes to setting up scenes and creating levels. Or for example when projects fail because some people can't be a good teamplayer.

It's odd how people even bother to argue about different engines so much anyways. Technical differences aside, most engines can do just about the same thing anyways, after all it's a tool to make games.

It's like people claiming one synthesizer (yeah, music industry example) is a lot better than the other, but truth is both can be used to make awesome music. The result matters! It's not an excuse for 3dgs being technically outdated, but it's not an argument to bash it, ultimately throwing it away as if it's completely useless either.

Funny thing is that I am not even really defending 3dgs now, but more so people's choice for whatever engine they decide to go or stick with.

Cheers

I dont see why 3dgs is supposed to be a programmer oriented engine while artists should go for Unity3d or other engines
I am myself more interested in programming but this is exactly one of the reason why I like Unity3d
In unity you can choose three modern programming languages : JavaScript, C# , Boo (phyton)
Not to mention the new " component " programming concept
Even though at the beginning I was skeptic , I must admit that it is better than the traditional class oriented programming style, at least for games

The 3dgs strong point is stability and the long experience in this businees but Conitec can not afford any further delay , in my opinion, unless they reduce the price down to 200-300 usd for the pro version

i'm still testing Unity3d, and actually i'm working with it by programming in c#, and i'm feeling like at home.

i hope to see a much more flexible scripting in A8, 'cause if i've to think to come back go SED after a day with c# and a context editor filled with "visual studio style" feature like, suggestions tips and contexct menu.... i'm feeeling bad to my stomach. :-\

i love A7 but, to be honest, unity looks coming from the future.
BUT..... A7 is much much more stable than Unity

Do you mean the engine or the editors?
Because, I can't believe that Unity isn't stable - I didn't play much games which are made with Unity, but I don't remember any problems with them.

yep I own Unity Indie , done some good bunch of experimentations and no problem.
Perhaps crashes comes form using C# instead of Javascript ?

For me it runs OK !

maybe ... maybe i've messed up with scripts and tuts, i'm in trial btw, so who know why, btw i've got 2 crash <_<'

/me very lucky

I also think that this is one of the main problems.

if you gave them money and lots of it i am sure they would do more. But in financial hardtimes like this crisis we are in and me living on Kapusta and JCL living on sourkrout! That goes for machine mech frank whats a programmer to do? Coca Cola is ripping my insides out, now i am pissing coke!

Man this world is seriously bent!

well true about the crisis... but think about it, if a developer behind gs was actually trying to make a game with it? dont you think it wouldve been better? because he would see is limitations... ever wonder y u never see a demo from conitec being advertised? am sure they wouldnt want to put the warehouse or venice demo on youtube or wherever and say "THIS IS WHAT OUR ENGINE CAN DO" it'd be a joke and you know it...

yes i know, users of gs have made great graphics but why not co-op with some of them since the cash isnt there?

well it comes down to this. Do you want a game with a mod-able engine or a game engine. I'd prefer an engine.

every engine needs a body to take it somewhere. Otherwise you go nowhere!

everyone says we must work, so i too need a pay check to feed my body to fuel the engine! revving the engine!!!!!

Hey baby lets ride, co-pilot excepts she says: "only if you have the money honey only then will i drive the stick!"

well am sure some users here that have released some grate addons wouldnt mind working to add them to the engine, yes, for FREE!



umm? oo k then? since when does adding better features to an engine make it a game?

as i said, am quite content with the engine am just saying that if the developers themselves were trying to make a game with it, they'd see and address the limitations we constantly yap about..

well for me I'd rather they spend time and the funding they have working on the engine, and not a game.

You did not understand what they meant. It is easier to see problems, bottlenecks, workflow issues and show stoppers or the power of the scene management, if you make a game. It does not have to be a pretty game, but it should be a complete game project.

But if you only check one feature separated then it might give a wrong picture.

But I am sure that Conitec has some kind of a playground project. Or they just test some of the projects of their customers.

GarageGames has a pile of games they are working on. And they have some affiliates working on quite ambitious projects. And they do some optimizing and testing on several hardware to support even weaker systems for T3D.

Like LordMoggy already mentioned. It is all a matter of money and team size.

THANKS YOU!!! finally some1 sees what i meant... for example, remake a scene from a current gen game.. not a big scene, they cant try to make just any game because as we know gs can handle casual titles greatly...
-torque remade a scene from gears, doesnt look as great but am sure they found their limitations by doing that... OR take some props from dexsoft and throw them into a scene with some shaders, then they'll kno the limits and what needs to be tweaked

If products evolve through use, and better products are the aim, then maybe communication between users / consumers and producers is paramount. ((Please,) Take a survey and install some adware today!!!)

Quoting darkinferno.

Yes, but it might be expected that the price of the product would go up measurably.

Quoting LordMoggy.

How much of that is choice?


Bent in favor and to the flavor of some.

i dont see why the price would go up? for what? adding free implementations such as newton? etc

for the cost of making a game. designing a game costs money.

Conitec pays people for good and usable additions. Maybe not too much, but they pay.

ahh forget it, machinery frank seems to be the only one that understood what i meant...

developing a game costs money? umm yh, i know but since when is making a decent graphical tech demo with a good game engine costly? the question isnt if gs can do it, its how long it takes to do it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZDAcyfpA1c

i wonder how much money they spent setting that up... i dont want them to build a game, just work thru setting up a decent demo like the above just so they can see problems, bottlenecks, workflow issues and show stoppers or the power of the scene management, as machinery_frank said...

garage games didnt make legions, they hired exis interactive to make it.

oh come on dude, help me out here... why'd you have to pay attention to that, just click on any torque scene or use the ones that the starter of this thread posted.. as i said, i'm content with the engine for what i want it to do... doesnt mean i cant point stuff out

Because I'm a pain in the ass :P

No, but this whole thread is useless, my only point was that this can be done with a7 and it's not nearly as difficult as anyone says. Granted one person can't do it all on there own, but if you have the budget to be making a game that needs those features then your not just one person anyways.

Point being that those engines ease comes with a cost, and I agree that they may be easier, I just tire of hearing users like why_do_i_die dog a7 as not being able to do these things (just because they aren't skilled enough to, and are apparently too lazy to research how to) and as if a7 is crap compared to them when there is a huge price difference so of course its going to be easier to do things.

Sheesh. If this much effort went into actually designing and creating an actual game (instead of arguing the merits of this game engine over that one) then imagine what could be accomplished.

EDIT: That was directed at no one in particular, btw.

I wonder why any of you guys updated to A6 or A7 in the first place, if all you need is detication and talent!

this aint about some shader or "one button miracle shit" at all. I am complaining about stoneage workflow that slows down project dramaticly. I am talking about features that cant be used in full projects. I am frustrated about 2 years without any major addon.

its a fucking joke that you cant even place some entities in your level with WED. This tool aint some editor its more of a torture instrument. Even creating BSP levels is a pain in the knee with it.
Even simple things like fast model placing or heightmap corrections are not possible.

Any project that needs more then one coder is 30% additional time needed just to combine that work.

Alternative platforms and systems are not anywhere visible. Physic system and multiplayer are made to prduce constant glitches ane error. not workin on a larger scale.

I am fine with the fact that gs is easy learning and stable. But being the only positive attribute left after 8 years is a shame!!! gs didnt gain anything but just got reduced to this two main selling points.
Ignoring the fact that some users might want to go from hobby to indy one day.
But it looks like gs aint comming with them.


for those who think arguing about tools you work every day with is useless, i cant help them. i dont like the fact that you can realize less and less projects with gs because it gets outdated and way to timeconsuming every month.

chis

no you cant, unless you remake then engine entirely, thats not the argument, certain features wouldnt have been possible with a6 or a5 that are possible with a7.

so updates make sense dont they!

cheers

they do make sense, and they have happened.

Of course updates happened. We can read them easily in the beta section. But many users already mentioned that more than 90 percent of the updates are new script commands. This is JCL's job, and no doubt, he is doing a great job. He created a nice multimedia language, easy to learn, robust and stable.

But there is no development in other areas like tools as an example. And the templates development also moves veeeerrrryyy slowly. So the name "...studio" is more and more misleading. Unity and T3D are better studios this time. Unity even delivers working templates.

I watched the same slow dev situation at GarageGames and Torque. But now they indeed improved and became a lot faster. They realized that Unity offered a serious competition and that C4 becomes more and more a full featured solution with all tools included. They learned their lesson.

I am still not a fan-boy of Torque and I will never be. But I just see what happens out there without looking through colored sunglasses.
And the example of darkinferno shows clearly, that a skilled Lite-C developer with a really impressive Gamestudio project still can have an objective and open-eyed view at the market (just like many old GS users as well).

I very much agree, in my opinions it should just be called the acknex engine. Because that's really all it should be considered.

XNA-Gamestudio is even less "Studio".

Imo it´s to extreme to predict the end of the acknex story.

When you look at some of the recent simulator games in germany,
(farmer simulator, digger simulator, garbage man simulator, busdriver simulator...)
then you´ll realize that literally every 3d engine is suited for these kind of games.
And these games sell very well.
The engine just doesn´t matter. The only thing that matters
when it comes to the deal is your personal reliability.

(This conclusion doesn´t come from me, it comes from so called "veterans" in the game scene.
e.g. producers, projectmanagers, developers)

Indie AAA games are doomed to fail, so why should every indie engine developer bother with so called "next gen" features?

If you really hit the jackpot and attract a publisher, you´ll go with gamebryo or any other engine, that fits industrial standards, just because you have the budget.
Then you don´t have to look at alternatives - you can grab a prooven AAA engine out of the pool.
However, this will happen to only 0.01% percent of us.

"Team Vienna" for example adapted the Panda engine for their upcoming MMO "7Million".
They developed a lot of inhouse tools for this engine.

We all can only guess why they don´t use a "studio" like Torque, Unity, C4, Acknex, Gamecore or another one.

Basically we shouldn´t judge others by our own standards - everyone needs different tools.

Yes the seriously arrogant mind f**ked rich!

the price goes up because mindless f**ks want it to, to make us suffer!

Why do you think i choose free when it's available....So i can buy extra Kupusta at the Military shop(sklep)

I remember a few years ago some turkey was trying to sell blender on ebay for 10$ dollars what a crazyhorse world we live in. The world is truely coming to an end when you see this type of shite!!!

Yes. Like everything else. Just to shave my arse i need money to buy the razor!!!

We are mad on hygiene here. Anything that stinks here, riots in the streets breakout!!!

Afterall we are a serious country!!!

To be very honest: There is no indie engine delivering AAA "next gen" features. All these tools have some drawbacks. Even technology like C4 with lots of modern techniques (e.g. voxel terrain, portals, shader editor) still misses some features of the big ones.
If you want to mess with AAA technology, then you can play with the editor of Unreal Tournament 3. But it still is not "next gen". It is "current gen".
Next generation will be something like sculpting a game in real-time without polygons, only pixels and textures. John Carmack has visions like this.



Yes. And I think nobody did something like that in this thread. People just compared different tools. If you want to make a small little simulator (like you mentioned) or a puzzle game or a physics game - you still have some tools to choose. And it makes sense to check them. Not the latest shader might be the reason but maybe the availability on different platforms.

I read a lot about the huge success of browser games lately. And I often read from Indies that their games sell better on Mac than on PC. And there is a huge wave of success of smaller games on iPhone now.

I have visions too, but i wont release them here for fear of theft! Oneday i will eat quality food! Rather than Kupusta!

This is why I´ve written "next gen" in quotation marks.

" If you want to make a small little simulator (like you mentioned)"

Small little is relative.
The "Landwirtschaftssimulator" (farmer simulator) for example is completely modable, over 250 mb heavy, has its own engine
( http://gdn.giants.ch/ ), a special foliage system, missions, physics, day/night cycles, a weathersystem, a lot of different vehicles and tools, a leveleditor...

This was a rather big project for an indie.
Same goes for all the other simulations.
I was very surprised about the amount of work that goes into
such projects.

@ the Lord:
"I have visions too, but i wont release them here for fear of theft!"
Are you serious about that? (I think you´re not)

And there is a huge wave of success of smaller games on iPhone now (and Itouch that is similar)

Some words about indie games :
There are some magic indie games like Breed, World of Goo,
Puzzle Quest and lot of others as good.
There are people that prefer to pay 5$ for a little,addictive and fun game than 60$ for a traditionnal violent FPS game with lot of blood

Originality comes from Indie games , not from AAA Titles that are always the same :
Always same horror games, War FPS games ... borring.

Just wanted to throw in that the term "next gen" more or less is pure marketing blurb.
Best is to stay at current gen.

i cant remember anyone here talking about "next generation" features at all.
since when are collision hulls, physics, shaders or word editors next gen?!
wer are complaining about basics here.

i agree gamestudio should be renamed. maybe to something like "almost a gamestudio".
i just doubt this would increase sales

speaking of sales:
all this indy games and simulatros mentioned can be created with gs of course. can be created with every single engine. but having to bypass every weakness of gs and having to write every single tool yourself will cut down your income dramaticly.
there is a huge difference if you need 4 months for a game or 14.

torque and other engines have realized that they need to provide tools to make game development possible today. gs hasnt yet.
all of them have weak points and drawbacks. but that doesnt make the gs problems dissapear.

having conitec creating small demos or games would open their eyes for a different part of gamedesign. jlc knows knows what he does code wise but games are not just code anymore.

chess

Only one example.



I agree that there are definately some problems - but they won´t prevent you from making a good game.

It´s always funny when people try to divide the world in black and white.

Speaking about basics - I don´t name it, but a highly praised indie engine can lock the framerate only since
a short time ago (~6 month).
Fps locking is, what I call basics - not a particle editor.




As I´ve prooven, a lot of serious developers are doing that. It´s nothing bad.
It fits their needs. They take ogre or another os-engine and get their work done.

Following your opinion, the farmer simulator can´t have much success.
However, both version (2008 & 2009) are very successful.

Yep

In fact that's to the lonewolf or team to see what indie engines exist.
See the problems, limitations, workflow and choose the more appropriate for them.
More appropriate in terms of coding (less or more), tools (less or more) , price, license etc ...

---

and what exactly should the link be for?
i strongly support intensex ai btw. its a great tool!

nobody complains about the speed of the engine nor about the fact that you should understand basic leveldesign to create levels, basic coding to create good code and basic fillinwhatyoulike.

talking about basics: locking the fps is basic for coding. games need more then code.

if all you wanna create are some simple minigames or you want to spend ages precreating tools for some bigger project, gs aint a bad choice.
and if gs develops as fast as the last 3 years it will be fun to see people struggling to realize simple sudoku games with this engine pretty soon.

either do something for this engine or let it rest in peace.
the way the last 3 years went is unacceptable and wont work anymore.

and all of you know that this is the truth!

chus

Most times next gen is used it's meant to assume current gen. The phrase has transformed into something like Band-Aid, Scotch tape, and Kleenex. Those are brand names but most people use those words to describe the general item no matter who made it (I don't blow my nose with facial tissue I blow it with some Kleenex). Same with calling current games next gen. We've used it so many times and in so many situations that they are now synonymous. We need a new classification. :P

3DGS is a studio because (in THEORY) it contains all you need to make a game...modeler, world editor, script editor, language, etc. That's splitting hairs but it is what it is regardless of quality, features, etc.

"Most times next gen is used it's meant to assume current gen"
NO
Next gen meant = Normal mapping , bloom , dynamic shadows , i.e. , shaders, which today most all engines have , and are technically , next gen , even gamestudio.

Now back to the point , the thing is , some people , like myself , have been using gamestudio since A5 , actually from later stages of A4 for me, So , I've been messing around with gamestudio for a good deal of time already. And while I've always LOVED gamestudio , and praised it above all other engines , I'm now looking at engines a bit more seriously , and am thoroughly impressed by how much Torque is maturing , and by how feature rich Unity is , while being very disappointed at gamestudio's VERY SLOW progress. Truly gamestudio is focusing more and more on the programing side , while forgetting they have always catered to the NON PROGRAMMERS. Lite C is just a pile of garbage, wdl , then c script , then lite c , what's coming for A8 , lite C ++ ? Who cares about that ? If I cared about that why would I even consider using gamestudio ?

To the people here saying features don't really matter, are you all retarded ?
Why do you think people pay close to a MILLION DOLLARS for engines like Unreal Engine 3 ? Why not hire a programmer to just program their engines from scratch ? Now how about this , why don't they themselves program them instead ? It's a retarded argument. Yes , you can create almost anything with gamestudio , but as technology advances , this other engines are jumping in and making their engines as advanced as possible while maintaining good user friendly interface.

Have you all seen the Cry engine 2 in action ? One of the things the developers are very proud of is their real time deverlopment environment , with the ability to manipulate and edit everything in game and getting a real time result. Do you think if this wasn't important , and a great tool for the art developers , they would be so proud of it ?

Tools are IMPORTANT , gamestudio IS a tool itself. It is what we are buying , a tool to create games , that handles as much of the core programming as possible, kinda like windows handles DOS for us , I'm sure you all would argue that using DOS gives you more flexibility ? LOL. Gamestudio WAS the #1 indie game engine , with wdl being one of it's biggest advantages over torque.
Now , Torque and Unity are the top 2 , and I would say gamestudio is prolly around #3 , which still isn't bad , but , I can honestly say , I still have A6 , and don't plan on ever upgrading to A7 , or A8 (unless A8 actually shows improvement , which I HIGHLY doubt), but as soon as I get enough money you can be sure I'm buying Torque 3D AND Unity.

Gamestudio = toy studio
Torque and Unity = professional game development studios

@Why_Do_I_Die:
Yes i agree a lot.
And you don't have 5 years to create a game , technology is speeding up and tools also.

Game Studio was Studio, but no more Studio.
Each Beta is lot of programming functions for coders to play with.
Lite C is for Coders, and i was very surprised to find full code in Lite-C for coders to play with and re invent the whell !
What i would do about all that code like in the old old days of the 3D :
By coding 50 lines : craete a turning 3D face : what hell will i do with that ??
i just want a good world editor and today tools.

3DGS is becoming each beta lot more programming tool.

But that's OK !
I can do some cool things with it, even if i can do lot more more easily ones in Unity ;
i can do something with A7.

That's the point also !
Lot of us are not interested in coding or palying code but make a game at good speed.
A7 is not the best for 3D artists, but can be great for coders with some 3D talent.

I'm not sure Torque 3D would not have problems with compilation
that i hear a lot or if you can program something easily other else than their FPS templates.

A7 is A7 becoming lot more coder oriented each step,
that's IT'S WAY , people ask lot more for code than panels or tools.
So it's HIS OWN WAY to evolve to a more CODING TOOL approach.

I also know A7 don't have lot of workflow features Unity have,
but i accept that, it's OK.
I like also A7 , i steer with it also.

I just hope A8 to become more like Professionnal tools like Unreal 2 (or 3) engine, Far Cry 2,Unity engine etc ... not as professionnal; but like them , with an all in one world editor (world, water,physics,terrain, complete object properties etc ...

Long life to CODERS and to A7

A8 also should do away with legacies like fixed point variables. They suck! CPUs have fast floating point units nowadys. Because of the bad precision of fixed point variables we can't just use 1 unit = 1 meter which would be much more intuitive.

i dont mind the strong coding powers of gs. you can see that jcl and co can code and that they know how to manage programming. coding was never the problem with gs and i suggest keeping it a strong point.
the issue is just that there is no development noticable in other areas at all.

i agree totaly with whats said above. in the beginning years you had to code to create simple 3d models (still have a lightwave version of that at home), but times change and so should tools.

and a lot of people think so right now about the engine. its not just the oppinion of a few nutheads.
as far as i am concerned i would love to see this engine gain its power again step by step. unlike a lot of other engines this one would be worth the hussle.

its about time that something is done. and sometimes its smarter to raise from the ashes then dragging dead horses arround the city. rethink the concept of gs. because there is nothing 6-9months of development couldnt change here dramaticly.

cheers

The issue is now and will always be about money. Conitec is a business and they are in it to generate a profit. Therefore, like any other business they have a budget and this is based on projections tied to product sales. Certainly there is a figure set aside for development of the engine and this would be mostly in the form of paying salaries for programmers to program tools and features for the engine. There is no money comming in if you are creating a product, only when you sell it do you generate an income. So by simply thinking about it everyone can see that Conitec obviously knows what they are doing because they have been around for a very long time. Have they produced a good working product? Yes. Does it compete with Unreal 3, Hero or Bigworld? No not at this time. If anyone is not please with what they have produced then you have 3 choices. Deal with it. Pay someone or write your own engine, see you in 5 to 7 years. Choose another engine, hope your pockets are deep. It all boils down to this, you get what you pay for and we are all getting a decent game engine for less than $200. Yeah sure pro is more but even then your still comming out on top. GS out.

Its funny how this very discussion always comes up every 3 months or so, and always with the same participants and the same arguments. I remember that when I started with 3DGS 7 years ago I've read exactly the same, at that time about 3DGS vs. Wildtangent or Genesis or some other long forgotten engine.

The reason of such threads is that Gamestudio is advertised as a studio for kids and beginners, but is in fact a professional tool that demands a learning curve into game programming. That is not clear to many at first and after some time, comes as a bad surprise.

I think 3DGS will continue to mostly add commands and features to the engine and language, because thats its main purpose. I'm pretty sure this will continue with A8, A9 and so on. Which is fine with me, because I like this combination of ease of use and flexibility that I dont find in any other engine. I dont care about more editing tools at all. Professionals use other editors anyway.

"Does it compete with Unreal 3, Hero or Bigworld? No not at this time"
The main problem is that it doesn't even compete with Torque or Unity , which are now the 2 indie leading game engines. If it continues down this road , nobody will even consider gamestudio anymore. Gamestudio's appeal has ALWAYS been , great and powerful engine , good scripting language , NO NEED TO BE A PROGRAMMER TO MAKE GAMES. And if you ARE a programmer , you could get the sdk and CREATE YOUR OWN DLLS DIRECTLY WITH C++. So , it was BEAUTIFUL , it was perfect , for everyone. But now , it's a pile of garbage , and is turning into a programmer's tool I guess. Who knows , but with it's same old tired interface , half implemented features , limited platforms(just windows actually), more and more programmer oriented, no realtime tools , I really can't see anyone in a year or 2 from now even considering purchasing this engine , other than people who already use it and are fond of it.

But like I said , who knows , maybe they have a trick under their sleeve with A8 , but I truly doubt it .

the only reason gs survived is because 3-4 years back the expectations for engines where what gs could offer. it was way more vital to have very basic and very stable 3d engine features as an indy.

times have changed.

hardly any decent project created with gs in the last 3 years speaks a pretty clear language. having less and less old timers in the forum adds antother point as well as the fact that innovative and inspireing new releases harldy ever surface lately.

having the same discussion every 3 months just shows that the problems dont get solved.

and maybe the only reason conitec isnt broke yet might be the fact that they do something beside engine development that brings them money.
maybe it also reduces the time they can spend on gs. it at least looks like it.

cheis

Maybe jcl just wants to milk it as long as possible with the current minimal work investment and then retire.

Like i said

3DGS becomes lot more programming tool each step.
That's it's way. that's all.
Some of us like it alot and would want it to have lot more all in one tools, but it costs money, demands a bigger team etc ...

Even in Dark Basic Pro that is a slow prgram , lot of people are mainly kids discovering 3D programming and playing with code.
Fro 3DGS it's also the same even if some pro people use it.

In fact that's to you to buy another engine or continue with A7.
You are the only person that know if A7 has enought tools
for the task you want to do; or if its is too much code oriented for making more easier and quicly a game ?

But with some work, with A7 you can do cool things
What i don't like is the old interface that is really outdated
when it appears on screen, some times ,i you would prefer to close the application right away caus it looks so old and slow !

And it's really slow.

I hope A8 would haved a totally new today interface.

So let's A7 become in the way it will be : more code oriented
for coders pleasure and game beginners pleasure !


The only thing i don't like a lot (but it's like that) :
Lot of people ask for coding features instead of panels/tools, they play with them , but dont start make a real game and just play with some code ??
It's clients, so it's like that !!

Well the thread was about Torque 3D no ??

So - what do you want Conitec to do?

Create a great new level and model editor?
This might take a long time and since they don't create games, how should they know about your art pipeline?
I guess they have not even created their own level and might not even have an idea about what you need.

Create an importer plugin for levels created with another tool?
This would not help with realtime placing of lights and adjusting light attributes, because the other editor might use another light model and it is very likely that the in-game lights would look different from what you have created in you favorite editor.

Add more level types to level_load() in order to load levels created with 3rd party tools
This would take some time, too but "it is just another filetype"... lots of work for collision, lights, etc. but faster to develop than a full featured 3D level editor.

What do you think?
Lets define a goal and the steps needed to get what we want - as community project or as request for Conitec.

We should know what we want before knocking at Conitecs door

Hey but if JCL is milking it doesnt that go along with what I said? Its a business and they are all about money. People harp about T3D and Unity but lets hold up on these engines because nobody has created a game with T3D since it isnt even released yet. Secondly no major titles or not anything I would consider to be that good has been created with Unity, with the exception of Fusion Fall. They have the tools but lets not vote either one in the hall of fame just yet. The point is people want the tools and they cost money. Conitec doesnt care that you need or want tools. I agree that if they want to compete then they need to step up greatly for next version. However, how long does it take? Will their tech be then outdated again? Hard to play catchup in this business of games and game programming. Now heres the kicker....
Im creating a prototype now for my game... Can I shock you with graphics, level design and gameplay using Gstudio? I guess we will see. Look for a demo in the near future. Things are about to get "dark" around here... (evil laugh) GS out.

We should know what we want before knocking at Conitecs door

wel some people ,especially 3D artist know what they want in A7.
but that's more a termes of money and team (A7 team is not as big as Unity or T3D team) ! And lot of young coders ask for code or functions instead of tools : that's another point.

Some tools / templates are coming, that's good
I had A6 , and sometimes asked for some tools, theyr are not here , even today !
So all people stop asking , hoping :
THINGS WILL BE DONE WHEN THEY WILL BE DONE

If you cant' wait a year for some tools , the solution is :
Just buy another engine !
But you can come back to 3DGS, caus it's evolving and perhaps for a special game or effects , A7 will give you better control of things by code !!


And for the commercial version, the price it's OK.
Even if you don't have all tools you want, it's better than programming directly in C++ like Ogre3D or TV3 all your tools and your own World editor (that can take some month or years ).

Admit it's lot better than FPS Creator for example : Buggy , very slow, very limited !!

Well long life to A7 like i said !

[edit]

The most important things I would like to see:

• ODE/OPCODE replaced with something better
• high quality shadow templates (PSSM,...) - We shouldn't be dependent on half-baked user contributions.
• scrap WED and MED (they are messed up beyond all hope) and concentrate 100% on GED - GED is a start but it only is 10% there yet.

The first two points shouldn't be very hard to do but considering Conitec's track record it probably will take 3 years.

That's why editors like the Unity one are fully scriptable.

Ill agree with that. Ive never liked med, although for legacy users that like the bsp geometry base that'd very hard to do accurately in GED, so maybe MED should stop being considered a level designer, and more of an BSP tool like quark, or hammer editors.

I agree with ratchet. Though this sounds like reaching for the stars, but indeed this is what Torque3d, C4, Unity or Leadwerks are trying to do and they succeed in some areas well.

Just a few examples: As C4 gots his node based script editor it was very much the same like the script editor from Unreal Engine (kismet). The new tools at T3D for real-time placing of roads and rivers are heavily inspired by the tools of the CryEngine. The real-time feedback and synchronisation of levels on PC and iPhone while editing the levels in Unity are woking just like the AAA engines work when you develop content for a console on a PC.

So it is not that bad to compare with the big ones and learn from them. We always should learn from the best.
Sometimes this takes some re-orientation. I had to learn C++ to get into new technologies, to understand the books about AI or other game logic, to understand Irrlicht, Ogre3D or C4. It just takes a week to understand a new syntax, nothing bad at all.

Of course this is only a strategy if you are learning, if you are beginning a new project or if you are just interested in technology.
It is an entire different story if you already work on an existing project. You don't have to care about alternatives and new tech then.

I agree - even if we should not stop to learn things it can be quite heavy if you´re in production.
But I´ve learned that I should keep a "multitasking" approach, different small projects / concepts, which are
done in Unity or A7, it depends on the project.

What I simply don´t get, is the hype about the engines.
They are just tools, nothing "revolutionary".
Of course it´s ok to get excited, but imo it´s ridiculous to say
that an engine represents the absolute truth and is the Holy Grail.
(I don´t mean you, Frank, but some people are sounding like this)

I love that there are such different approaches on the market.
Imagine everyone would drive a smart - how boring.
Insteat of that, some people are driving Porsche (Unreal), some
driving a Mercedes (Torque) and some are driving VW (A7).

Now imagine a Mercedes driver that denies VW drastically.
He even ignores that there are a lot of VW drivers that are quite happy how VW evolves.
And he claims, that VW will suffer in the long end.
Ridiculous?

Of couse I would love new Gs features in terms of workflow.
But we won´t get them if we are just unfriendly.
Guisswork about the general situation of conitec doesn´t help either.

"What I simply don´t get, is the hype about the engines.
They are just tools, nothing "revolutionary".
Of course it´s ok to get excited, but imo it´s ridiculous to say
that an engine represents the absolute truth and is the Holy Grail."

Unreal Engine 3 and CryEngine 2 cost close to

A MILLION DOLLARS

And tons of developers license them.

So , I think that should OBLITERATE your argument , as if these were just mere tools of not great importance , I doubt anyone would shell out close to a million dollars for an engine.

Yes, from your point of view this might be ridiculous but I also understand people like Blattsalat, WhyDoIDie, Broozar, Wicht, Nitro, Kiyaku and others I forgot to mention.

The problem is, that Torque is not a Mercedes. Trinigy is a Mercedes. Unity is a VW and GS is probably an old VW.

Here are some examples:
1.) The motor (engine) of this old VW is ok. It can get you where you want to go (it renders content on the screen).

2.) The controls are fine. You can steer the vehicle well (Lite-C). You have a lot of small buttons and sliders.

3.) But the windscreen is blurry and dirty. You even have no wiper. You see your way not very clearly (no real-time editor). You have to guess where to go.

4.) The brakes are working most of the time but not always (collision detection). There is no break-assistant integrated.

5.) All the automatic helper and assistants are mainly missing or are weak implementations (physics, shadows, terrain, scene-management).

6.) You even cannot drive this car into other countries (no multi-platform), while most of the other cars can do this.

In the end it comes to this picture: It is a car for kids and students who cannot afford a Mercedes or Porsche. Thus it is a beginners car. Some of these beginners passionately like it and tune it further, create their own assistants, change wheels and add some rear spoilers. It will not drive faster but they like it and have fun with it.

This is nothing bad at my mind. This is how the market works.

T3D on the other hand is VW becoming a Mercedes soon, but tries to catch up with Ferrari and Porsche. Probably they will never reach this high goal but at least they are trying.

There must be a reason why many skilled users are creating professional add-ons, tools and contents for T3D (the river and road tool is actually a customer project, many shaders are from customers and this very advanced physics-animation system called Ecstasy is from customers).

Many in this thread wrote that A7 is a programmers engine, so I would expect similar tools from skilled programmers as well. GED and IntenseX are such examples. But both dont develop faster than Torque-projects, actually they develop very slowly. So programming Lite-C is in the end not faster than programming any other language out there.

I love that there are such different approaches on the market.
Imagine everyone would drive a smart - how boring.
Insteat of that, some people are driving Porsche (Unreal), some
driving a Mercedes (Torque) and some are driving VW (A7).

I prefer to walk....and drive my own internal engine!

Now having said that girls love this type of engine all beefed up and primed for action. Put me in the game and the girls will have screaming orgasms!


But seriously when you asking for something here and i should know you dont really get. I have been here since the dawn of time. Nothing really happens except coding i new this from day one and it is still the same today. I asked for a simple book and no real good book came. The answer i got was we are busy coding! The real programmers love this kind of talk. But not the artist!

Conitec should consider both!!! But sadly in recent years this has fallen on deaf ears! The reason why others have taken over and created engines that consider the artist in us all not just coders.

DRAG AND DROP IS YOUR FRIEND EMBRACE IT!!!! OR DO YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH DOS!?

"Unreal Engine 3 and CryEngine 2 cost close to
A MILLION DOLLARS
And tons of developers license them."


Then go with Unreal - however, if you don´t have the budget, then it might be not the Holy Grail for you.
And it won´t get better, if you get louder.
The "Holy Grail" is simply the one that fits to your needs - time, quality, budget.

What Frank said - it´s all about marketing when it comes to different software solutions.

Torque 3D has become an excelent engine, and none engine is for novices unless you have money to through to the garbage. It's a great thing Torque is always inovating... while gamestudio upgrades are nothing special. Why won't gamestudio create a shadow mapping like torque... you just start the engine and the shadow is there... why won't gamestudio create a world builder....? Those kind of things call alot of people... 3d Gamestudio should give a seriously thought about that stuff and other things. In my opinion the only thing that makes this engine a great engine is the users that belong to this forum...
Regards,
Mythran

3d Gamestudio should give a seriously thought about that stuff and other things

Well don't forget Coders people or beginners that like to play with code, don't see the things as some Artists oriented people here.
Well the things are the way they are, that's useless to try to change something, A7 evolves in it's own way, and that's OK
You can make games with it.

Torque 3D is the Thread :
It's a great tool indeed, i don't think it's the wya to make arcade or casual games ?
It seems to be a big tool for FPS or 3 person shooters than little games.

I don't want to code in C++, so i don't think T3D is the way.
And i doubt you can code camera behaviour like you want in their script ?
Anyone knows if it has precise collision detection on animated models (and not a global sphere like in A7) ?
And for royalties, you always have to pay them if your title sells a lot ?

yes but thats the point. It's not perfect because it costs that much, there is no line in the sand that "this is the engine everyone needs and everything else is junk" there is a good point and a bad point to every engine, unreal being it accessiblity/cost, torque being its license and cost and up until recently, Unity's platform/cost. A7's bad point is it's easy of use, it's not a click together program like everyone expects, and yes, don't go on and on about how it "used to be focused on that" everyone gets it and has mentioned it, its not a artist tool anymore.

Shouldn't this thread be discussing toruqe and not constantly going back to A7 and other engines, comparison is one thing but this is just aruging.

I had the first A4 version and it was less artist friendly than todays version. I guess if makeing games was as easy as some people wanted it then everyone would do it and then where would we be? Sometimes you just haven to accept that you arent as good as someone else and your end results wont be as favorable. I would be bet that some real pros could take A7 and with no real ad ons could make a very good game.
This is proof that A7 is capable of really nice things. The question is are you?


Torque 3d is going to be very nice but like anything else it will come to can u do the art and can you program it? Tools make the work faster, they dont do the work itself. GS out.

@Gamesaint762 :
can u do the art and can you program it?
Yes, i agree 200% with you !!
What is the picture ? Dead Space game ?

For A7 , lot of users like coding than making a game and don't have enought modeling/texturing skills.
Even by using a simple FPS template, if you have great skills you can make a great adventure or other type game.

Perhaps the right method for A7 to push beginners or coders to work on 3D/texture tutorials instead of 3D coding would be :
1) Use the template
2) Make best looking levels
3) Make good looking ennemies
4) Make best effects/particles
5) Make some basic game logic (basic attacks etc ...),
for the game to run.
6) Last step : Modify template or use your own code for
camear/collision
7) Work only on game logic

Personnaly it's the way i use with A7.

Well let's talk T3D : easy to program by script ?
Is it's script limited ?

I asked this question on GameDev.net some time ago

I was replied by a guy who claimed to work for one of the most important software house

He said that it is not a matter of features and / or tools
Low cost game engine are not suitable to develop true AAA games
Sooner or later you come across a lot of bugs which are not so evident as long as you make simple stuff

In other words you can design a fragment of game or even a simple level which look like a top quality commercial product on your PC but designing a complete game capable of running on hundreds different platform is an other matter

It made sense to me

the picture is actually from 'lived'.... made with with A7...

I have never had any doubt that graphic quality depend 99 % on the artist and
1 % on the engine
The only added value of an engine is the workflow

Another great point of AAA engines is optimisation :

Coded optimisation, optimisation of scene displaying by the engine etc ...lot of code tricks by veteran coders sometimes
And also optimisation of what meshes are affected by nearest lights, and tools to measure that also.

Some game engine like the one of Naughty Dogs(Uncharted 2 on PS3), is an oustanding amount of optimisations on code to allow such amount of polygons/effects/shaders on screen.

A7, T3D won't display as big scenes as some AAA engines with same detailled characters having more than 5000 polys.

Well ...

Never heard of that game "Lived" ??
Is it a thread ? is it an abandonned game ?

@Rachet,

I cannot do the programming and I feel as if I can do the artwork but there is always someone better. Mostly I have found that I am more skilled at animation than anything else. GS out.

"The only added value of an engine is the workflow"
EXACTLY

That's what the whole discussion is about. Having an engine where you can just provide the art , and select per pixel lighting for it and dynamic shadows , and just compile and have it work just like it's supposed to is INVALUABLE. Having this engine gave the shaders optomized with fallbacks for older cards is even better. This is what I'm talking about , having a river editor ? FANTASTIC , having the shaders ready out of the box for the river/water = GREAT.

Because I KNOW I can do this with gamestudio , but if another engine is offering all this things out of the box , it's many many things less in my mind while creating a game.

One of the things I want to test with torque 3d is speed , as I havn't downloaded it(don't know if they have download available) , because I'm busy with a diff project.

But speed is also a concern , but the new Torque 3D toolset is AWESOME , undeniable , everything that's been asked of gamestudio for years torque has delivered , don't see how anyone could not see that ?

yes, but the price comparison makes it apples and oranges. $200 vs $1000, you may as well say that people should get unreal instead of a7 since the workflow is unreasonable. I still don't get why your trying to compare the two instead of just rating torque as it's own engine in a different bracket tool-wise and price wise.

"$200 vs $1000"
Well gamestudio Pro is also $899 , and $1000 is actually INSANELY cheap.

There's also differences between Com and Pro for gamestudio , but nowadays mainly the multiplayer numbers. Still , Torque has torque advanced for like 300, but , the way T3D is looking , it's well worth the $1000.

Again , the only thing left is the speed , see how fast it runs with all those shaders.

Same for unity.

who in there right mind would use pro aside from getting rid of the need for an intro screen and if bsp was needed.

If you want to make an indoor game then you will not come far with ABT as your scene management of choice.
Though I am not sure how well the latest BSP implementation works with shaders and lots of detailed static meshes applied.

But actually something like a good BSP system or a system with zones and portals is needed then. Torque and C4 have zones and portals. The advantage is: You can manually influence how areas will be occluded. This way you can put tons of details into a zone. Shaders and real-time shadows will be no problem even if your level is huge. Only one room and some geometry visible through a portal in view will be rendered.

Because of this I would also compare the pro edition to these alternatives.

Also let's note that for a multiplayer game you more likely would need pro as well , as the norm player count in multiplayer is usually 16.

Yes, though no one but Pro owners can effectivly use bsp, in my commercil build, if I obey the requirements for bsp then what little effect commercial has, works very well indeed.

In my house example for a tutorial series I have undertaken, my properly built bsp type map loads faster and effortlessly plays at the required 60 fps.
A similar house without the bsp build parameters on the other hand, drags as if the level is loaded with tons of shaders so auto scene management thru portals and bsp is essential for workflow purposes and for saving time writing work arounds (or trying to )

It is native to A7 so therefore, you may have chosen the wrong engine to begin with

I choose A7 because I knew no better and after trying and spending good money on torque , I am happy to say I made the right choice for me at this time
A7 cost me 400 NZ dollars, well!, what other engine provides for the same in the same price range, my answer, none!

I am not a programmer so any option where true languages are used is beyound me, but learning scripting thru A6 templates then Georges AUM series and my tutors has set me up to continue with lite_c in mixed scripting mode (A6 and A7 script types) which will lead to full light_c and finally, oop's (in my dreams )

yes but if you used native mp features... well Im not sure this even needs explainations. better to use anet gsnet or the raknet plugin made by excessus.

Just to say i have played with the new torque engine, its only beta (stage 2) but it is amazing, it has a really good editor and just some amazing features.

We are using (http://spearbang.awardspace.com/news.php) and will be commenting on it in our blogs.

Yeah , I think the main point of the post was , Torque is becoming a very professional engine , and a better option to opt for in creation a full commercial game. Same thing for unity. While I myself still like gamestudio(A6 as A7 = garbage), for my next full game project , I'm certainly going to evaluate Torque vs Unity , to see which I ultimate choose for the project.

But to make one thing clear , as much as the out of the box effects impress me , the BIGGEST advantage I see with Torque and Unity is the cross platform development option. It's been asked here for YEARS , but never been done because of licensing reasons. However , these engines now support it , which to me is the biggest plus they have , as learning this engines now gives you a much better opportunity as a developer to get your game out there to players. And that to me , is truly INVALUABLE.


Oh yeah , and for the people talking about the price , we're looking at pro versions here , of both Torque and Gamestudio , as they both have cheaper versions with less features.
So it's really more like Gamestudio $899 VS Torque $1000.

$200 is not a bigg difference to me for getting a good solid engine with a beautiful userfriendly interface and a bunch of great fully functioning out of the box fx.

Another thing to point is , I've been using gamestudio for years, and am now serious about developing a commercial title , as opposed to back then when I just thought having a game engine to play with was the most incredible thing on earth. So as a serious developer looking for a serious engine to develop commercial products with , Torque and Unity have now become my 2 top choices , with 3rd being something like Flash , and maybe after that gamestudio.

To the gamestudio defenders , I've been defending it for years , but as good and advanced as it was back then , it's progress from there to now has been SLOW and almost none other than in the programing aspect of the engine , which to MOST users I'd say is worthless. But this topics are actually good for gamestudio , as the engine developers can weigh what the users are thinking of the engine , as we are their customers and this is nothing but pure unadultered feedback concerning the newest engine edition verses the newest competitor's editions.

And again , I await A8 , as if Conitec actually delivers , I'd be very happy to purchase that new version. But we'll have to see , as only time will tell where this engine is going , I might be judging to soon.

what do you know about a7

in your opinion, and comparing the pro features of the two engines is not comparing equal things, the less advanced versions of both torque and unity are nothing featurewise where comm. gstudio is what is the closest equivilent to the pro versions of those engines.

As far as cross platform capabilities, gstudio is lacking it, but again its a situation of choose your engine for your demographic, not many indies are going to make it big selling wii games, Iphone, yes this is something that would be nice to dev for but again if your not planning on deving for iphone why would you need it. Its like saying that you should get a game design prog, or engine for building a business app, yes, it adds features, but if your not going to use them anyways (and for a lot of users, windows is all that is needed) then it doesnt matter. again, the choice is about the need of the dev.

Well how about developing a game and being able to publish it to pc , mac , and web delpoyment as well ?

"the less advanced versions of both torque and unity are nothing featurewise where comm"
They're still better engines to make smaller games with.

@Why_Do_I_Die :
and am now serious about developing a commercial title , as opposed to back then when I just thought having a game engine to play with was the most incredible thing on earth
Yep, seriously thinking on making a game and 3D art (lot lot lot) is different from just watching , coding some features or playing with the engine.

But it isn't a reason to consider A7 as bad.
It's a good engine, with it's own strenght and weak points,
some people like it a lot caus of the control on code, the BSP,
and other things ...
A7 is A7 and it's like that, it will be great for some people and bad for some other depending on personnal goals and taste (more or less coding).

I target Casual, arcade little games, so Unity commercial versions are OK.
And i want to go fast , so Unity is perfect in my case !
Example of lot of time i gain in Unity :
To have some basic meshes i want them to use Physics , by one or two click you make it : that's a lot better than typing 10 lines of code in A7.


Well it has been said too much, but i have lot of hopes in A8 ,that i hope will be totally new !

People that really want to use a different engine, wouldn't be here anymore if you ask me. I think a lot of people want A7 to be the Unreal Engine 3 but minus the price tag and plus the user or newbie-friendliness of A7's c-script and so on.

I am fairly certain some people that are complaining are using this engine with a wrong idea of what's possible and what's not.

No. They compared to Torque3d. Just look at the headline of this thread!

@Phemox :
I don't said i wanted it to be Unreal 3.
Just said A7 is a real good cheap engine (for commercial version) with it's strong points and some weak points compared to some other engines for same price.

And personnaly i would only want A7 to have an all in one editor, nothing else
You'll find some indie engines that are not Unreal3 that have an all ion one editor (Torque 3D have that from long long years).

Now i don't ask anything to A7
I know some of its weak points and workflow but i hope to do some cool indie game with it.

Let's talk Torque 3D : wasn't it the Thread subject ??
Let's stop the WAR : A7 Vs OTHER ENGINE (or make a special thread for it) !

just fucked up on entire textured wmb block while rotating it. some textures got disorted and couldnt be rendered. then one ground block wasnt lit correctly because the unseen faces i placed "none" placeholder materials to. had to get rid of it to make it work.
spent 1 hour testing and calculatind lights and textures because for every little shit i changed i had to recompile the entire map. ended up in cutting it into peaces and merging it one by one once finished. this of course leads to welding issues and some light misplacements. to top this the unexplainable snapping modes of gs added a funny little pain in the ass for every single block that needs to be moved.


the really sad thing about this ist: i could have written the exact same text 3 years ago because nothing really has changed since then.


the problem about sticking to an engine: after spending 8 years with it, knowing the tools is also a big bonus when creating something. having to change means having to start very low again to "learn" how the engine works.
this is also a value that needs to be concidered.

but the harder it gets to create games with gs the less its worth sticking to it.

grass

i also find WED unusable. i already had nightmares from it. it constantly fights the user. doing selections is a pain, fbx import is a pain, the viewport is a pain,...

if i couldn't bypass WED by exporting whole scenes directly from blender then i wouldn't have been able to complete several of my projects for clients (without taking 10 times longer and going crazy) and would have completely given up on gamestudio already.

Actually the FBX import works quite well. I also had never problems rotating imported meshes in A7 WED, the textures stay fixed, maybe you were using some old version. Aside from that you're right. As an editor itself, WED is unusable or only usable for simple levels. Same with MED, for simple models only. I dont think that this will ever change. Probably both will eventually evolve into mere converters, with GED as the only editor for editing levels.



Threads like this always also attract a good amount of trolls, who post lengthy comments about A7 but admit that they don't even have A7... It's strange how some people spend their time.

Hiya.

I 'just' (a week ago?) upgraded my TGEA to T3D for their intro price of about $505 (don't tell my wife! ). I was almost off the fence (on the not gonna' buy it side). Last day of the intro price I decided to take another look and see what they were doing with it...

Road editor, river editor, physics...I was VERY impressed! The native COLLADA as the file format of choice placed me firmly on the fence again. Then I found one example/demo that pretty much kicked my ass over the fence: it was the rain/weather demo ("Weather and Precipitation" I think it's called). How it automagicaly clips the rain-drop textures when they hit the ground if the ripples go 'over' and edge, and the general quality...and this is in Beta!...well, I whipped it out, stuck it in and blew my wad (re: got out my credit card, put my card number into the online order page and spent my wad of money).

So far, I'm not regretting it. I'm waiting for more documentation and tutorials to come out for it, obviously, but it's still fun to just push random buttons and see what happens. The biggest problem I have right now, is there is an alpha-clipp problem for those with ATI cards, specifically dealing with the leaves of trees. The grass is fine, so is everything else...but I think they "hard coded" a limitation thingie into a rendering doohicky because NVidia cards can't display some whatchamacallit bit-depth somethingorother...but ATI can, and so this confuses the ATI cards.

(Can you tell I'm not a programmer? ).

now that beautiful of an analogy takes some skill.

Do this in 3DGS or Unity:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17567

what, that video at the end? thats nothing.

Hey lostclimate , since you claim all this things are so easy in gamestudio , why not put together a simple shader template that will work properly ? Kind of like what Matt tried to do with Sphere , but properly working , since Sphere is useless for an actual game. Maybe Matt didn't know something you do , I think the whole community would enjoy something of this nature , and you seem to think it's cake to do. Oh yeah , and maybe a small easy to make precipitation script kinda like the one from Torque 3d , would be very handy , it shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes according to you to put together , and EVERYONE here would love having a nice script like that that works properly. Thanks in advance , this things seem to be a bit complex to the average gamestudio user like myself , but gamestudio gurus like you seem to say it's nothing more than a 15 minute job , I'm sure you can spare 15 minutes and help us all out while at the same time restoring gamestudio's reputation ?

i never said it only takes 15 minutes, but again, if you compare gstudios comm to the pro features of these games (actual capabilities, not hand holding, toggle generic dynmic shadow mapping on switches) you can do with gstudio all the effects that you have mentioned. all the post processing shaders have been done and packaged before several times, by both slin, phemox, and much much better, boh_havoc. sphere isnt useless, it just doesnt have any built in optimization, but thats something the designers should be doing by hand anyways (lod, setting up a portal system etc.) and as far as ssao, i have done it a couple of times just recently I rebuilt my old ssao shader so that it looks damn near the one in the torque demo. and for dynamic shadow mapping, hasnt been finished yet, Im working on one, slin made one (albiet needs work) boh_havoc is working on one, and chris_b is working on an advanced one using a custom plugin. so just because you cant do it doesnt mean it can be done or even that its all that hard. IT JUST MEANS YOU CANT DO IT. Btw, if you cant figure out how to do that stuff with a scripting language, how do you plan on ever making it to anything past these little indie games, you'll have to learn that stuff eventually if you want a full fledged in-house job at a game studio some day. That is unless you want to make indie games the rest of your life, which is ok for some people, but some people feel its stuff that needs to be known anyways.

again, no one claimed it was easy, its not, game design isnt easy ever. the sooner you learn that, the sooner you can make some real money, and stop screwing around with "a very impressive tech demo". Click together games suck.

Honestly, I don't get you. I still only use 3DGS, and I never considered buying Torque, but this huge landscape and the flawless real time shadowing in it is beyond anything that I expect to see in 3DGS in any reasonable time frame.

Although, I would like to know how fast it would run on my pc.

you can easily make a large landscape run well in a7 and look at chrisb's plugin, flawless real time shadowing at its best.

From a German thread in Ask Developers I read that it it still doesn't work under all circumstances:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=249412#Post249412

- bigger levels than 14.000 quants give problems
- it doesn't like tgas and fog


All shaders, that I used, were too slow for a commercial product. (Although, as mentioned, I don't know how fast the Torque example would run on my pc.)

"you'll have to learn that stuff eventually if you want a full fledged in-house job at a game studio some day"

Who ever said I was a programmer ? I'm a full developer , with experience in gfx scripting designing and over all project management. My goal is not to become a programmer , if it was , I would be reading some C++ and DirectX books. My goal is to create a game development company , starting with indie games and move to console games. By that time , I would hire a programmer if needed , for more complicated things , but I could care less for becoming a programmer or for working for any game development company , that is not my intention , it has never been.

So the more features an engine has out of the box , the better for me , because I could care less for setting it up myself if I can buy a tool that already has it set up for me. I model/texture and do environment modeling , however , a lot of times I purchase 3d models and textures rather than making them , because it saves a ton of time. So you can see why I'm liking how the new Torque 3D is looking so far.

And again , one of their biggest strengths is cross platform publishing, it's such a great feature I'm learning Javascript right now for Unity and as soon as I get it down I'm moving to C++ for Torque (hopefully I can get by with minimal knowledge as I hear C++ is HARD).

I love GameStudio , and will probably always have a copy around , but I feel the more serious I take game development the more important an engine and it's features start to become, as even though right now it's much easier for me to develop with gamestudio , learning and developing with unity and torque seem like a much better investment of my time, as it will give my games a much bigger audience.

@lostclimate
"i never said it only takes 15 minutes"

Your right , you said it took 5.


"Bull, it takes about 5 minutes to set that up."

Thanks for the link. It is very nice to see our models in this test scenery.

I saw a very similar scene in Unity3d, directly in a browser window (but I could also switch to full-screen). It displayed an entire village made with our desert models on a terrain, a lake with real-time reflections, real-time shadows and some post-processing.
I walked and jumped very smoothly in this scene, collision detection was perfect, not a single slow-down and the scene has more than 1.000.000 polygons easily.

So yes, it is also possible in Unity.

LostClimate: It is not that easy to use a real-time shadow mapping shader on a large terrain. It works only with a good multi-resolution mechanism and some optimizations. And it should take fog into consideration.

yes it takes 5 minutes to set up a bloom shader, read the contex in your quotes.

"yes it takes 5 minutes to set up a bloom shader"
I sad normal mapping with bloom , with obviously includes dynamic shadowing with per pixel lighting. Yes , a shitty half working unusable version can be set up in 5 minutes , but I meant a solid version you could use in an actual game.

DOES IT MATTER????!!!! i mean, come on guys, nothing we say here will make the engine better, am sure they're aware of our bickering and are working at it, i don't think they'd want to fail either... plus jcl just announced that he's setting up a video showcase, should be great and currently, i'm convinced that GS can handle what torque can if the user can code it... but what are we arguing at?
its ease of use or its functionalities? make up ur minds!

what???? normal mapping and bloom take a couple of minutes to set up, and have absolutely nothing to do with dynamic shadows... no wonder you need torque, it covers the aspects you obviously dont know the difference between.

lmao... ok, lostclimate, have you gotten shadowmapping to work? not starting an arguement, just wanna know if it works... i see a few but theyre rather slow or unreliable...

I havent finished mine with anything more than one directional light, having some issues setting it up, but they are just issues with things i havent fully studied or tested yet. But it is possible and I have come very close. and again take a look at chrisb's work, his runs at a great speed so its obviously not a case of possibility, but a case of skill. If I keep working on my shadowmapping it should be done within the month, but I may not since right now I am experimenting with OGRE and am really liking it, and even if i switch i might continue since a large part of my income is people needing me to code for a7.

well... i know its possible, i tried looking for chrisb's version, couldnt find it..

look under 3rd party tools

It is ChrisD not ChrisB, although ChrisB made a lot of shader programming.

OHHHH!!!.. lol thanks pappenheimer, lol, w/e that means... lol...

ah, its actually chris3D but you can see where the confusion comes in

yh.. i found the shader, i actually had it already, it looks great.. doesnt take long to implement, too bad its a demo.. lol... oh well, great things comes to those who wait

"I havent finished mine with anything more than one directional light, having some issues setting it up, but they are just issues with things i havent fully studied or tested yet"

And you prove me fully right

"DOES IT MATTER????!!!! i mean, come on guys, nothing we say here will make the engine better"

You should check the forum you are posting in before posting. The purpose of this forum is to post other game development tools and engines and critique and compare them with gamestudio.

"what???? normal mapping and bloom take a couple of minutes to set up, and have absolutely nothing to do with dynamic shadows"

So your actually saying that we should be satisfied with normal mapping and no shadows ?

Didn't you just say some posts earlier doing everything seen in the Torque3D demos I posted could easily be reproduced with gamestudio , yet you are here saying you still can't get dynamic shadows working properly ? So which is it lostclimate , can this things be easily reproduced with gamestudio , or can they not ? There's no sense in saying they can and then state you've been working to get shadows working but haven't been able to , that statement COMPLETELY contradicts your whole argument on the subject

ummm.. hello, i know the purpose of the forum, whats the purpose of THIS thread??? i mean, even the author seemed to have abandoned it and here we are

"ummm.. hello, i know the purpose of the forum, whats the purpose of THIS thread???"
To show the progress of the current Torque3D game engine which is currently still in beta.

"i mean, even the author seemed to have abandoned it and here we are"
Well since I am the author of the thread , I don't see how you came to the conclusion that I've abandoned it.

I do: by indulging in an argument about the capabilities of THIS engine in a thread about another engine.

First: even though the guy who made the 167k or whatever terrain example said he'd like to see it kill other engines, it actually wouldn't. It's really not a big deal. And on his dual-graphics card PC (which is not absolute latest-gen but more than enough for any modern game [I'd say even Crysis on full settings, given I have ONE of those graphics cards and handle full-Crysis beautifully]) he raved about getting up to 40 fps AFTER adding LoD. 60 fps as a general rule is ideal for an actual release game (though in the PC world you obviously can't account for everyone's different specs).

So no, performance-wise, not amazing. Not something that will kill A7. The shadows are nice, the graphics are nice. Nice that they're built-in. Nice that they're easy to use. You complain about A7's lack of non-programmer features and art pipeline, fine (as long as you're in the appropriate thread for it), but don't complain about the engine itself, it's capabilities, and it's performance, because A7 is really good in those regards.

I do like the soft-particles example for Torque 3D. If I used that engine, that would probably be what I'd most be looking forward to -- even most current-gen games on PS3 or XBox 360 still suffer from edgy particles that lose the illusion of volume when they interact with other surfaces, but these look really awesome.

Jibb

"do: by indulging in an argument about the capabilities of THIS engine in a thread about another engine."
That is the POINT of this ENTIRE sub-forum.

then y title it torque3d and not, 3dgs versus torque3d or watever, cuz the focus of all these posts seem to be on 3dgs and not TORQUE, which is the heading...

I probably wasn't clear: by "THIS" I mean "A7", and by "another engine" I mean "Torque 3D". This sub-forum is not about talking about A7, it is about talking about "Competitor products & game development tools".

To make this extra clear so you cannot twist my words: You deviated from the topic by arguing about the capabilities of A7 and what A7 can do, in a thread about Torque 3D, in a sub-forum about non-A7 tools.

Stick with comments about Torque 3D and links relating to it (those youtube links earlier were really cool, and great discussion material for Torque 3D).

Jibb

Then let's talk about Torque3D:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17517

This shows a new plug-in called pureLight. It does automatically unwrapping of meshes and calculates lighting and shadows for static lighting. It works with every mesh and is a proven tool. They used it for architectural visualisation a lot.

It is interesting how fast things happen there.
It is still no directional light mapping like Source or Unreal are doing but they said it will move into the same direction.

Very, very cool. I hate unwrapping, and while I can understand the need to do it for a game-quality model, I'd like it to be easier to throw together a prototype model, bake some AO, and then use it. I do it in blender, and blender's unwrapping is good, but not fully automatic (like I still have to deal with making seams, which can be annoying on high-poly, well-rounded models).

Shame about the $500 pricetag on that plug-in though.

Jibb

Well in the pictures ,it's good lightmapping,
some tools can do that , Blender can bake it !

For games with lot of action where you look at ennemies instead
of exploring static world : You don't need incredible Lightmaps , vene players will never notice if lightmaps are precise or not !

For 1500$ : Sorry but for arcade games, casual no need !

In fact that lightmapper is really for scenes visualisation,
where the user stand on the scene visualizing it hours !
Not sure it's incredible for games

For gaming no need,and solution already exists, seems to be some trick from Garage games to make more money

that is pretty cool but i agree with julz, 500 is pretty rediculous for what is really a advanced "part of" a tool. not sure its a great idea to add extra software in the pipeline either. but it is at least cool to envision and I'd definately at least check it out if i had torque (did they have a demo of any sort?)

A price tag is ok. I buy tools in my business all the time (programming components, 3d modelling tools and more).

If someone has no need then he does not have to buy, especially since you can manually make your uv-maps and bake your light-maps in 3d applications for the second uv-set.

Tools like this are for the people who really have projects and limited time. If someone is in a learning process, then it might be better to do it manually, learn about uv-mapping, lighting, rendering and see what an awful amount of time it takes to set all this up for just a little scenery.

Yep,
And some rare 3D engines have plugins to export directly Lightmaps from your 3D modeler/renderer with a quality at top caus it's from the renderer : )

If you're sure to sell a game , why not spend more money,
but if you're not sure , it can be lot of money just for palying (or your own pleasure ).

i also think the price tag is ok, atleast now they'll have alot more customers as ppl wanting to do realtime renders will look theyre way....

so as i can see, torque seems to be directed more towards artists while gs seems to be directed more towards programmers

I have read a similar comment in the C4 forums. But actually they told this is not true. A game project in reality needs artists and programmers. Good technology takes both into account.

As an example: You can code in C++ and you can expose tools, functions and interfaces to the scriping languages (Torque-Script or the visual scripting tool in C4). So an artist can work with the functions the programmer prepared for them.

Absolutely, but I think darkinferno's point was more that programmers will probably enjoy A7 more than Torque 3D, while artists will probably enjoy Torque 3D more.

Particularly in our hobby/indie context where people are often more a programmer than artist, or more an artist than programmer.

Being primarily a programmer, I don't mind the extra work to get a level set up looking how I want it to if I find that I can make the game in a fast and feature-rich language (as opposed to a Scripting language, and/or a language that seems easier to learn but imposes many more limits if I want to do something different to what it was designed for).

Shaders are a good example, I think. Torque 3D comes with tonnes of shaders, and they can be edited in a really user-friendly fashion. But if I want to try an effect that hadn't been done before, A7 would be the way to go (before SSAO became a standard, in fact before I'd even heard of it in Crysis, I was fiddling around with a similar effect in A7; I don't know much about Torque 3D and TorqueScript, but I can't imagine a more flexible shader system than A7's for a programmer).

Jibb

EDIT: And I know I could use C++ with Torque 3D and get even more programmer flexibility, but I think Lite-C is a very good balance as it hides the internals of the engine whilst placing very few restrictions.

EDIT2: - from main Torque 3D page.

I really like the sound of that!

They just released a new blog about real-time lighting, real-time soft shadows and real-time editing:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17605

so as i can see, torque seems to be directed more towards artists while gs seems to be directed more towards programmers

Sure , and each beta confirms it for 3DGS :
each beta = new fonctions for programmers
I would prefer :
each beat = new tools or properties panels for 3D Artists !

@Freank_G:
Well the last demo of Torque 3D is great
REminds Unity interface , caus the two engines have similar workflow : all lights properties on panel,easy to change and direct views of result.
Yep Torque 3D seems to really work, i like a lot the light rays also in their video.

I like alos their implementation of Nvidia Physics Cloth :
Cloth demo

Why A7 don't move directly to Nvidia Physx !
A simple engine as Dark BAsic Professionnal , even if it is very buggy, have implement Nvidia Physics from some time already !

Their racing Kit like some other Torque Kits will be great.
Imagine you can mod it and make your own racing game,without much coding ! why not a Daytona USA clone !
Torque Racing Kit

Found also material editor in the World Editor :
material editor
It's a lot like in Unity, nut in Unity you can affect material to an object just by dargging the material on it's properties panel !

The guy posted in his comments that he was simulating a single core cpu, he turned off his additional cpus and the setup was:

Single core 2.6 Ghz
Single GeForce 9600GT

When it was simulated in the engine it showed up as a PIII....that means it's theoretically possible to run torque on a P3.

Read This:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17567/1#comment-128273

Now remember that the polys he mentions is just the tall buildings, that's not including the desert scene that is in the same map, or the high poly terrain. There's way more than just 1mil polys.



did you actually read the blog? check my link above.



That does involve 'comparing' 3DGS with other engines.

@Frank: I'm gonna finish reading that blog in a minute.

@everyone: Ok, you want to prove your point that 3DGS can do this stuff, here's what you do:

1. Make a GAME that has it, big terrains, soft shadows, terrain shadow mapping (easily done with a shader), normal mapping, parallax, a decent flood of particles (yes torque can handle quite a few of them, if you want to go against T3D, then make them soft particles, yes they added that to T3D), a number of trees and grass covering your terrain, and heavy rain in that map, SSAO, Refractions, Good Physics running where you don't get stuck in the wall, etc.

2. It has to be a playable game, not just a small room with tests.

3. Post the game in the showcase, or projects or whatever. The moment I see this game (and play it) that can run all those effects in the same map (which i can run in the demo version of TGEA) and have a playable game with AI, then I'll admit that 3DGS can do all you crack it up to do.

The moment I see this game (and play it) that can run all those effects in the same map (which i can run in the demo version of TGEA) and have a playable game with AI, then I'll admit that 3DGS can do all you crack it up to do.


Lot of realist people already know A7 can't compare.

I would say instead try to do it in A7 : i just can't imagine the lot of work it will take to someone to do it :
Find the code for each effect ,try to integrate it etc ...
In Torque 3D, you just use standard assets and libraries: no coding , all things are ready to use !

Of course I read it: This comes before the post you mentioned. It was only then that he began simulating a lazier PC. He had already raved about the 40fps. And even afterwards he probably went back to his normal set-up.

Also, I don't care how few cores he simulated. He has hardly any entities on screen, only one animated character, it's really the graphics that're the main point to impress here.

At the moment I have exams, but next week I will try and see how much I can squeeze out of A7. That's not relevant, though.

For one thing: it says a lot about that guy's expectations when he began raving about how it should kill other engines when he only had one fortress and the terrain.

It is good performance, really, but it's not amazing.
Yes, but obviously the argument had descended into "I've seen 3DGS do this -- Well I haven't -- Well I have" without talking about Torque 3D.

We're enjoying having a look and talk about features like soft-particles and all that, and then you come back and try to turn the thread back onto what you think A7 can't do.

Jibb

EDIT: Btw, my attitude doesn't come across very nicely in this post, I know. In real life I enjoy a good argument, and I'll do it light-heartedly and with a smile, but that doesn't translate to text very well (if I put in smileys but don't change the wording it'll probably look patronising). Sorry for that, that's something I'm working on when I'm online.

That's true, but I don't want an engine that does it all for me. I'm a programmer, I want to make my own content. That's why I want Torque for the source code.

I think if 3DGS released source code it would instantly change the way the engine is. Having source means you have no limits at all. You can make the engine your own.



That's why I posted the one that I did in my last post, he didn't just run one fortress, he ran multiple ones. He had over 1,002,000 polys in fortresses alone (which is only around 8-9 fortresses, but it's more polys than most engines can handle). You also forget that he has the desert scene with multiple buildings and trees, which is in the same map.



True, for my first post, but it is relevant to T3D, which is why I posted.



Same here, I enjoy debating issues like this, and I like debating with people who have a good standpoint. I'm not at all frustrated with debating with you.

The only thing that bugs me is people who haven't made games post "well the engine's totally capable of this and this" when in reality they haven't tried to do any kind of frame rate tests that involve actual gameplay. There's multiple reasons why I'm rooting for Torque:

1. Tribes 2
2. Jeff Tunnel (not really but I thought i'd throw it in there)
3. Garage Games, unlike Conitec, are game developers. (no offense intended) They know that if they want to pull off more they will have to dabble in newer technology. The fact that they MAKE games with their engine is what gives them an edge, that's why AAA engines are so well made (except D3 ) because they were made to make a game.
4. Source Code, when all else fails in the script, use c++
5. The developers listen, even to people who haven't bought the game engine (not that conitec doesn't, it's just that some things that were complained about even in A5 still aren't fixed)

Like I mentioned I just want to be able to code outside of the box. I get that A7 can do that, which is nice and all, but with A7 you still have to use the syntax which is just piling up more on the engines coding, and if the code is a bit slow then it just makes it a bit slower. The reason I like Torque is because you can change the basis, you don't have to add on with a plugin, you can change the engine itself.

Don't get me wrong I like having things like a grass/tree generator that's already in engine, and the fact that it's in the actual editor makes it all the better since the editor is 100% live. That kind of stuff saves time, and it's great, but over all the "click together your game" stuff...I want source. I started as a modder and went insane that I couldn't edit game source for the games I was modding, which is why I got into Game Development.

But I digress, my post is too long. At least it's mostly about Torque.

so your telling me you don't think a level in a7 can have more than 1mill polys? thats hilarious.

"so your telling me you don't think a level in a7 can have more than 1mill polys? laugh thats hilarious."

Hey lostclimate , when are you setting up the scripts man ? You said 5 minutes to do , it's been days and you haven't put a thing together. Were you lying ?

http://www.opserver.de/wiki/index.php/Shaders#Fullscreen_Postprocessing

enjoy.

I am not going to spend time setting something up and setting up a test level to prove something that is completely obvious. follow that link and follow directions, its not difficult in the least.

It already was mentioned a few times in this thread: This scene shows much more than 1 mio polies. The fortress models alone sum up to this. There is still a huge terrain and the desert village, palm trees, sky, an animated character, per-poly collision detection, a weapon, some scripts running, multi-resolution real-time shadow mapping (highres shadow map near the camera and lowres shadow map in a distant).

Your link to a shader collection is no comparison to this.

In the end you are assuming and I would say: seeing is believing.
I saw impressive scenes in T3D, in Unity and C4. They made their points, they proved what they can deliver.

But back to T3D:
Some of you wrote about having the source code. This can be nice and helpful an in the case of Torque it is often needed. But I know from several skilled programmers that the Torque code is not always very well structured. They mention the C4 engine code as the best engine source code, easy to read, well structured and well engineered.

I wasn't comparing those to the video (obviously no equality there) why_do_i_die seems to think that just because I said basic post processing effects take all of 5 min to set up, that I'd build a level and implement it just for the sake of proving it to him, instead i just linked those. As far as the level, people seem to act like all of it is visible in the same frame when it is very much not.

a7 Ill admit is not as "plug and play" as torque, but again, its not a good comparison and there is good reason to use either of them. as darkinferno julz and frank seem to be trying to do, lets get back to talking about torque, why_do_i_die, or did you make this thread specifically to bash a7?

And this is exactly what a good engine does: occlusion, automatic removing of content. A good scene management renders almost only visible polygons and tries to generate as less render batches as possible and tries to minimize the amount of state changes in the graphics card.

But it is not only the scene management of models. The management of textures, memory and the quality and optimization of shaders has to be taken into account to achieve good performance.

Because of this a huge scene (indoor or outdoor, depends on your project) can be a good scenario to explore the power of such a technology.

@Losticmate:
In the end you are assuming and I would say: seeing is believing.
I saw impressive scenes in T3D, in Unity and C4. They made their points, they proved what they can deliver.


That's years we wait for an impressive demo : nothing !
And i think we can wait some years again
Losticmate you like a lot A7 , we like the engine also , but unliek you , we are not fanboys, we are realistic and admit worfklow is behind some others, power also.

Some of us , are not people that want to play with tools or code , we don't want puzzle engines or toy engines
We think lot more in terms of making a game , with good features , without loosing time on coding or trying to integrate missing features.

Some of us see lot more making a game something more serious than playing all year with code , and we see it more in terms of time/delay and global project to reach ot a final game
Lot of other people like coding : it's OK, but other of us more Artists than coders ,
don't mind about playing with code or implementing features.

If you would think in terms of delivering a game (before in 1 or 2 years) :
you'll think differently and won't wait months for features you find in anothers engine ready/easy ot use for similar price.

We think lot more in tersm of easy to use features and workflow:
Just click on object properties to bring shadow mapping ;
just choose shaders on a list , just choose textures directly in object properties etc ... etc ...

That's the difference between artists bringing scenes and seeing problems, and programmers saying they can code all missing features and make A7 as powerfull as Unreal Engine 3 !

Yes, I'm definitely guilty of that one. I'll do some next week after my exams, just don't expect nice screenshots because I'm not about to make decent assets for the sake of a stress test, but thankfully it's things like the poly-count and texture resolutions that count, and they'll be there. Then I'll write some shaders for it, which WILL be good quality but take me longer (because there's no such thing as a "place-holder" shader -- we obviously want to see SSAO like that and shadows like those).
True, but those later on are in the comments. He appeared to post the blog under the impression that the first test was ground-breaking.

In the A7 manual there's a general material defined for particles, which has "future use" written next to it. I'm going to go hound jcl for that feature so I can write soft-particles -- until we get that, I'll try write soft-sprites to prove I can do it

Jibb

EDIT: And yes, I know I'm guilty in this post of making a post that does not relate to Torque 3D at all.

EDIT2:
I don't think that's a great argument. I, as a programmer, don't prefer A7 because I get to program missing features. I prefer it because it's an environment in which I can program innovative features without touching or looking at engine source code. By innovative, I again refer to my example of me fiddling around with SSAO before I'd even heard of it. There are other avenues (more shader stuff, but also other areas such as physics) that I can write stuff as I imagine it, or write it very soon after someone else invents it and opens it to the public, instead of waiting around for the engine developer to implement it or diving into source code.

Why haven't I released anything innovative into the 3DGS community? Quite frankly I haven't touched A7 in more than a year because of other commitments/priorities/issues. And honestly it's also because I'm lazy

wow. Ok thats bordering on personal insult. fanboy? I have already said, if i had the cash around I'd get torque3d or unity pro in a split second. The main two things I have said here is that people keep bitching and comparing those two engines workflow when its not a fair comparison, and saying that a7 can't do something just because they cant do it.

as far as both the "having never tested it" and the "bad framerate" comment: with the exception of volumetric god rays, a precipitation shader (which I've already described an even better process in the shader forum) and dynamic shadow mapping I have done with a7 everything that has been showing, I've implemented ssao, bloom, normal mapping, huge complex levels with entity management, dof, ive made editors for materials and landscapes. I just dont feel the need to recreate them all to prove something to you or why_do_i_die.

and as far as it being a toy engine, well apparently a toy engine gets my rent, food on my table, my utility bills, my savings, my taxes, and all my spending money. and tell ichiro lambe or david landcaster or dan_silverman, or andvari.... That its a toy engine.

ok, pm me when you finish a nice one. I can understand the placeholders, I'm a programmer. If you could also put a stats panel in there (fps, visible polys, ents, etc) it would be nice too.



Well it is a nice test still, even one 167k poly fortress with a desert scene (trees, buildings, huge terrain, etc) is still a nice test. When testing with A6 I couldn't come close to having that many polys or entities without the engine throwing up on itself. The terrain for A6 was rather slow.



Mkay

Although my experience with A6 has shown that using sprites over particles is faster.



pffff, what's a little off topic-ness between arguments



Well, I for one don't have Torque, so I'm not gonna say that the engine is groundbreaking and will destroy all engines out there. I will say that the test was really good nonetheless, the facts of the sizes and polycounts alone gives me a jump in wanting to get it.

I'll admit that I don't have A7, but I also don't plan on wasting my money on it(no offense). The reason I do not care for 3DGS much is this; Every time I do a decent test of the engine, a simple test that most other engines can handle the engine dies. I mean a simple test of just some entities and a small amount of code. My experience with A6 has shown me this:

1. The engine renders entities as a whole, meaning that if the textures are changed it doesn't make that huge of a difference. 1024 texs take alot of memory compared to 512, which is right, but anything around the 256 and below area doesn't really change the framerate at all.
2. LOD doesn't make as big a difference as it should. The engine doesn't seem to depend on polys as much as the fact that there is another entity in the game. For instance: In PreVa, we did an Island map that had trees around the island. IF we made the trees individual trees the engine crapped on itself. The framerate was horrible, so we had to make the trees all one model, they still had the same amount of polygons, but once they were made one model the difference was in about 20 fps or more. Making trees all one model like that is a big no-no, but we had to in order to get the framerate we wanted.
3. Sprites render waaaaaay faster than particles. You can pull off alot more sprites than you can particles. You can do some dense smoke and stuff with sprites when if you try to do it with particles, it dies. That's rather odd considering that a particle should have a little less code on it than a sprite, a sprite should be rendered similar to a model.
4. Terrains are not a good idea, even small ones with low poly counts cause extreme framerate drops compared to Torques MegaTerrains.
5. Even making a simple shooter with A6 is slow. I mean a scrolling shooter. Kino One's framerate is a bit slow on certain levels and we can't help it. It's not collision, it's not AI, it's not the player. Just from having entities with low poly counts.

I know that A7 is probably different and I've been told to upgrade quite a few times, but frankly, I don't want to. It's a waste of time and money.

The reason I want torque is that with some of the games I've seen are more than we pulled off in PreVa which leads me to believe that We could've pulled off PreVa with a very high fps and could've done way more than we did with A6. And that's just TGE.

I'm off topic but meh...

uh, you realize that if you want to test that fairly you need to have the same machine they have. you afaik were testing with a geforce 6100 which is now-a-days, basically crap compared to even the cheap cards out now.

with the texture resolution you have to remember, reducing from 1024x to 512 is reducing it by 4x, but the amount of pixels is a ton, were going from 512 to 256 your only taking of about 16th as much off.

as far as the problems with the trees its like that with a lot of engines, and a7 is missing one feature that they do really need, and thats object instancing.

as far as what you pulled off with preva vs what you coulda got with tge.... believe me i have love for preva, but you coulda still pulled a lot more off with it than you did and i never understood how you repeatedly said you had all these performance issues.



And i keep telling myself my next post will be on topic

well... @mpdeveloper, idk what you went through developing preva so i cant say much, but based on MY tests, i really think i couldve remade preva to run on a7 to look and play better... dont know if you'll ever make part 2, but that is a goal of mine... maybe you could have me develop part 2 or atleast a demo using the preva models anyways, thats not the point here... i understand where ur coming from but i do think a7 is a leap over a6.. based on work i've done so far...

the thing is just this, the ARTISTIC work flow of torque seems really easy... but i kno it can be done with 3dgs, even if i cant pull it off



lol.. i kno wat u mean

Ok, I respect you LC, and you're an ok guy, but you really don't know what you're talking about. I didn't just test on one pc that had a 6100, we have tested on more than 5 or 6 pcs and got the same kind of performance.

As for what we could pull off, no, there couldn't have been more. The fact that the game as is couldn't run on an older system with graphics that were not much more than a 2001 game, when the games from that era ran at blistering speed on a 6100, is pathetic.

If you think that we just placed alot of entities in the levels and left them as-is, you're completely wrong. The reason the game looks the way it does is because after countless (2 years) of testing multiple ways of doing the levels we had to go with a very simple setup or else the framerate was below 20, and yes that involves systems that are updated (or were updated for that time). It's pathetic that to run the game you have to have a modern setup considering that the game was very simple in coding and design.

You have the Game, you got it for beta testing. If you think the code is the problem, look at it. If you think the levels are the problem open them up and edit them.

I had to make my own scanning code because the engine's was too slow. We had to cut corners on multiple things.

As for David Lancaster, I know a decent bit about his work, we're kinda buddies. He quit working on 3DGS a while back, and his project that he was working on A6 with was turning out too slow. He then got A7 and it was running better but I assume he ran into more problems for them to switch engines. We had been talking about Torque and 3DGS too.



I can't say much on PreVa, but the actual name is a joke. We named it PreVa as a predecessor to a game that we wanted to make. Originally PreVa was just going to be a tech demo. Yes we plan on more games in the timeline of PreVa, as a matter of fact we are going to do a version of it on torque. We originally planned for multiplayer and ladder matches, but we decided not to with A6. That's all I can say on that. :P

As for a PreVa 2...you can't make one. We wouldn't take too kindly to our game being released by someone else. However, if you want to work with us we have a job contact from our site and we could always use someone else. I'll put you up for someone to hire.

If you want to do some tech tests with it though you can show me what you could do, but probably no public releases. I would like to see what you can do though. If you pull off something pretty good then it might be a little more push to hire you.

@Both: If you guys want to do a level test of PreVa, do so, but you must use A6 considering that the argument is over whether A6 could pull off more or not. I'm sure that A7 has more and that it could pull the game off a bit better, but we have made the decision to not use 3DGS again for our mech games.

As for being off-topic....maybe we should pm this stuff to each other?

umm.. i wasnt arguing over a6's capabilities, but i'd love to do the tech demo, though i would use a7... if i get the go ahead i'll work on smn and show you the vids, wouldnt need the world to see em... up to you

I have seen this on so many forums, people saying this and that about different engines,middleware and software developement kits, but the truth is how many actual games are made by anyone on any of the game engine forums,the fact is indie games are never going to be next gen,thats why we use engines that cost less than $5,000, if we wanted to make a next gen game we would need a budget running into millions. But we can make games of doom 3 quality with any of the indie game engines.You all talk about workflow but its the end product that matters.Its like some people say blender is a hard program to learn and the ui is crap, but it still can give same quality as 3ds max or maya.

This is exactly what we are talking about. We are looking at videos of some kind of end products (though this time they are only tech demos of Torque3d).
And sometimes we look at finished games (the gallery of Ogre, Torque and Unity3d or the new Instant action platform is full of them).

You are right, that workflow is not the only fact, especially not for professionals. You see this easily if you look at the raising amount of professional games made with Ogre3d. They even have to code their own editors. But they decided to use a flexible and powerful engine with full source code.

And I agree, you can make small Windows games with each of these engines. Some of them can even produce games for web browsers, iPhone, Wii or Mac.
The multi-platform availability can be important especially for small games and small indie developers. And having a good work-flow will help as well because we all have limited time.

And these are some of the reasons why a few developers are happy to see good tools, simple scripting, easy publishing to many platforms. It makes their lives easier, even if they develop very small home-brewed games.

Unity started to deliver all this and Garage-Games realized that they have to compete. And they do their best to deliver something similar. And as we can see they seem to reach this goal soon.

agreeing with the above post, look, when selling an engine, game, car, w/e, one rule counts.. the better it looks, the more attention you attract... torque as realized this and alot of upcoming designers will rarely choose gs... simply because...

It makes their lives easier, even if they develop very small home-brewed games.

Yes , lot of time saved to work on 3D art and level design, new ideas ...

@Losticmate :
Don't take it too bad, i don't wanted to insult you saying the word "Fanboy", just meaned to say you was perhaps too much attached to A7. REmember in life all the things change over time and you must follow and adapt
Unity didn't exist, Torque was too rigid, A7 was a good tool.
Now things have changed, and they will change in future , just
don't hesitate to move to other solutions (3D engines or tools).
Well indeed you've done great outstanding ,and some people can produce cool things with A7 !

And for casual games , on PC , A7 can do a great job.

What would be cool in A7 would be QUALITY templates like the incoming racing template for the new Torque 3D !
3D quality models and textures.
Conitec team should consider that , and i'm sure there are lot of people that would not hesitate to put some 40 bucks to
have a quality template !

Well let's talks back to Torque 3D

Actually Instant Action is Torque, which brings me to mention that the games on there are more than enough proof for TGEA.

[quote=darkinferno]agreeing with the above post, look, when selling an engine, game, car, w/e, one rule counts.. the better it looks, the more attention you attract... torque as realized this and alot of upcoming designers will rarely choose gs... simply because...[/url]

Completely true, that's why most indies that can't draw just make the game look scribbly, which MOST people pass off as a great looking art game. To me it's just scribbles, but it's the gameplay that matters.

Back on the T3D train: The blogs they have been posting about T3D have impressed me well enough to say that it can pull off nice graphics. So far with TGEA they have had some nice games released (Dreamlords, Buccaneer, Fallen Empire) which prove the engine is good at MMOs and networking. Actually, those three games and Lore Aftermath are reason enough (to me) to get Torque. At first I was a bit concerned with T3D and wondering if it would be fast and good looking and it has both. Apparently it's also good for mid and low range systems.

When I saw Torque back in '04 I thought 'There's no way in hell I'm gonna get that engine'. The license was horrible, as a matter of fact IT was the reason I didn't get Torque to begin with, instead we got A6 around '05. I have to say, A6 made it easy for me to jump into programming and now I'm happy to say that I'm ready to move up to Torque, although it'll be about a year or two of learning TorqueScript and C++ (i know some basic cpp, but that's it. another thanks to cscript) I'll be able to walk in on a cusion rather than a hardwood floor so to speak. There's no way I would've tried jumping to C++ back then.

It's just that so far Torque has been proven, I think It's gonna be a good engine (T3D), and since you still get the license to use TGEA you can downgrade at any time.

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showgallery&Number=272855&gonew=1#UNREAD

there you go, dynamic shadow mapping.

It is interesting how fast T3D develops these days. I remember some other times.

Beta3 is now available:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17661

new features:
- PhysX Cloth objects
- Shape Editor
- Decal Editor (wrapped and aligned decals in real-time)
- Mesh Road Editor
- improved Material Editor
- normal and parallax mapping for terrain
- zones and portals (finally you can make large indoors from models)

This is really impressive.

Perhaps they have hired more people in the team !!

But that's sure the different editors are great in terms of workflow and features , we could almost say it is 3D artist oriented.

But how many people/teams buying it will produce 3D quality art to use with these tools ?

Quite a lot. Some professional teams made games with Torque (e.g. Hinterland):
http://www.garagegames.com/best-of-torque/torque-3d

Yes ,
i forgot those ones ,and the ones in progress.
Hinterlands is a really cool one, and Penny arcade adventures for X360 !

Yeah , Torque is used by professionnals indeed

That's also what makes me want it more.

@Frank: Yea I read that blog yesterday, I like how it's progressing.

Our team have brought this and are developing a game for a large company with it, we are happy with the power of the engine

If anyone needs more in-depth explanations about the engine I started a topic a while back, it's located here:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/82871

i'm quite picky about these engines. if all engines would be have scripting language like or similar to 3dgs i'd be very pleased.

anyway. could someone post me an image to see how torques script looks like?

I'll tell you what I was told, to get a look at the script download one of the demos of TGEA:

http://www.garagegames.com/products/download/28

According to GG alot of the code will be very similar in T3D, It's still TorqueScript.

it's still Torque script, yes but i dont know how it looks like
i'll try to dl it and see that TS...most probably i wont use it, i'm just curious to compare it to lite-c

Well when downloading the demo you can see what it looks like...I'm not sure what you mean here.

Anyway, If anyone needs to look at the docs go to one of these two links:

Documentation Page(I'm not sure if you need a login to access it, but from here you just click the documentation you want to view)
Torque Developer Network(you just need a login for the main torque site to access these)

@croman: this page alone makes me want to play with TS: http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TorqueScript#About_TorqueScript

You'll probably need a login to access it, but it may be what you're talking about

edit: you can also download the demo to torsion on the page that links to the demo. torsion is the torque script editor.

This depends on your point of view. I could understand that a non-programmer might be more comfortable in the beginning with Lite-C. But an experienced programmer will probably like Torque Script more. It is also a C language, but leaning a bit towards modern languages with object oriented approach and well structured logic.
I personally (as a programmer familiar with high languages like Delphi, Java and C#) find Torque Script more familiar and comfortable.

But this is really just a personal taste and in the end it is not important. Any programming language is just a tool to get the job done, just like a screwdriver or a hammer. They are exchangeable.
More important is the API behind it, the rendering technology, the platform(s) you are developing for, the workflow and the features you need for your project.

Your customers will not see your script language. They care only about the product, the content they see at the screen, the music, the control and the gameplay.

But there are also problems in the Torque world and they need workarounds and hacks. Some projects need C++ modifications. At least this happened in the past.
But I know that such things happen with every complex technology.

If you still want screens let me know and i can post some on here for you.

yea, sure...i'd like to see some screens. i dont have time to dl it and try it nor i can find something useful on its website(i know i didnt look good probably, but i dont have time...)

Ok these are from beta 2 as i haven't got beta 3 yet.







Full size here
http://game-design.djw-designs.com/Screen1.jpg

http://game-design.djw-designs.com/Screen2.jpg

http://game-design.djw-designs.com/Screen3.jpg

Well i don't like tehir license :
For 250$ , you don't have advanced lightening :
You can't do nothing with shaders and no lightening
It's a useless version i think !

Where did you get this information? Advanced lighting is indeed only in the expensive version but shaders are available in every edition.
They are part of the material system.

@Frank_G :
So what do they mean by advanced lightening so ?
Caus shaders like normal mapping ,specular etc ... need lights to work !

And they have lights, the same lights that exist in TGE and TGEA. They made games with lights in the past as well.

It is called advanced lighting, because it offers new and advanced features to the standard lighting.

I didn't read the complete thread now, but A7 has an major advantage,
A Giant Community, the forum is active independent from Time, and its nice documented. A good coder would do the workshops and thats it, no more need, the rest is documentation. That's my way to develop software, 1st "read the fuckin manual" , 2nd search the forums & use Google, 3rd ask in the forums.
T3D documentation is a little to wired.

my minds ...

greetz

zem

@zemog :
Yeah , 3DGS community is great : INDEED

With some people we discuss here lot more about workflow than code.
And A7 workflow is for now far behind Unity or Torque 3D !
Just the object properties in Unity have all about an object : shader,code,textures,physics and each sub panel can be dropped , added !

Are you making a game actually or just coding ?
When you'll go to make a serious game, an go fast (not spending time trying to code to implement X or Y feature) :
Than we'll talk again

Workflow is important but Zemog is also right in terms of documentation. The docs of Unity are much better than the Torque docs.

I spent the last 3 years with Ruby Programming, workflow isnt so much important for myself,.
I need a stable engine with a straight forward documentation and learning curve. Unity looks nice, but it is .net based and I prefer to avoid the usage of .net
But I will take a deeper look on it
Torque is not enough documented, and I cannot go on with this lack of documentation.

A tool has to fit to the entire team, not only to the programmer. If a programmer is comfortable with Ogre3d then it might be that the level designers and artists cannot work at all without additional tools (Ogre has no editors).

It is only a tool. Professional artists are able to switch between modeling tools. Professional coders know a couple of languages and can get into a new one in a few days.

Unity does not offer C# as the only option. You can also program in Boo and JavaScript. Though C# is a very good and powerful language. Several XNA-engines or the Neoaxis-Engine also support C# programming. This is way easier than C++ coding, more safe and creates no memory leaks.

And I agree, a good documentation is a very important fact to take into consideration.

Right , I have alwayes been on 3dgs side, in the past
Whenever a new engine came up, I wrote something like " Pay attention my friends, dont stick to a bloody graphic effect, stability, documentation, comunity these are the key features "
However nowadays I must admit that there are better engines around

This is also my opinion. (The time from games like Half-Life 1 are over)

Gamestudio is not the youngest Engine. But it have a huge community, JCL that post at the forum and more.
I think it doesnt matter if you are a proffesionel programmer or an amateru. Every guy need a good documentation.

And the best: There are regular updates.

ummm...you guys do know what the advanced lighting is, right?

The advanced lighting doesn't mean you don't get lighting, It means you get the lighting from TGEA...TGEA still had good lighting and shadows, for $250 you more-or-less get what you got in TGEA except source.

It's not that much different from the 3DGS license that you keep referring to. 3DGS doesn't have source either, and for $800 you really only get the ability to change the popup window along with some other very small features that don't deserve the $600 difference.

You talk about how bad the license is, well...just be happy you're getting it for under 100k.

"The time from games like Half-Life 1 are over"
But you wanna spend $250 on the tool you want to develop your "next gen" games in.
Let me ask you this , did you spend $250 on your car ? Did you spend $250 on your computer ? Many PC gamers spend more than that on a video card or ram . My monitor cost me more than that , so do you think it's suitable or even sane to pursue creation of a commercial game of today's standard by using the cheapest engine version of (an already cheap)game engine you've chosen to use ? Be realistic , $5000 for a game engine would be a steal , I mean , compare to a AAA+ engine like U3 , $760,000. And Torque is only $1,000 . To look at Torque 3D and all of it's new features , and it's incredibly price tag , and then complain about the $250 version not including all of the $1000 version features is INSANITY. A successful commercial game will make you a millionaire , and you think spending $1000 on the tool to make it is too much of an investment to shell out ?

I've seen modelers charge over $1000 for ONE next-gen game model , and what can you do with just one game model ? I think we have some people here who have no idea of what a good piece of software is worth. I'm extremely happy to see garagegames still offering it's engine at an extremely fair price , when with their track record they could easily tackle the middle price range and charge $50,000 for it's new engine , or even polish it some more and move to the full commercial arena , as other companies that have taken that road (project offset ?Reality Engine?).

No matter how much of a fanboy , I would have imagined any game developer would have gotten exited after seeing Torque3D's videos , and price tag , but I was wrong. I was pretty exited to see the engine's progress , hence the post. In any case , as soon as I get enough money I'm getting both Torque3D and Unity , as they are beautiful pieces of software and ANY indie game developer would have to be clinically insane not to want to have them in their arsenal.

Heh, you still not getting it.
YOU WEREN'T WRONG ABOUT IT

they are incredible demos, and if i had the money, i'd definately consider torque3d, what i have the issue with (and i've said this wayyy tooo many times) is that you make a comparison of torque3d with a7, which isnt a fair comparison.

I'll support GameStudio. In my books, it's the best engine that works with good quality works-out-of-the-box-and-ready-to-go templates that just work, even if it's something being recycled.

Other engines are confusing/need intense code learning/buggy or just not worth the money. I know GameStudio is a bit of a whammy with the cost ($800 I think for one of the versions) but hey, at least it's better than a version that lacks the basic key features.

Torque 3D may have beaten GameStudio to the mark, but it depends on the money you're willing to pay.

This thread and this argument still makes no sense to me.



There are people that spend $50,000 on a night in a penthouse suite, but I'm betting most people here can't do that, so they stay in a Best Western and it works for them. How much some people can afford for a game engine doesn't relate to what others can afford. If money is no object for creating your commercial game then go with a real AAA engine. If money is an issue, then you make do with what you can afford to work with. Which in the case of most people here is probably GS Extra or Commercial.



Again, compared to a Lamborghini a Lexus is a steal, so why aren't we all driving a Lexus? Everyone tries to use the comparison above, but you can't compare T3D to U3 no matter how hard you try. T3D is still Tribes 2 code with some updated functions and a better toolset than TGEA had.



Torque in all it's various forms has been around for 9 years now, and though 'commercial' games have been made with it I'd like to see a list of people who have become millionaires from them. I'm betting the list of GameStudio millionaires is just as large.



And again, how does this relate? I've seen people pay $60,000 for a paint job on a vehicle, but that still doesn't mean that being able to get a whole car for $60,000 is a good deal for the average person. Why throw these figures out there?



I think most people have an idea of what things are worth, but they also have a better idea of what they can afford. There are people out there that would say "Why are you playing around with a $50,000 game engine, you should be using U3 if you want to make a real commercial game."



What track record? How many people have gotten wealthy off a game made with Torque? They have some very dedicated developers that (with a lot of work to get around the engine drawbacks) have made some cool games, and some groups have used it for some pretty unique things, but you're still not going to find any millionaires in the group.



And there it is, everyone is going to get the big fancy engine 'when they get enough money'. So everyone should just wait until they get enough money to buy an expensive engine before they get into development?

People buy what they can afford, or what they want to spend on a hobby, and that's what they work with. If you can afford a bazillion dollars to buy a whiz bang engine that's great, but it seems there are a few people arguing for an engine being a great deal when they can't even afford it themselves.

Personally, I think $180,000 for a loaded Lamborghini is a great deal, and as soon as I get enough money I'm going to get one. Or maybe one of the Torque millionaires will float me a loan...

And that's great, 3DGS is for you.

It's just that the ones that want to make full games without using the 'out of the box' stuff will choose an engine like Unity or T3D because of the ability to build 'out of the boundaries of said box'. When it comes down to it, T3D are for the ones who want T3D, 3DGS is more for people who want to learn programming, and want to make some simpler games.

The point is that T3D is still a bargain even at 1k.



I think it also comes down to if it's a hobby or a job. For people like me, it's a job. I'm a coder so I want the best bang for my buck, and I don't really consider A7, or any other Acknex that 'bang'.

I think it is completely fair to consider what others pay for models and resources, the point is how much people will pay for models when said money could be spent on a better engine. Say you spent $500 on an....meh, ok modelling program, when you could've gotten something like blender or TrueSpace(which is now dying) and spent $500 on a great engine to run your models for whatever purpose. It'd be a better deal to get a better program for free and spend the 500 you have on an engine. It's still a valid example.

It just comes down to if you're making games, or small projects. For someone who is payed to make presentations for a company, and the presentation doesn't require many models or anything extra to run and said person is getting paid decently by said company, a simple DX9 engine would do. For someone who wants to make good games that require some rendering power and are more than a simple shooter or casual game, they'd need something with more power than a simple DX9 engine. For someone who is a modeller/artist/level designer, an engine that does most code for you is good.

I wouldn't say it's a matter of budget (because most people will spend a decent amount on multiple things just to play around with it) but a matter of what you want to do. I have seen plenty of people around here that have bought multiple game engines and never did anything with them. They bought em, played around with them, and found out that the engine(s) doesn't have a "make game" button and give up. Most of those people will buy an engine that does most of it for them, not that it's a bad thing, but after spending ALL that money (which could amount to well over 1k) they settle with the engine that does the code for them.

The point is that most people will spend alot of money to "test".

edit: anyway, hopefully this will be my last off-topic post.

Yes. I see such people in many forums. Some of them collect game engines and I have to admit, I also spent a lot of money in this area (Gamestudio, Lawmaker, C4, Torque Showtool Pro plus I worked with Irrlicht, Beyond Virtual, Ogre and evaluated Gamebryo, Unity and others). I even created an episode of 9 levels for the first Doom game with an ancient editor.

But I indeed use many of them on a regular base. I render models and textures for our web shop and test import workflow and check for render problem.

I am indeed close to get a T3D license. For my purpose it looks very complete. I have shaders, shadow-mapping, post-processing and real-time editing plus scripting. It is very important for me to setup scenes fast and directly and to get results instantly. I cannot spend weeks because I want to finish something and turn toward the next model or texture pack fast.

I am sure the same counts for people who make small games. Id-Software wants to release games for the iPhone every 2-3 months now. This makes sense. If you want to live from that then you have to finish such small projects fast. And because of that you need a good workflow.

But it depends on the project what technology fits better then. Gamestudio is only an option for Windows games. If you want to have more platforms then you have to check Shiva, Unity3d and Torque products. They all have modern tools. You will find good docs for Torgue Game Builder (2d-games) and Unity3d. I dont know how good the Shiva docs are.

"People buy what they can afford, or what they want to spend on a hobby, and that's what they work with. If you can afford a bazillion dollars to buy a whiz bang engine that's great"

Yeah , the point of all those arguments was that Torque3D only costs a mere $1000 , and the AAA+ toolsets can cost close to a million , hence how it's a great thing that it's at an affordable price to the average person. How much money do you have to make to consider a $1000 investment in a game development engine too expensive ? $0.25 an hour ? A decent size television will run you at $2000 to $4000 , and even a shitty small one will be around $7000 to $1000 , unless you buy one of those tiny ones. PS3 came out costing around $600 , and sold like cake. So the point was , that the engine looks incredible , and is very affordable, I don't see how anyone could see it as being too expensive. In fact , most people can get some type of credit to buy it and pay it off in small amounts , just like people buy everything else.

Now I still don't have the engine , so I can't say first hand if it's as awesome as it looks like it's going to be , but if it is , I would say it's easily worth it's price tag.

"What track record? How many people have gotten wealthy off a game made with Torque?"
Many more than gamestudio , that's for certain.(though that's purely developer's fault rather than engine)

"I think most people have an idea of what things are worth, but they also have a better idea of what they can afford."
Yeah , the engine is $1000 , not $100,000
If $1000 is such an astronomical price tag for you , then how on earth do you afford to pay your rent and your bills ?

"Again, compared to a Lamborghini a Lexus is a steal, so why aren't we all driving a Lexus? Everyone tries to use the comparison above, but you can't compare T3D to U3 no matter how hard you try"
T3D Toolset is starting to look more and more like a truly next gen toolset. But price wise , your comparison doesn't work , it's more like comparing a lamborghini to a Lexus that's priced like a 15 year old used , shitty , half broken camaro. Would be crazy not to buy that Lexus right ?

"There are people that spend $50,000 on a night in a penthouse suite"
Yeah , and for those people there is UE3 and Cry Engine.

"but I'm betting most people here can't do that, so they stay in a Best Western"
Yeah , but your suggesting even that is too much , and maybe they should stay in the smallest shittiest hotel in the worst part of town.

"If money is an issue, then you make do with what you can afford to work with."
Again , it's $1000 and NOT $100,000 like your making it seem.

"Torque in all it's various forms has been around for 9 years now, and though 'commercial' games have been made with it I'd like to see a list of people who have become millionaires from them"
The tribes people musta made a couple millies for sure.

"And again, how does this relate? I've seen people pay $60,000 for a paint job on a vehicle, but that still doesn't mean that being able to get a whole car for $60,000 is a good deal for the average person. Why throw these figures out there?"
Because it shows the weight of the money.

You seem to not understand anything , the examples I put were very clear and to the point , how did you read them all and not understand them ? Yes , there's people with trillions of dollars , and some with very little. But Torque at $1000 is priced for the indie with no budget at all , EVERYONE can put some money aside every week and have the money to buy Torque in a couple of months , it's priced VERY moderately.

The only thing I can think is that you might be a 12 year old kid that sees $1000 like a million dollars , because other than that , I don't see how you could consider such a modest price so ridiculously expensive you compare it to spending $50,000 a night in a penthouse suite. Do you realize what you say ?

And , did you know that the full version of GameStudio costs $899 ? And do you realize many people here on the boards have the Pro version ? Are they filthy rich billionaires who lavishly spend away their money with no care in the world ?

And one last thing , if your that bad off financially , there IS free engines , MANY MANY free engines , it's not like I'm posting on the board of a freeware engine , the full featured version of this engine costs $899 , don't forget that when your making your comparisons.

In principle I agree, Torque is much more a c++ like programming language than Lite-c but for a game oriented programming language other factors must be taken in duly consideration
I tried Torque some years ago, at that time there were two main issues

# 1 the client / server architecture
Good for multiplayer games but an issue for any thing else

# 2 the sets of commands
Impressive for an FPS game but definitley not sufficient for any thing else
You had to tweak the engine to achieve features which were quite normal in 3dgs

The reason was that torque engine had been originally designed for the multiplayer FPS Tribe

If the new Torque3d uses the same old Torque syntax but it turned into a real multipurpose engine that's ok
Otherwise I will never take Torque3d into consideration

As I understood, T3D is not that different. It is just some kind of TGEA2.0. It still is best suited for FPS. If you want to make a 2d game then TGB is better. For anything else Unity might be a better choice.

Professional game devs will spend whatever it takes to get the tools that work best for them - within some kind of budget determined by the amount of money available to them.

After all this back and forth in this thread, then, the real question would be how many professional developers are there in this thread? Because if that's the case, then I agree that you'd want to spend every penny you can get your hands on for the best tool set.

So, how many people here in this thread develop games professionally as their sole source of income in their own business? Not working for someone else. And how many have had a successful commercial title (successful meaning that you can at least make a living from it)?

That would be an interesting bit of information and make certain points in this thread much more valid...

"So, how many people here in this thread develop games professionally as their sole source of income in their own business?"

I would say not many , but that's the goal.

hmm, well me and mpdev, frank uses the engine for testing purposes for his models (but i beleive he also has a dayjob), so thats like 2.5

I agree that may be the goal for some, but that's why it's called a goal. Smaller steps have to be taken along the way to achieve that goal, and for many people GS may be one of those necessary steps.

There would also be many people here who do not have that goal, and for them GS may be everything they need.

I can see this thread being started as a "Hey, take a look at the cool new T3D engine over at GarageGames" just for an FYI, but the ongoing argument that people should be buying it instead of GS just seems counter intuitive.

As someone mentioned a few pages back, this engine against engine argument goes on endlessly across multiple forums because it's a pointless argument. People either buy what they need, or what they want. Informational posts about new or different technology are nice, but posts trying to convince people to buy something they're not interested in don't generally accomplish much, except for the people who like to endlessly argue about something.

Instead of spending hours arguing about why your engine of choice is better, spend the time making a game with it to prove your point...

It's great seeing people be able to do that, wish I could, and I hope the people that are doing it make a fortune. But that still leaves quite a few thousand hobby devs out there who may not feel it necessary to lay out big dollars to pursue that hobby.

I definitely don't want to slight anyone who has made this their career, as I said I think that's great. My only point earlier was that there are very few people buying GS who are going to make game dev their career...

That's precisely my point. As for me, I plan on Game Development as only one source of income, but for now it's my full time job.

"but the ongoing argument that people should be buying it instead of GS just seems counter intuitive"

Well I have never said people shouldn't be buying gamestudio , as I myself have a copy. I have compared them both and have stated that the way things are going gamestudio is being far surpassed by engines like Unity and T3D , with the MAIN reason for my argument being cross platform deployment , and not the plug and play shaders(which I also do love btw) . And one of the reasons I post the comparisons is in hope Conitec will see how it's customers are feeling towards it's engine in comparison with the competition's engine. I would assume it's in conitec's interest to be aware of this issues , as this is their business , and I'm almost certain that they've realized the mistake they've don with A7 , hence I keep saying I'm not buying A7 but waiting till A8 to buy , if A8 delivers all the features everyone wanted for A7.

Still , gamestudio is a good engine , but there is no doubt in my mind that it is no longer the number 1 indie engine as it was a couple of years ago , but it is now somewhere around number 3 or 4, which is still decent.

But in any case , I never said people shouldn't buy A7 , I said you should check out T3d as it's looking very impressive , and thought I should give a heads up to my fellow GameStudio game developers about this new iteration of the Torque Engine soon to be released.I still love gamestudio , but I do wish some of our requests would have been payed some more attention to in the development of A7 , hence my disappointment with it and constant comparison to the competitor engines.

I cannot remember that somebody in this thread told you that. I constantly always tell to buy the right tool for the right job and the right platform. There are situations where Unity3d is the best and there are situations where TGB fits best. And T3D can be a very interesting option as well when finished and available. C4 is the best option in some areas (optimizations, scene management, terrain with steep rocks and caves).

And if you really dont have the goal to finish a game then you can also learn and play around with Irrlicht and Ogre3d for free. They are both very good and well documented. I followed the tutorials and understood them easily.

So it indeed depends on your point of view and your projects. Nobody forces you to do something you dont want to do.

Sorry if I'm coming across the wrong way here, Frank, and though it may or may not have been specifically stated that was the implication in many posts. I've seen these types of arguments since there have been game engines available to the public, and they always turn from informative threads into a "this engine is great and that engine sucks" kind of thing. I usually never get drawn into them because they always seem to be perpetuated by a few people who (usually) don't even own the engine their arguing for. I shouldn't have gotten into this one, it's always a no win argument. My only point in this was to try to relate the fact that some people just like GS and want to use it, and shouldn't be made to feel bad for that. So, I'll back out now.




Actually, I've made a pretty good living off my own computer consulting business for over 30 years now, raised a family on the income, and taught computer science at university for 10 of those years in addition to my own business. And though game dev is not my specialty or my business, I've made a lot more money on developing business apps than most will ever see in game dev. So yes, I have some idea of software tools, what they cost, and what different levels of business can spend on those tools. People pay me a lot of money for advice in those areas, and have been pretty happy with that advice over the last 30+ years.

And one thing I've learned (though apparently not very well) is that arguing with kids and people with little to no experience is definitely a no win situation. This place is like any other, there are people here who are experienced and very good at what they do, and there are also people who just aren't but want to talk a lot anyway.

It's been quite a while since I've gotten into one of these, and I appreciate the reminder for why I shouldn't...

Yes and no
The most important feature of a game engine is stabillity
You should have made intensive test before writing a review, no question

On the other hand people who are familiar with game engines can express their valuable opinion about other characteristics such as the workflow or the scripting language even with a superficial knowledge of the engine same as you probably do with the type of software you used to in your professional life

Adventure Kit

Try it and enjoy

"Sorry if I'm coming across the wrong way here, Frank, and though it may or may not have been specifically stated that was the implication in many posts"

But that's your personal interpretation of the events , and it's an errored one.

So it indeed depends on your point of view and your projects. Nobody forces you to do something you dont want to do.

Yeah indeed

It depends like Frank_G said on your project, how you work, if you have a team or not, if you begin 3D or not etc ...

if you begin 3D A7 can be a very good engine indeed.
Once you ar no more beginner, you can also try out other 3D tools ! A7 will always have a place for new comers to 3D and kids indeed, and also advanced users that like it (i have A7 , and i think i'll buy A8 ) !!

It only depends on your goal, what workflow you expect , features you need etc ...

To turn it back to T3D:
I found this today. A new customer made a first test level in just 3,5 hours and is excited like crazy how well and easy the tools work. Here is what he made. The wall has been created with the road-tool:




The whole story is here:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17731


He also told that stories like this are the reason why he bought the license. This is the best advertising a software can get.

Okey then, this scene needs that specs? I'm not gonna earn a pc with that specs within the next 2 years, most probably.
Means, I couldn't play that scene within reasonable framerates.
Or, is there an automatic fallback like in Unity?

Very Nice

Strange logic. Nobody told that you need these specs to play an island scene in T3D. This user ist just amazed about his new 2000$ PC.

Even the older TGEA had fallbacks of every shader. The rest is how you build the game (LOD stages, polygon count, texture size). This is the same approach to be taken into consideration with every engine.

@Frank_G :
Be always objective

-The scene is really empty
- It's only very good textures : the two buildings are simple.
-On the last picture of his blog the texture on terrain is very very deformed and it looks weird ,and it's noticeable at first look !
TGEA don't have a voxel terrain compared to C4 that allow holes, caves and no texture deformation like in traditionnnal terrain.

In fact the lightening is good , the water is good , the sky is good.
It's a simple 3D quality textures and simple design.


is excited like crazy how well and easy the tools work
In fact he should post a video about workflow and panels for editing things, caus scrennshots just show a simple very good little level.

It has taken 3 days to make textures and the two or three models and the tree , but i hope he have not spend 3 days importing assets to TGEA

ratchet: This was just about the workflow and not the textures. Look at the amount of grass (you cannot place it manually in this short time), the good-fitting wall, the nice lighting the alignment and scale of models. It has been made in a couple of hours by a hobby user (18 years old).

Of course this is not a perfectly sculpted voxel terrain, has not an immense amount of architectural models and no intense game-play. There are other projects to check this.

I was just talking about beginner stories. Such kind of stories spread fast and are good marketing.

Yeah, i wish it woulda been presented with the video because the impressive part was the amount that was accomplished in that amount of time.

@Frank_G:
Well i'm gonna again be too much relative perhaps
-At 14 Year Old or less some of us programmed on Amstrad CPC in ssembly language and was doing 2D art , so i don't find 18 years to use tools exceptionnal
-For grass, yeah great tool : But even the old simple Torque Engine had already grass placement visually. It's just the same old tool , perhaps improved !

Yeah indeed , it can only show TGEA is easy to use ,and allow make a scene without coding with all required tools
I have Unity it is very sufficient in tersm of workflow and as easy as TGEA.

He should post a video.

Not sure, why it is strange logic, when I suppose that the correlation of screenshots, video and demo as I experienced it from the most other nice looking scenes - regardless of the used engine - to this one, when he _started_ his thread with the specs of his pc - this means at least - one can't say anything about whether workflow or playing the scene works nice on my specs.

I've seen so much nice scenes in the last years which were useless for playing (and thus making a game of it)!

I don't say that the scene renders slow or that it has no fallbacks - I _asked_

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy seeing new nice screenshots like this! [But, I finally _trust_ only a demo which runs smooth on my pc...]

Yes. I agree completely. I also think that way.

But on the other hand it will probably run fine. There are just a couple of simple trees and windmills.

But what I just want to point out: This user is amazed and will tell it to everybody in his MSN-List, via Email or via forum posts. It will spread around the world and will attract more customers.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy seeing new nice screenshots like this! [But, I finally _trust_ only a demo which runs smooth on my pc...]

Totally agree
The Torque 3D on vimeo shows lot more in terms of workflow.
And the guy have not done anything great, just an empty level.
Even old tools like EMisphere CosmoCreator or other visualtisation tools can show great scenes.

Bring on characters, ennemies, gameplay, effects, varied structures and textures .... we'll talk after that.

For me also only demo matters and can convince me to buy an engine.
For Unity 2.5 that is a huge improvments over 1.5 or 1.0 :
it's tool demo , demo island and FPS demo have totally convinced me

Ratched: You probably still did not get my point.

This was just a report of an amazed new customer happy about the tools, the workflow. He did not mention anything about performance, optimization or scene-management.

We can talk about this, if there is a T3D-demo or if we have more information or if we touch this technology ourselves.

We just cannot complain abot information that we do not have. This is pure guessing.

or if we touch this technology ourselves
Yeh !

They should put a demo of a level where we can test the editor and tools , but when ??
Caus the new version is has not for the moment reached the version 1.0.


Just seen the weather video of TGEA:
Cool ripples features (it's only decal with clipping over edges like A7 new decals); and good use of textur offset to simulate water falling on walls.

IS it done automatically over your normal mapped models or do you have to manually create the shader and normal map for water falling on walls ?

Torque Workflow : like a breeze

Torque Workflow

Hiya.

I upgraded from TGEA up to T3D when they had the special promo going (it "only" cost me $500 or so...*sigh*).

Anyway, despite it still being in BETA, I'm pretty impressed. It's almost like a totally different game engine...the tools are WAAAAAY easier to use. It takes COLLADA files now as it's native format, so that makes it *very* easy to import artwork. Applying textures to things is dirt simple; terrain modeling and painting is quite good; setting up a mood via sun, rain, lighting, etc...likewise, just a few clicks. Once this puppy gets out of beta and into full fledged 'gold', I can see it really giving a LOT (if not most) other game engines out there a serious run for their money...assuming GG gets to gold within, say, a year.

For me, bottom line, I'm not regretting the $500 I spent on my upgrade. I will be using T3D (beta as it is) for most of my "quick prototype-walk-through" games and proof-of-concepts as far as visuals, theme, feeling, etc. goes.