Hiya.

Anyone have any experience with this game engine? It seems to be pretty straight forward. Looks like it would be AWESOME for a "proof-of-concept" for any RPG style game. I'm an artist who knows a *little* bit about programming, so its focus on "make your art, import into game" is definitly alluring. The new version (v2.0) is due out 'early 2007', and sports some nice upgrades (DX9, shaders, lots of visual enhancements, reworked editors). However...

I'm a bit leery of a company that only lets those who have purchased their product into their forums. The specifics I'm interested in finding out are:

• Vegitation system? Kinda like Sphere2.0, where vegitation appears as the player moves around. The vegitation would be based on a texture map (so you don't get grass on top of your wooden walkway, for example).
  
• How easy is it to impliment your own game system rules? That is, the 'rules of the RPG aspect of the game'...not the game engine. For example, what if I want to have 3 main stats for characters; Physical, Mental, Spiritual. And these each range from 5 to 50. Or maybe I want shields to reduce the chance of being hit, not reduce damage taken. That kind of thing.
  
• Just how easy/hard is it to import your art asetts? Is it easier than 3DGS? (ok, so that's a bad example...the art pipline for 3DGS is painful...). Is there a limit to skin size? Polygon count? Model size itself?
  
• Does it have easily definable collision detection? Is it a flag per model, per face, or do you use a special 'invisible brush/model' to indicate collision boundries?
  

Thanks for any help guys!

BlitzBasic products are said to be slow and ugly but i would't care if the network code would do what's told on the website. i would also be interested in a full un-biased review.

The ugly and slow statements can belong to the past very fast. Realm Crafter uses a new rendering kernel in beta versions (Irrlicht). So the BlitzBasic fact is not a critic any more. It will be a decent DX9 engine with shader support and dynamic shadows.

I liked to play with it's terrain editor and world editor.
Irrlicht will only bring it up.

I think it can be used perhaps for not MMorpg , but simple RPG ,
but how customizable can it be by code
(new combat system etc ...) ?

Hiya.

Well, I went ahead and broke down and got it...with the extra editors, of course. All totaled, it was $167 ($195 canadian) for RealmCrafter (with free update to v2.0 when it's released), MegaTerrains, SkinEditor, and CaveMaker.

So far I've only installed them and opened them once. Poking around I can see it's fairly straight foward; things are mainly labled as you would expect, and most of it is 'common language' for setting stuff up. It seems very modular in design, with the main RC window giving you access to all your exta goodies (be they add-on programs like CaveMaker, or even 'props' and 'model packs'). That's kinda nice. The biggest things I'm gonna have to get used to are work-flow related. In RC, it seems that the 'left/right' button usages are backwards. Left clicking brings up 'uses' of whatever tool you're using, and right clicking is for selecting/moving stuff. Wierd...I'm gonna try 'reversing' my mouse buttons to see if that makes it easier for me. Also, the screens for all tools are limited to a maximum of 1024x768 at this time. If you are that size, it's 'full screen'. If you go bigger, it goes into window mode at 1024x768. I'll have to see how I like to work in it. Oh, as an aside to that, the text for the tool buttons seems blurry to me; I suspect it's my video settings (I have it set to AAx4 and AFx4 and not 'by program preferences').

Anyway, from the looks of it, it's getting more and more powerful with regards to rendering stuff come v2.0. That'll be nice. From a "make a game on your own" point of view...I'm not dissappointed. It's definitly looking 'easier' to get a base RPG-style game up and running that 3DGS...at the cost of customizability. Still, you can customize RC quite a bit..as long as you're not trying to do something other than MMORPG/RPG. Which is just fine, because it doesn't try to be 'versitile'.

The scripting seems fairly powerful. And as soon as v2 gets out, and then they get the Pro version going you will have full source code to the engine.

Well, off to spend a day playing around with import/export and learning the tools.

Ok, tell us whenever you have made a playable level, to check it out online.
Interesting tool I you dont want to have everything custom in you game.

have got this along time ago,you can see from their test,if you wanted to make mmorpg for 20 people then it's ok for you ,cmon dude what you can expect from 50$ whatsocalled "mmorpg engine" , did you even know that delay public release of 2.0 since 5 months ago!
here is their TON of RC2 todolist left :

Quote:

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GE
Various Minor Application bugs (Fixes Ongoing: Update Thursday 25th)
Missing tabs or features (i.e. Gubbin/Armoury: Ongoing)
Picking Errors Fixed
End Graphics Fixed: Needs confirmation from Testers
RCTE Terrain Fixed
Untextured Objects (X Meshes) Fixed
Unloadable Objects (Some Meshes) Fixed
Clear Surface Fixed
Actor Model Crash Fixed
B3D Leak Partially Fixed, reduced from 12MB down to 1-2
Mipmapping on Alpha's Fixed
D3D Effects Framework
Documentation

Client
Mesh Animations
Rendering Optimizations of shaders, textures, lights, and stream source
3D Sound Library
Object Shaders
Scene Shaders
Reflection Shaders (Proposed)
Post Processing Shaders
Tangent Space shaders
Full Screen
TurnEntity Global Flag

Shaders
Lit Object 1 & 2
Alphas & Particles
Terrain - LOD
Terrain MegaTerrains
Trees
Shadow Mapping
Water
Normal Mapping
Parallax Mapping
Bloom/Tone Mapping
Black & white
Cel Shading

RC Tree System version 2.0
Core Code (Completed)
Lighting
Swaying
Normal Mapping
Sub-Surface scattering
Shadows

---

Estimate Completion?1 Year? 5 Months Delay+another 1 Year?Great!

A RC1 test result run by their staff :

Quote:

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ok npc count: 100
frames were about 4 frames per second very unplayable.
Keep in mind the npc's were all in view though.

Specs

amd 64 bit 3400
ram: ddr 400 1.5 GB

---

they will release RC2 Pro for 100$,50$ upgrade if you own current license,which mean you can get some source code of their hybrid c++ + blitzplus + blitz3d engine,imagine if you do that? you need to learn straight 3 different languages , in compare with wellknown Torque for it's networking capability,buy TGE and Mmorpg kit if you wanna serious in mmorpg,just need to learn their c script language and c++ .i don't want to advertise this but just wanna save you guys who is serious for another worthless money spent

Hiya.

Yeah...their "list of things to do" has me doubting their 'early 2007 release'. But, what the hell. I like new toys to tinker with. I'm sure I'll get at least a couple of months of fun outta these. Their interface and hot-key choices leave something to be desired, that's for sure! You can tell that the guy(s) writing it are 98% programers and 2% artists...I guess it makes perfect sense to them to use Ctrl-Right Click to place a model on a map, and regular old Left Click to...uh..to do absolutely *nothing*. o_O Talk about non-standard!

But still...it seems that once I get all the little fiddly bits down it will be fun to just kinda 'make an RPG'. (I'm not planning on an actual MMORPG...what I would want to do, RC couldn't handle; I knew that before I bought it). I still love A6...probably use it primarily still...but RealmCrafter is kinda like grabbing a cheeseburger, fries and a large coke. Its fast, easy, fun and tastes good...but it still doesn't beat barbequeing your own top sirloin, baked potatoe (with soure cream, chives and bacon), and and ice cold beer. RealmCrafter is the 'fast food' of the RPG engine creation tools I guess. It's good for what it does, but you can't really live off of it.

Hiya.

Ok. Uh, to put it bluntly...there are a LOT of 'fiddly bits'. The biggest problem I have with it is the documentation. A6's documentation is absolutely phenomenal when compaired to RC's. The 'tutorials' are not much more than "Click button 1. Now click button 2. Now click button 3. Done." ...in other words, it tells you what to do, but it doesn't explain why and what you are doing. The documents on a tool consist primarily of having a picture of the interface, and then a one-liner telling you what the button does. For example, You might see a picture of a tab called "Actors". The description would be "ACTORS - Click this to add actors." Oooo...kaaaayyyy... What *is* an Actor? *shrug* What can be an actor? *shrug* Do Actors have to be bipeds? *shrug* ...I think you get the point. In short, it seems like the program was/is documented by the programmers. They make the assumption that everyone knows about programming and how things work or dont work... "Well, what do you mean? C'mon! Everyone knows what a vertex array matrix is! Sheesh!"...

When I saw the list of what was comming up in RC2 I was pretty excited about all the graphical enhancements I'd get to play with. Now, I'm most excited about decent documentation and starting tutorials!

Still, I'm not dissapointed. The more I play with it, the more I'm figuring it out on my own. I was hoping it would be a LOT more striaght-forward...kinda like DarkBASIC Professiona's "FPS Creator" style program, but for RPG's. Ahh well...I'm still not sorry I bought it.

UPDATE!

Changed my mind. I'm kinda sorry I bought it. The documentation is pretty much useless or non-existant...and with RC2, for some reason, if you aren't connected to the internet, you can't access the documentation/help files. o_O

Crashes, I think, have to be part of the feature set. These are totally unexpected crashes too. You're clicking along, placing stuff, moving stuff around on your map, then BLAMMO! Crash. Why? No idea. It could happen when you are simply moving a house back to where you had it in the first place. Or maybe you rotate the camera to get a better view. Or maybe you are clicking a different tab. It will work perfectly fine for several of these 'opperations' (whatever they are), then, for some reason, it will just crash.

The importing/exporting and deleting of objects is mucho-screwdo. You have to do to many copy/paste/import to get a simple model into your project. You can "import a mesh"...but you have to 'pre-import' it first by copying the mesh into your project's folder (using normal Windows copy/paste/explorer methods; you can't do this from within RC). Along with it's texture...even if the .b3d format can store the texture in the object file...you still have to import the texture seperately using "import texture". Of course, you do that after you've already copied the texture to the *same* directory that you copied the mesh into (not imported using their "import mesh" tool; that's different). Confuseing? Yeah, it is.

Call me crasy, but I think when I read "Import Mesh" it should ask you for where the mesh is you want to import it, and where you want to store it in your project...and the program should do all the rest.

Lighting is also a bit odd. Seems too bright most of the time. But, I guess RC2, when it's finally 'finished' and not in beta, this will be taken care of.

All in all, RC has/had potential, but with very backward workflow, some nasty unstability, and virtually no documentation. Not worth the nigh-$200 I paid for everything...yet. Maybe when/if RC2 gets finalized and stuff, but right now, I'd have to tell folks to keep away from it.