Tell you the truth I have always had a low GPU system, my last 2 PC's used the Intel HD on-board system. I hate trying to find games on Steam. Some many awesome games I just can't run...
This engine is gold for producing games that can run on PC's that are 8gb ram and Intel HD. I can not be alone in being locked out of the 90% of PC gamers with killer rigs. If Steam is 2 Million users and 10% are like me, then there is a 200,000 user base that is dying for 3dgs built games.

Anyways

*Bump

Anyone - What are you target audiences? I personally think building a FPS-Shooter with 3dgs is foolish. However this is still a great engine that runs on almost any Windows system these days. We have seen a few releases these last months and they are all smart ,creative games that do not try to eclipse the EU4 Shooter machine.

As a group, what kinds of games and audiences should we be targeting?

Only because you dont know the engine 100%... If a person wanted to use low res graphics to style their game and with optimal code, why not?

It all depends on your own ability to create a game. I could personally, and easily create a low res fps and market it to people with low end rigs with this engine... Once my friend figures out shaders a bit more, we will likely start something.



Basically anything you can possibly create, can be targeted at any audience with the right marketing tact.

you can make very bad performance games with 3dgs easily... simple low quality levels run fast, but as you increase level and rendering complexity, performance falls rapidly... you so have to write and optimize for your particular game everything by yourself, that can make development longer than expected.

@sivan - I plan to keep all my work simple as I would use UE4 for any heavy project. However I would love if you could tell us about the optimization issues and give us insight into how much work that would be for a simpler programmer like me.

Yes, optimization is a really important step. I think most big-name games have a selection of different quality levels that you can use to get the best performance.

Creating a user menu with different screen sizes, texture size, detail level for models, whether to use shaders, shadows etc... is an important step in any serious game production.

Also, some of the built in functions like "camera.clip_far" and LOD (Levels of Detail) are critical things for getting any game to run smoothly. I think 3DGS is actually a very powerful engine, but it does not do these things for you automatically.

Also, the way you write your code can have an impact on your game too. I am not an expert in this area, I basically taught myself lite-c by trial and error, but I'm sure some of the more advanced programmers on the forum could explain further.

probably I could...

Well this idea is extremely theoretical as people nowadays rarely accept a DirectX7 level of graphics quality. So it may be true that the absolute minimum requirements 3DGS has are lower than for e.g. UE4. That's not some Acknex optimization magic though but simply the absence of many features. Just try to apply normal maps to all of your surfaces (which modern internal GPUs can handle just fine) and start to welcome practical and performance problems in 3DGS. I mean it in theory is not impossible to create a game that consists just of some textured polygons with a little bit of lighting. But practically speaking it's going to be very difficult to actually convince people of such a level of quality...

I mean even two-man-shows like those simulator games (that sell very well) use all kinds of advanced shader work and other techniques (as e.g. managing seamlessly driving your bus through an entire city otherwise would be a performance nightmare). The same goes for those horror games that pop up since Slenderman entered the fray. Going lower also means looking worse than most 3D smartphone games. That's why I don't see a market for games on an ultra low technical level. It's not that a modern engine is slow - they enable you to use advanced features at a fantastic performance and with this I don't mean just "luxury" features like tesselation but simple shader or lighting work. Things like that have become a no brainer today and e.g. applying normal maps gives a huge improvement in visual quality while costing very little performance - even on modern iGPUs. A halfway modern version of those things even can run BF4 flawlessly with 30-40 fps. That's why I don't think there'll be many that will take a downgrade to BF1942 graphics without a grain of salt...

So if you're really aiming at the 8GB IntelHD customers still go for a modern engine rather than 3DGS. Or maybe switch to the mobile smartphone market entirely as you have many chances to target those people as well as others here. With a modern engine you even could target both the smartphone and PC crowd via multiple publishing options - this sounds like the best option to me...

@Toast - Thanks for the reply and information. I know for a fact that UE4 choke my system on anything but very low settings. I have to hunt for games on the Steam Store that are very dated. I can run Borderlands 2 on medium at 1080, otherwise I'm out of luck for new content. I see the current releases from this engine and even the contest games and I think of all the people I know who can and would play these games. I see windows 8-10 moving to mobile and tablet spaces where a dedicated GPU card will not be an option.

LOl in the end thank you for the reply and I may be holding on to hope. I though it was a simple matter of being held to the DirectX9 base. However, now that you guys are talking about the inefficiency of the engine, that is a new issue.

, I thought that was the main issue (okay maybe the tools are...). Still if you don't go for huge amount of polygons and the most advanced shaders, you can still get good results. That's why I agree with this -> "I personally think building a FPS-Shooter with 3dgs is foolish." cause many commercial fps's require high poly models and good shaders to look good (cause of the close camera). Low poly models are easier to get right.

I would say that target audiences for professional/commercial games mainly are audiences that want: creative games (puzzle games etc.), 2d games?, simulation games (not the city ones), rpg (with isometric or top-down/zoomed out camera), possible rts (if you are good with ai), turnbased, arcade games (remake of classics etc.). Perhaps space games too cause they tend to have less props/objects and so are less heavy?