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