mat_bones? I personally didnt know about it. Okay i dont need it, cause my games are low end :P(visual)
But interesting.

Gretes
Rackscha

Maybe because the engine core has a lot more features then the DLL. Locoweed used his own DLLs for a specific purpose but the 3dgs has to be programmed to fit for any game in any situation meaning that c_trace for example generates a lot more data than you might actually need.

So basically it is just the decision between a lot of comfort or a lot of performance.
And since 3dgs wants to support all the noobs it has a lot of comfort in scripting (and still people are whining that it hasnt got enough features).

LOD is not always that important as you stress it. Current hardware even does not care much about LOD. It can "eat" polygons without any problems. The number of draw calls and the size of textures are much more important. When I am testing my sci-fi and fantasy scenes in different engines I often realize that downsizing textures and reducing shader quality affects the FPS numbers much more than reducing polygons.

Although it is important to reduce polygons for collision detection, physics or other CPU-related content. In these cases it makes a huge difference.

But this can differ when you are on old hardware, consoles or mobile devices. I am still learning with our latest projects how they behave.

Baking can make a difference if done right. But it always comes with higher memory needed for all the baked maps. So you need good asset management, maybe streaming and a good memory manager.

Maybe... but especially c_trace allows to set a lot of IGNORE_ flags which make c_trace remarkably faster depending on your needs...

Hi, been long since I post here, I mostly just lurking here.
Okay, so the thread is "is 3DGS is dying?", well I guess(or hope) not
But I do think that it seriously need some game to show the teeth. I know that there are some game recently released but I don't think it really represent what 3DGS got.

I dont want to compare it with other tool but it can't be helped, take a look at Unity free version. It give you a full support of shaders(except r2t and shadows). And even can make MMOG with that too I guess(though I'm not sure bout this). In 3DGS, the free version can only make games that look like was made 10 years ago, although this really depends on the user, but how can people get interested? And unless you're using the pro version, people can see your game resource, although there are some good packers tool but only if people can find it. And the list can still go on...

Now I know that I havent touch 3DGS for a long time since I switch to flash games, but I must say that conitec took a wrong step by stopping A7 and starting A8.
Why not just improve A7? Give it more support like mobile platform capabilities and stuffs?

Well, long story short, 3DGS doesn't let people create game easy(like it used to be in the previous versions), there's too much effort to put in that now can/should be eliminated somehow.

A8 was the only way they'd get some money in their pockets thats all... to be honest i dont even see why people are buying it and its incomplete, though i do see alot of useful features, i think we can all agree that it couldve been added to A7... theres no SIGNIFICANTLY different feature that makes the versions standout, unless you count physX

now, i in no way want to hate on the engine but personally its obvious that 3dgs is slowly dying, keyword: "slowly", look at this what happened to me:

[in class, logs on to 3dgs site]
teacher: hmm, what a ugly site, you need to change how it looks, its just horrible
me: ahm, its not mine, its the gamestudio site
teacher: oh..

That alone tells you what others first impressions are, lame gallery, no videos? wtf?, lame 2d work, lame presentation.

I've bought A8 (for 50% off of upgrade price) as soon as it was possible, even though it almost didn't have any new features. Why did I buy it then at all?
Because now I get at least 2 years of free updates and meanwhile I can shape the engine to some extent myself, I can request little but (for me) important features like the new d3d_entsort mode.
You don't pay for a finished product with feature ABC when you buy gamestudio but rather for a 2-year-free-updates-licence.


The page is really horrible and by far the worst part of the product. :<

The previous page was a whole lot more horrible. Hard to imagine...

Regarding the Google statistics:

Search results do not always reveal a programs popularity. When you know the places where to get answers to your software there is no need to google it.

In particular, Gamestudio offers a nice hand book and has - with this forum - a "single point of truth". If you know this, you do not need Google!

Unity is new and interesting but the knowledge is rare and scattered all over the net so that you need to search for it.

... my theory


EDIT: What might upset people in this forum - me too - is that there was no visible improvement with the A8 update. When a company does not invest in a new version which is up to date and comparable to other products in a higher price segment will look like "Hey let's get the rest of cash we can get and then close the store". This is very pesimistic but it is just a personal point of view.

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