Getting Started

#1 Er... You DO know this is an engine and not a point and click game maker? This is for real developing, not making some kiddie game. Yes, in the real world it actually takes work to make something.

#2 Welcome to the community. Seems like you've realized whats in front of you and you're ready to embrace it now. Good luck!

#3

Quote:I saw Minions of Mirth and was horrified. I hope I can create something alot more asthetically pleasing than MoM.

As a matter of fact, if all a game has going for it is visuals, then it's just as bad as if it had bad visuals. The fact that MoM reached 40,000 registered subscribers without a single advertising campaign should tell you something about that. But if you're just starting to look into making an RPG, then you'll find out the truth of things soon enough.

Welcome to the GG community, and good luck on your project :)

#4 One week in.... and you are already pissing off the locals....

Torque for Teens is a great starting point. You will have a finished product by the end of the book. Think small and slowly add functionality to your RPG. Everything takes time.

#5 Eh.. a frustrated newcomer? Thats not very uncommon actually... like Neill said, its not a point-and-click-make-your-game-in-no-time-and-beat-Oblivion thingy for sure...atleast thats what I'd make of it :)

Anyway, enjoy yourself while you can and get cracking... but remember patience is the key, if you just get pissed you won't get much done at all...

And yeah, nice config you got there... I've been programming with OpenGL for a a few years now, and all I have is this:

Athlon XP 1.5 GHz
512 MB RAM (saves some of the blushes)
40 GB HDD (yes, they still exist outside the museum)
GeForce 2 MX (truly vintage, even lacks support for multi-texturing)

So yeah, I've kept going, and I think with a rig like that, you could do a lot, just stick with it...

And BTW, please don't post stuff like that about MoM, it might not be WoW, but you have no idea about what went into its making... (HINT: it wasn't made by a multi-billion dollar company called...er... Blizzard, was it?), and its definitely going to take you more than "a few ideas in your head" to better it.

#6 I didn't mean anything by my MoM comment. I was just basing my initial expectations of it based off the screenshots of TGEA on GGs site. They make it look all nice and easy on their page, but in reality it's not so easy.

#7 Jeramy, here is my advice to you. Try to start slowly and try to avoid frustration. Go through every tutorial in your books and online. Accept that this is a learning experience and that if you stick with it, you will be rewarded in the end.

Also, in the interest of avoiding frustrated newcomers, how do you personally feel we could improve the way we represent our products and/or emphasize the level of knowledge required to get started with each of our engines?

If you feel like something in the product pages made it seem easier to learn to you than it was after you bought the product, please let me know.

Good luck and stick with it!

#8 Actually I'm glad you asked this. A very simple way of showing the how the level, be it intermediate, advanced or whatever is to put up a demo video of what it takes to put togther a very small game. 1 zone, one player model, etc...

This way when people are looking at the product, and deciding whether it's for them or not they can see the level of difficulty it might take to put together something.

#9 Welcome to the community, I would suggest you get Torsion too, as debugging the scripts is as essential as debugging the Code.

In MoM's defence, It was made with TGE if I'm not mistaken. Not TGEA.

Quote:
They make it look all nice and easy on their page, but in reality it's not so easy

To have great art takes great skill (or a little cash). It's not always about the engine. TGEA is powerfull. Not trying to pimp my game, but do a search for Solar Battles. The models I use was bought, and imo I think it looks pretty decent ingame.

#10 Hey Jeramy. Like some of the others, I want to welcome you to the community. It's true that quite a few newcomers to Torque Technology feel overwhelmed by the tech, and underwhelmed with what they feel they can accomplish in the beginning.

I am actually in the process of writing new documentation for the engines, particularly focused on TGEA right now. For tutorials, up until the TGEA 1.7 Beta, there was not a whole lot to go on at first. That's why it was labeled as Advanced. On top of documentation, I will be writing tutorials of all degrees. Beginner tutorials will help people become familiar with the tools and system, whereas advanced tutorials will expose the power of the engine and go crazy with it.

I don't think you were looking for a point-and-click engine, but I also don't think there is anything on the product pages that make the process sound simple. Developing a game of any kind is tough work and requires patience.

Like you, I started making MUD engines from scratch in the beginning, and even that was daunting. From the sounds of it, I bet you came from the same Simutronics community as me: Dragonrealms, Gemstone, etc =). As a Simutroncs fanboy from the old days, I got a special tour of the Hero Engine at GDC. It is just as complex, if not more, than Torque.

Don't feel so discouraged. Hang in there and it'll come to you.

#11 gotta admit that hero engine is pretty cool. wish the tools for TGE were that polished.

#12 @Jeramy - I feel your pain.

I too feel that current technology is too disorganized and too time consuming for Indies to really have a chance at making great games in a relatively small amount of time.

The people that say "start with something simple, read all of the documentation, go through all of the tutorials," are still not thinking outside of the box.

Writing more documentation, providing more tutorials, etc simply isn't going to streamline game development for Indies. That's just going to train a whole bunch of people how to work around today's technological mess.

What if we started training people how to fix the mess so we can stop spinning our wheels and actually start being productive? Better yet, what if we actually banded together and fixed the mess ourselves?

Indie 2.0 - The Brewing Revolution
...are you ready?

#13

Quote:
That's just going to train a whole bunch of people how to work around today's technological mess.

Conversely, more documentation and tutorials can result in what you suggested: fixing the "mess." I'm not sure what the "mess" is, but by participating in the massive Bug Report storm going on, posting in the feedback sections (engine and docs), and so on, can result in what your end goal might be.

Quote:
...making great games in a relatively small amount of time.

Is there such a thing when it comes to game development, Indie or otherwise? I've heard of Indie games taking a month to create, or years. I don't believe there is a defined standard for anything when it comes to this industry, except "make it fun" and "hopefully make some money."

Thinking outside the box is a great idea, but sometimes you need to be in the box to see the guts to fix. Once you know what's on the inside, you can step out and try something new.

#14 Well here's another problem. I went to http://www.torqueschool.com and took a look at the classes available. The introduction to the torque engine class is $200. My sides are still hurting from all the laughing. This class is supposed to show you how to compile and setup the Torque engine so that you can get started. $200!

#15 Funny thing, Jeramy. That was going to be my class. I was originally asked to teach the Intro class, GUI 101, and maybe some AFX stuff. The Intro class was designed to go way beyond compiling the engine, believe me.

The guys there have a good concept, and probably will have some great information available.

I just decided to go another route, but none of this has to do with what you are posting about =)

#16 @Jeremy - welcome to the community. As a novice programmer and ok artist, and even if you were brilliant, you'd still need other people to help you create a game regardless of what engine you use. GG is a two way street I think - developers contribute a ton to the forums / resources / IRC, etc. So you're not helping yourself out by cutting people down and pissing people off. Instead, you could start by asking questions, getting your feet wet, contributing and even helping out on an existing dev team.

As for the MoM engine - if you had taken the time to really look at it, you'd be able to figure out why 40K people have registered and purchased the game (including myself), why it stacks up to other MMO engines even though most MMOs have a budget an order of magnitude higher than they did. They've also distributed it free(!) to anyone who has purchased TGE and ArcaneFX. And the art is solid - they've won a bunch of awards for the game and their artists are winning awards on other games they're doing as well. It was also done in TGE.

I'm also a bit confused about your comparison to the Hero engine. Do you know what hero is going to cost? anyone? I'm guessing upwards of $100K. We started a couple years back by doing a Half-Life 2 (Source engine) mod and all was peachy until we realized it would cost 250K to license and do what we needed it to do.

As for your progression/frustration, when you're done with Torque for Teens, get Ed Maurina's Game Programmer's Guide - it's a good intro to TGE. You should also probably start with TGE (not TGEA), as the art pipeline is shorter, it's easier to get acclimated to, etc. When you're first getting into Torque, wading through the engine can be a challenge. But once you've got basic knowledge of a few things (GUI editor, mission editor, the art pipeline for DIF and DTS objects, terrain editing, networking, passing objects back and forth in the console, etc), you can do a ton with this engine. There are people using this engine who have tens of thousands of users in their games - and the engines are only getting better.

You live in Hawaii man, anything is possible.

#17

Quote:Do you know what hero is going to cost? anyone? I'm guessing upwards of $100K.

Your off by 10 x ... seriously.

#18 @Tom - too rich for my blood... ;)

#19 10x less? or 10x more? =)

#20 More... yeh.