Plan for John Kabus
by John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) · 04/01/2003 (2:47 pm) · 2 comments
Project 'Orcs' first plan entry.
All right, this first entry is nothing more than a shrink session and a brief background of our development / design team. Our product is currently unnamed. Orcs is the internal project name and has nothing to do with the game's premise or content. Our team consists of myself, a developer / designer, and two designers with backgrounds in building Half-Life levels. The team has been together for about two years and was previously working on the same project under a proprietary game engine. I was trying to build the engine while working full time, and as you can imagine, it wasn't working out very well. That's not to say the engine wasn't great... it just wasn't done.
The time came when I decided that actually completing the game was more important than having the perfect engine, so I decided to look into 3rd party game engines. Obviously we are on a budget, so our first pass was through the Open Source community. We checkout the usual suspects; Crystal Space, Nevrax, NeoEngine... and some of them looked really good, but none of them were complete. After finding Torque we decided that using an engine that already has published titles on it out weighed any graphic shortcomings.
I have to admit that I'm still coming to terms with a few of the shortcomings, like doors, platforms, graphics, and what appears at first glance to be a questionable AI interface. The indoor / terrain engine, however, is amazing. When I look back at a lot of games that inspired me, I think of how much better they could have been with a similar style engine. Unreal, for instance, was moving due to its use of indoor and outdoor environments. To see the Unreal universe expanded with a terrain engine would be amazing.
The following is a list of complaints I have after just a few weeks of working with the engine. I'm hoping that the issues are just my inexperience with the design environment talking and that things will get easier.
1 - Was it really necessary to rip half of the damn code out of the engine? Tribes 2 wasn't that great and the really unique part of the engine is the integrated indoor / terrain engine which we _ARE_ allowed to use.
2 - Hammer sucks plain and simple. 'Carve' should be renamed to 'Tear geometry'.
3 - I haven't been able to get a version of max2map to work well. It constantly chokes on complex scenes and concave objects.
4 - All of the interiors look like they were rendered in Half-Life (not good).
5 - The renderer is looking very dated already. I know the engine is something like two years old, but hopefully with all of the additions going into the engine someone will add per-light, per-pixel lighting and bump mapping.
The engine is very impressive it just needs a facelift. This was just a list of the things that jump out at me. Torque did put our project about twelve months a head of schedule, so although these things do suck, I can live with them (for now).
Some things I noticed about the community. I'm not sure if the community has moderators, but being a long time member of the OpenGL board I must say that the people here are _A_LOT_ more friendly and easy to get along with. I've been perusing through the forums and I've seen very few incidents of flaming or the 'stupid question' attitude.
Plan related info:
1 - Get together and regroup. Discuss storyline, play style, look and feel, texture libraries, work on preliminary sketches for prefab look and feel, and toss around level ideas.
All right, this first entry is nothing more than a shrink session and a brief background of our development / design team. Our product is currently unnamed. Orcs is the internal project name and has nothing to do with the game's premise or content. Our team consists of myself, a developer / designer, and two designers with backgrounds in building Half-Life levels. The team has been together for about two years and was previously working on the same project under a proprietary game engine. I was trying to build the engine while working full time, and as you can imagine, it wasn't working out very well. That's not to say the engine wasn't great... it just wasn't done.
The time came when I decided that actually completing the game was more important than having the perfect engine, so I decided to look into 3rd party game engines. Obviously we are on a budget, so our first pass was through the Open Source community. We checkout the usual suspects; Crystal Space, Nevrax, NeoEngine... and some of them looked really good, but none of them were complete. After finding Torque we decided that using an engine that already has published titles on it out weighed any graphic shortcomings.
I have to admit that I'm still coming to terms with a few of the shortcomings, like doors, platforms, graphics, and what appears at first glance to be a questionable AI interface. The indoor / terrain engine, however, is amazing. When I look back at a lot of games that inspired me, I think of how much better they could have been with a similar style engine. Unreal, for instance, was moving due to its use of indoor and outdoor environments. To see the Unreal universe expanded with a terrain engine would be amazing.
The following is a list of complaints I have after just a few weeks of working with the engine. I'm hoping that the issues are just my inexperience with the design environment talking and that things will get easier.
1 - Was it really necessary to rip half of the damn code out of the engine? Tribes 2 wasn't that great and the really unique part of the engine is the integrated indoor / terrain engine which we _ARE_ allowed to use.
2 - Hammer sucks plain and simple. 'Carve' should be renamed to 'Tear geometry'.
3 - I haven't been able to get a version of max2map to work well. It constantly chokes on complex scenes and concave objects.
4 - All of the interiors look like they were rendered in Half-Life (not good).
5 - The renderer is looking very dated already. I know the engine is something like two years old, but hopefully with all of the additions going into the engine someone will add per-light, per-pixel lighting and bump mapping.
The engine is very impressive it just needs a facelift. This was just a list of the things that jump out at me. Torque did put our project about twelve months a head of schedule, so although these things do suck, I can live with them (for now).
Some things I noticed about the community. I'm not sure if the community has moderators, but being a long time member of the OpenGL board I must say that the people here are _A_LOT_ more friendly and easy to get along with. I've been perusing through the forums and I've seen very few incidents of flaming or the 'stupid question' attitude.
Plan related info:
1 - Get together and regroup. Discuss storyline, play style, look and feel, texture libraries, work on preliminary sketches for prefab look and feel, and toss around level ideas.
#2
04/01/2003 (6:45 pm)
congrats to me, I finally learned how to use the plan editor (avoid paste from MS Word)...
Torque Owner John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)