Creating a sports game with TGE

#1

Quote:Do you think TGE has the power to rival published companies like EA and their sports series?

Torque can potentially be modified to compete... the better question is do you have the budget to compete with companies like EA?

#2 It would take much more work modyfying torque than it would to write your own engine. Torque cant compete with any xbox game. Maybe a few hard-core marble blast fans would argue though.

#3 So if the sports game was specifically made for the PC it would still be better to write your own engine? The games mentioned are on the PC as well as the Xbox.

#4 Torque would definitely provide you a strong foundation for a game engine; it gives you networking, rendering framework, lots of utility code...

The big issue, though, is the budget. I think you could get a basic game of, say, baseball put together pretty handily just in script, but to get it really polished and solid (read: salable) would probably involve a lot of tweaking of the character animation engine and perhaps interior rendering, too.

#5 If the budget allows for mocap of the players for the animation would it be an issue for TGE? Right now I am reviewing TGE compared to other engines and wanted to see how it compares in terms of sports mocap, ball physics, etc. I have gotten mixed replies stating it would be better to build an engine vs. modifiying TGE, so I am a little confused.

Thanks for your feedback. I should be reviewing the engine myself now, but wanted to get a quick and dirty answer from people who have more experience with TGE than I currently have.

#6

Quote:Torque would definitely provide you a strong foundation for a game engine; it gives you networking, rendering framework, lots of utility code...

I am sure I will get flamed for this for being negative but here goes . . .

This should be qualitifed to say, a "strong foundation for a FPS Tribes2 like game engine".

The most time consuming part of using Torque is trying to figure out what is being used, what is dead code and what it WON'T do.
Some features I wanted to implement that I assumed from coding against other game engines would be "simple" or "straight" foward.
It most cases, if you want to deviate from the T2 style mechanics you have to do alot of rip and replace.

There are lots of cruft code from T2 as it is, 90% of it is not applicable to any kind of baseball game, thus you spend more time
actually figuring out what can stay and what needs to go.

Mocap has nothing to do with it, ball physics has nothing to do with it.

Torque uses exported meshes and animations from an external program, that is where the mocap would have to be applied.
Ball physics is just some code that would need to be written.

The reality is that Torque is in my PERSONAL opinion a FPS framework, more than an "engine", it is not very modular at all.

Until Torque becomes more modular and some serious refactoring is implemented, it is going to be more appropriate for Tribes2 style first person shooters without lots of and lots of work.

#7 Whether you hand animate or generate animation data from motion capture, it shouldn't matter to this (or indeed, any other) engine as long as you export it into the proper format.

You would probably have to spend some time revamping the physics if you want a very realistic game, but the time involved would definately be much, much less than writing an engine from scratch.

Torque support anything console though, and I'm not sure it would be a good idea to count on being able to port Torque to a console platform. If you want to ship on console, you should consider licensing an engine like renderware.

If you're happy being PC only for the moment, Torque should suit your needs just as well as any other engine (that I can think of, anyway) on the market.

#8

Quote:Do you think TGE has the power to rival published companies like EA and their sports series?

No. But for marketing, not technical reasons. Here's a news article from today:

Quote:Microsoft Corp on Tuesday said it will not release new versions of its sports video games this fall in a move Wall Street saw as opening the door to deeper ties with industry leader Electronic Arts Inc. In recent years, Microsoft, Sony Corp. (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) and Sega Corp, among others, have contended with the growing dominance of EA in sports games, particularly football. Securities analyst Michael Pachter raised his price target on EA to $64 from $56 and said the decreased competition would help the company increase its market share.

#9 LOL...you posted over two years after the first post. I am sure he gave up on that game at least a year ago. But who knows, maybe he will post on this thread, stating otherwise.

#10 Guess not....