Cipher Game Engine changes hands

#41 Yup. He should have just come up with his own zippy style for his apparently primo-zippy engine is all. I am tempted to lay down the $100 just to check out the demos :)

-J

#42 Garagegames should look into trademarking the "look and theme" of the site like winamp.com did.

This was a totally lame thing to do, and the fact he reads this thread, but won't reply tells me alot about what kind of person he must be.

#43 Not everyone likes to jump into a tank of sharks.

-J

#44 I really dsiagree that garagegames should get ultra-legal here. We're all grateful to garagegames.com for what they've done thus far, but getting involved in such things just sets bad precedent. How would you feel, for example, if Sega slapped garagegames.com with a lawsuit claiming that Marble Blast is too much like Monkey Ball?

In the end there are no truly unique ideas, and its already getting bad enough here in America with all the frivilous lawsuits, indefinite copyright extention, business method patents, patents of simple obvious algorithms, etc. Don't contribute to that madness. Once you start getting into lawsuits over how things "feel" and not the actual content involved you start losing me as someone who can support your cause.

#45 FYI: I was suggesting GG look at that as a way to protect the site from being ripped off in the future, not take legal action against Richard.

What really annoys me is; we all know Garagegames goes out of their way to not be the type of company you describe above, GG takes postconventional ethics to heart and yet they still get ripped off.

#46 I googled for Rik Heywood, he has credentials as a programmer, not as a marketing/web guy... I am more interested in making games than worrying about a poor choice in website theme, or copying banner ads. People make mistakes.
Fine, turn him over, he is getting burned on this side.

Who knows maybe Cipher has a nice scenegraph that can plug into Torque ... people have been bitching about shaders here for ages now... Well, Cipher uses OpenGL and appears to have some awfully nice shader support. Check out the shader designer video...

If Cipher has a nice clean API, a good exporter, nice skeletal, BSP stuff, realtime shadows, etc, whatever ... $100 ain't bad.

Here's a video I dug up on NVidia's Crazy Car Championship page... makes me look forward to the downloadable demos I'll tell you that...

I can't say I'll use Torque or Cipher for my independent development... though, there is nothing wrong with options.

-J

#47 Sorry to have upset people so much. I thought we all just wanted to make games.
I feel I need to answer a few of the comments made against me here.

The design is a fairly common one, with logo bar at the top and links down the side. As others have pointed out, many gaming news sites use the same layout. I was surprised that people found it actually, as I've only told a couple of people about it as the site is still in development.

Cipher has been in development for over 3 years (by me) and has been licensed to developers over most of that time from Synaptic Soup. After Synaptic Soup closed, I wanted to continue to support existing Cipher developers and make it more accessible to new developers, hence the new site and pricing.

Nvidia used Cipher to show off bump mapping and shader technology when the Geforce was released with a demo of our racing game CCC. http://nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=crazycar

Rik

#48 As far as the site is concerned, yes there are considerable similarities but I've got too agree that it's a very common layout (just take a look at phpnuke for example).

If you're interested in seeing some real design rips, ask me and I'll be more than glad to post some of our stuff which has been ripped over and over again.

As for business models and EULA's, I can't comment as I really don't know enough about what's considered legal to imitate and what isn't (although I do know that there are tons of 'template' business models, contracts, licenses, and so on used in various industries. This probably doesn't apply here as this is quite a small market niche).

All that aside, the rendering engine looks excellent.

#49 Anyone that "confuses" the Cipher site with this one has to be a moron, and that is what the legal eagles will tell you also, it would have to cause consumer confusion, very plain and simple . . .

Plus the GG site is nice and clean and functional, and looks just as simlar to dozens of other sites with the same type of content, news, forums and banners . . . like Luigi points out above the default for most portal/forum packes looks just about as similar.

Now the banner and slogan are pretty blatant, but is "imitation the sincerest form of flattery" or not anymore?
It appears that he pulled them after just a tiny bit of bitching I don't think Rik had any maliscous intent, just a little bit of bad judgement.

Like Joshua, I think plunking down the $100 just to get the a peek at the code is worth it. I mean that is the price of 1.5/2 printed books easily. Just from a learning experience and resource it would be worth $100 about as much as Torque is.

I have to say, that from the screen shots the Cipher engine looks way more "up to date" visually. But it proof is in the "pudding" and the pudding is made from tools support and clean well documented source code.

I guess it will cost $100 to see what the pudding ingredients are.

#50 There aren't any of the max tools or >any< documentation above a limited number of function descriptions at the moment. Even the most impressive look demo didn't work (to be fair it was looks like it was missing some simple script) and they fixed that quickly. I'd say in hindsight to wait until they have the forums up and see what people have to say.

$100 is cheap, but it really doesn't deliver what it says on the tin yet. But to be fair it looks like this kind of got out before it was intended to.

I agree with Jarrod (*shudder*) on the look and feel though, it is somewhat common. And I agree with Rik in that I think most of us are here just to make games...

#51 I wouldn't really say a thing if the GG website used a "sophisticated" design, but please, it's "tables with a 2 pixel border", you can't really call that a design (one could protect).

#52 One thing I noticed is that there are no actual games for the engine. TGE of course has Tribes 2 and man small games to its name.

#53 I think the number of independent projects being sold / developed here using TGE really show off its flexibility. If Cipher has been around for a few years and there are no demos or products... well it seems suspect to me.

John.

#54 If you cared to read up you wouldn't be wondering why there are not as many demos/products.

#55 Well I did read up on the engine and the information I got left me wondering. For instance on the Synaptic Soup site I found info on them closing and that the engine is still being supported for existing customers (and apparently sold to new customers):

Quote:

Cipher Under New Management
Customers using Cipher will be pleased to know that this leading edge game engine is now under new management and will continue to be supported and developed by its new owner. A full source code license now costs only $100. All enquiries reguarding Cipher should now be sent to www.cipherengine.com.

Then I checked out the Cipher site and I read this:

Quote:

15. Who else is using Cipher?
Cipher is being used by a number of organisations now, from start-ups to well established game studios. Cipher is also being used by research groups and major hardware vendors like NVidia and 3D Labs.

So my question still stands, 'who is using the engine to develop games and what kind of games are they'. I understand that the site is new, but the product is not (as far as I can tell). The most info I could gather was on the Synaptic Soup, under 'testimonials', there are two game developers with quotes.

Am I missing something?

John.

#56 @Samo: The problem is not the design of the site. It is the look of the ad, the wording of the ad, the layout of the ad, the pricing, the business idea, the approach, etc. Rik has pulled the ad without any notice from GarageGames.

Ideas cannot be copyrighted or patented. That said, we also do not intend on doing anything about this even if they were. I'm sure that Rik will eventually find his own market and voice.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#57 @George: Of course rik didn't steal html.. after all it's not html it's php! doh!
But he definetly looked at GG's site and did the same in php imitating the layout.. click on login or register.. they are the same!

#58 :o) How bizzare. Time for an "In this thread...strangely rant again"

Only just read these posts while looking for cipher (encryption) stuff. It seems to me that most posts here (Exception for Jeff Tunnell and one or two others) are from people who are threatened by the cipher engine. As for the web site issue. As both sites are in php and the template for the layout is readily available off the shelf, only graphics could possibly have been copied as the php code is cookie cutter stuff.

As for the cipher engine. It's graphics are definitely better than Torque. Integrating shaders into torque is a real pain and as someone on one of these forums once said (well as near as I can remember anyways) "All this community code updating, while fantastic, has lead to a very hard to understand engine" and 400k lines of code scares me (a professional programmer for some 10 years now) a great deal.

I'm no beginner programmer, but if I ever have to add stuff to this engine I get scared (I mean genuine heart pounding stuff). Most recently I added fragment and vertex program support and believe you me I am not going through that again.

I think this is why there are so few completed games out there which use torque. It's only when you start your project that you realise that you need to add so many things that are missing. It then occurs to you (well it did me anyways) that this engine was built for tribes and tribes alone. Making a fps is simple as anything, but try making a third person game and unless it's a simple third person shooter i.e. press the tab key in the fps demo then fix the camera there by modifying the scripts, then it's near impossible to do without serious engine overhaul.

As anyone who plays and loves games and is in the indie scene has probably had the same flashes of panic I have at the thought that if you make a 3d game that isn't dead simple like a five minute picker upper or god forbit a fps (yes the grammar is correct as this translates to a first person shooter for all you spelling nitpickers) then the graphics that you can produce with torque simple will not cut it. No reflections, no shaders etc etc.

Melf and others have added a lot of stuff over the years (I've been a member from pretty much day one), but there comes a time when you simply have to say GG guys you've had two years and the bug list hasn't changed much in all that time so whats the deal? And don't get me started on documentation. Sorry people but a few generated docs don't cut it! Hell even a demo disk comes with more meaningful documentation than that!!

I see lots of torque projects and sadly so few get finished once the teams realise how much work they need to do on the engine just to get to the demo stage. We seriously need a 1.3 or 1.4 release with some much needed features to get us all excited again. To say engine development is getting stale (I'm talking official dev not community dev) is an understatement.

With the Cipher engine the phrase "The grass is always greener..." comes to mind and sadly this Cow herder is seriously staring to eye the bridge and forget about the trolls underneath it.

#59 We may be expecting to only sell a hundred or a few thousand units but poor graphics and a poor graphics engine will limit this figure even more. I've done my market research and aside from mod'ing existing games no-one is really getting excited about fps games except doom 3 and half life 2 and more recently a glimmer about quake 4. Paying for an indie fps just plain got laughted at by most and a tentative if it was of doom 3/halflife 2 quality they would by the rest. On my rpg questions, there was a more favourable response as no-one seems to do this stuff well on the pc since ultima it appears (my targets were fps people with regards to rpgs and fps games). As always multiplayer was high on everyones list. Most of the audience I asked (1000 people with 252 complete replies and a further 150 near completed replies) sited graphics as a very high factor in their decision to buy a new game or download a shareware title. Novelty factor came a close second such things as quirky stuff to show mates that kind of thing. Lastly but by no means least was the quick play factor. Strangely when asked to think about it most people didn't see quick play as an issue, just that they liked stuff you could simply pick up and have a go at. This was particularly evident with female gamers I questioned (got to say a thanks to my local GAME store for letting me bother their customers for four whole days).

Like it or not our customers want us to deliver games on a par with full blown development houses even though we are only two or three people teams (four or five if your lucky!!) In this respect torque is letting us down on the graphics from. And before you say well you can add pixel and vertex shaders to torque. You need to remember that many indie developers are not professional engine coders and we are often forced to be jacks of all trades to get our games done. In this respect we simply do not have the time or resources to trawl through 400k lines of code to add such things and we certainly don't have the reosurces to bug fix these features once we add them.

Because of this many look to the community and garage games in particular to modify the engine with at least basic support for these features. Those that ask are not whiners or lazy but, are in fact the very same people who may be buying your game in the future. They ask because they do not have the resources to add these features or even know where to look to add them. In this respect Jeff Tunnells comments in previous shader threads have been unhelpful, often placing the duty on the community to do this work. Surely the GG staff have a far more intimate knowledge of the engine than the community do and isn't it then down to them to, if not do the work, then tell everyone what to modify and where!

I know that I for one would have saved a few months work (a long time to an indie) if anyone at all from GG had bothered to reply to the numerous posts asking how to add this support to the engine.

For this reason alone I will probably be buying the Cipher engine and evaluating it with a view to moving over from Torque. If the support for adding features and the documentation are even marginally better than torque then the time I save head scratching at seemingly random function calling (anyone tried looking through the shape classes at the render calls or the scene graph stuff lately) will more than make up for the move.

rant over (just had to get that off the old chest)

#60 I'm not trying to start an argument or tell you how to feel (I recently blew up in a thread for similar reasons):

In your survey did you mention the number of people that can play together in a game? I happen to think this is one of Torques strongest points. Or that vehicle play is in the game.

Don't take this the wrong way, I'm purely curious about the responses when you use a bit of marketing to show what your game will have over the high end games.

Let me know what you think...

John.

Edit: Forgot the massive terrain... :)