3D Game Studio A6--Anyone Tried It?

#41 I am an amateur so I like black boxes :)

However a part, may be, from game programming , generally speaking, it is a hard to agree with you.
Let's consider a Data Base, Access, for example
Professional people expect flexibility and a programming language . as well.
I dont' suppose they would be happy if MS say :

"Hey ,you can develop any kind of data base provide of course you are prepared to tweak my software"

The point is that game programming is still a black art.
That' why a lot of coders are still "proud" to have the source


If you go on GameDev web site you find a lot of people claiming that a "true" coder should start from the scratch, opengl , direct x, and all that stuff

Never seen a finished game game made by these guys ,anyway

#42 Ah, but you are still wrong. Access is not a professional database. Access is a utility to help people with simple needs, such as a basic phone index.

A professional database is Oracle.

You cannot run Oracle without being willing to tweak it. Becoming a skilled Oracle professional is a rather arduous process, one that can take many years to become really good at it.

Access is great for the people who aren't really database professionals, but who have simple database needs.

Oh, by the way... if you'd like to see a game written by coders that do everything from scratch, go check out .kkrieger. The Farb-rausch guys are hardcore.

#43 So as far as I understand ,you dont agree that modularity is the progress while tweaking, adjusting,editing, changing and and all those stuff are typical of a pre_ industrial enviromental

Maybe software industry in general and game programming in particular have not yet reached this level of maturity which is widly demanded in all other sectors of the modern industry

OOP is however definitly on this way
You simplyt use the object interface without having access to the code

Defining applications such as Access or Visual Basic for applications a sort of amateurish tool honestly it is excessive
They are normaly used in any industrial sector

Last, maybe ,I did not explain myself

If you go through some 3d web sites, Torque, 3DGS etc are considered a sort of toys

A "tough guy", they claim , must use C++ and direct x\ opengl
If you ask ,why dont' you use a game engine and a scripting language, being much more easy friendly?
they answer :

Efficiency - Power- Flexibility etc

They simply forget a golden rule of any industrial activity
The ratio:

Results / investements

must be maximized
You can not focus on results only without also considering the costs you must pay to achieve such results

Ovbiuosly I knew that some games have been developed from the scratch but I supposed you got the point

Getting back to Torque

I personally think it is an exceptional price valued engine

If you mean that tweaking the engine, from time to time, is a more than acceptable compromise considering the low cost and the tons of pre_built features and resources , that's ok
But trying to convince people that it is even a benefit
Well guys....

#44 No, I never meant to say any of what you just accused me of saying. What I said is that you cannot expect a professional engine to not require you to get your hands dirty. I have not had to make a ton of changes to the Torque engine to accomplish what I'm doing, but I have had to make changes. Expecting to just have your game engine magically do everything you want it to do is not realistic - and the quality of the engine is going to suffer for how much it does out of the box.

I do believe in modularity, though... the amount of work I've had to do on the actual engine in Torque is pretty minimal. I can extend Torque without having a full understanding of every line of code in the engine, and that is the definition of modularity - but it helps to understand the general structure of the engine and how it works.

Also, I'm sorry... I still disagree with you regarding Access or Visual Basic. I have worked in many different sectors, and Access databases are not something you will find behind important applications. Your telephone company's billing system is not a Visual Basic application that runs against an Access database. The car manufacturing plant does not use Access to track orders.

I'm not saying Access doesn't have its place, any more than I'm saying that anybody who wants to make games should have to get their hands dirty - what I'm saying is a professional game developer needs to be prepared to get their hands dirty in the source code of an engine just the same as a professional database administrator is going to need to be prepared to understand how to tweak the performance of their database server.

Regarding the statement about only writing your own engine, that is not an opinion I agree with or I wouldn't be a Torque licensee. I have written my own engines, and I believe it was a learning experience. Several years ago, I even wrote a software rendered engine in 100% assembly language. I don't want to do this again, but I have had a very easy time picking up the general lay of the land in the Torque source code because of this experience, and I most definitely contend that writing your own engine will help you to understand things a lot better than you could otherwise... especially if you only spend your time working with a black box engine. But I do not believe that "real game developers only roll their own engines," to paraphrase the "real men" jokes.

However, as you say, the price point just isn't there... the price point of developing your own engine is too high most of the time. I must say, though, that the price point for some engines is high enough that it would be more valuable to develop your own engine than buy them if that was your only alternative. The price point for the Torque engine is incredibly fair, and I think that the Torque Shader Engine is the best bang for the buck if you are making modern games.

What I mean isn't quite what you sum up with in the end. What I am saying is not at all that tweaking the engine is an acceptable compromise but a necessity if you are going to be able to use the engine for anything but the gameplay style that it was originally designed to deliver. If what you wish to make with Torque is a multi-player first person shooter, I think you could use it with no modifications at all. If what you intend to make is a MMORPG, then expect to need to make some modifications to the engine because it is not what it was built to be.

A "one-size-fits-all" engine is going to have to sacrifice something in order to fit every possibility, as is demonstrated by the more black box engines. I think DarkBasic Pro is an incredible learning language, and is even capable of making non-professional games - but you'd never see a game created with it on the shelf at your local CompUSA. The TGE is essentially the Tribes 2 engine, so we have seen games on the shelf created with it - though I do contend that these days, you'd be more likely to see a game written in the TSE on the shelf than the TGE. The TGE is starting to show its age, there's no doubt about that.

#45 Cliff

A part from general considerations, let's get back please to Bersek's and my original topic.

I want to code an rpg mouse moving
"I left click on the map, my player moves toward the target, for any position and angulation of the camera"

" Bersek asked how to detect close collisions in a beatin'up game"

You would agree that both Bersek and I are asking for a quite common features

I went through Torque documentation (The appendix of Maurina's book ) but I did not find any pre_built class \ methods which can be of use for my problem

If you or an other member can let me have the list of Torque functions (I do not expect a finished code) suitable for my needs, thanks a lot and please accept my apologizes

If you mean that I must tweak the engine and \ or rely on the comunity resources, well , maybe I am a stubborn guy , but I dont' change my mind

The problem is not so serious but it must be fixed if you want to claim that Torque is a real multipurpose game engine

I see that Torque already supply a f.o.c FPS module and cheap RTS module , recently updated to TGE 1.4
A member is developing an RPG module

That's fine

#46

Quote:
The problem is not so serious but it must be fixed if you want to claim that Torque is a real multipurpose game engine

I don't know where you've heard this, but Torque is not a multi-purpose engine.
It's geared towards FPS's, out of the box.

A multi purpose engine is almost always less powerful than a focused one, but on the other hand you gain some flexibility.

Quote:
The claim that you can do everything in Torque , tweaking the engine, well in my opinion, is rather weak
Unless you are a guru, you normally expect your engine to be a black box

This is a game engine. It's not a game maker package. It sounds like you expected it to be the latter.

I do not expect to be able to modify my car all by myself, simply because I don't know cars that well. But for a guy that knows cars, he can do almost whatever he wants.

You can do everything in Torque, but as with cars you need to know how the technology works before you can expect to accomplish that. This is obvious.

#47

Quote:I want to code an rpg mouse moving

Did you actually read my response? I already addressed that the engine is not a general purpose engine:

Quote:If what you wish to make with Torque is a multi-player first person shooter, I think you could use it with no modifications at all. If what you intend to make is a MMORPG

... but you seemed to completely ignore what I said. As Stefan pointed out, and I pointed out before him (and before you even said what I quoted), TGE out-of-the-box is an FPS engine. If all you want to make is an FPS, you should be able to do so without modifying the engine.

If you want to make something in another genre, yeah... you are going to have to modify your engine. I know for a fact that the code to support what you want to do is available in the RTS pack, so you could get it without having to actually know how to modify the engine yourself, but the engine is still going to have to be modified.

Any other professional engine out there, such as the Quake engines, Half Life, and so on, is not going to make an RPG out of the box either.

I'm sorry, but if you are going to ignore my responses, though, this is the last response I have to make to this. I addressed what you said before you even said it, and that is incredibly frustrating. I am typing long messages for no good reason at all, because the person I am typing them to isn't reading them.

#48 Cliff

I thought it was evident that I was referring to the other thread

"Game engines by Fendory"

Of which you were an active part


That's why , at the beginning of this thread I pointed out

"I have already posted my comments in an other thread about this matter"

An important topic arisen by Bersek was :

Is Torque a multipurpose engine ?

Stefan

"I don't know where you've heard this, but Torque is not a multi-purpose engine.
It's geared towards FPS's, out of the box."

You got the answer
It does not seem that all Torque members and employers would agree with you

Even Cliff ,even though, I must admit ,has never claim ithat Torque is a multipurpose engine was at the time, a little ambiguos about this topic
I was suggested to go for 3DGS, right, but dispite his irritation he never got to the point

I understand however that yourself and other members might have been confused by my remarks in this thread if you were not aware of the prevoius one, sorry for it

#49 @Alberto - you may want to check out C4 @ www.terathon.com/c4engine/index.php. It is a true do anything game engine, however, it requires a working knowledge of both C++ and openGL. Their graphics and lighting abilities are superior to most engines and the best support I have found. The price of $100 usd make it an easy choice.

#50 Stefan

Just for saving your time I quote some claims taken from other thread

Negative :

"....a real general purpose engine would let me use whatever development method I wish..."

"... there could be at least some ort of disclaimer saying:"Torque is general purpose as long as you mod the source..."

"I need to implement a "mouse driven " player.." (it was my question)

Positive :

"....I'd like to note that Torque is fully suitable for pretty much any genre game you want. It's been used for puzzle games, hunting games, RPGs, RTSes, MMORPG.. lots of stuff..."

",,,It is easy to use TGE for a non-FPS game.."

"...one of the key problems is that terminology gets mixed. People, including experts in the TGE source, speak from a FPS terminology POV and often don't generalize in terms of how things can be abstracted.."

#51 I decided to do a cursory search for you since it hasn't been done during the duration of this topic.

Mouse Controlled Player Movement

#52 @Alberto:
I've just got to say: Please start using periods instead of carriage returns/linefeeds! After just one of your posts, I don't want to read anymore.

#53 Jesus.. The last time I saw this post was over a year ago when I last posted on it.

There sure are a lot of posts being resurected from the dead lately.