Question about an engine, answers will help tremendously!

#1 I haven't downloaded or looked at this one yet. It looks interesting, but sounds like a "Game Construction Kit" (CSK), which can be good or bad, depending on what type of game your building.

The nice thing about a CSK is that it's usually easy to get started, and fun to play with. The down side is that your stuck with whatever the developers thought was appropriate (or optimal) for a game. It depends on how much they try to hide from you. If you don't get source (I didn't see anything on the site that mentions it), this can be a real problem. Engine developers always make tradeoffs when designing their libraries, if your lucky, they'll be the tradeoffs you want :)

The price certainly is reasonable.

#2 I would recommend our upcoming V12 engine. Hopefully, the details will be public before the end of this week. We are working on last minute details now.

Jeff Tunnell GG

#3 Thank you for your input.

I'll wait and see what you guys have come up with ;)

Hope to see you all at the GDC,

Joseph A. Hatcher Jr.
AGFRAG Entertainment

#4 It always good to look at all your alternatives. We'll have something here for you, but it might not be what your looking for. We've no problems with that, use whatever is appropriate for your game. We'd like community here to be engine agnostic.

#5 Woah, horsey, woah!

Okay, someone's asking about 3DRad, a pretty stinky program for real commercial releases. But it still provides a lot of people to develop some fun stuff without a lot of experience.

From what I've read about V12, it's more like a C++ game engine, that needs lots of experience and programming know-how from the user, as well as a copy of MS Visual C++. Am I correct in this assumption?

So, if the above is correct, telling someone to go for the V12 instead of RAD would be like telling someone interested in kite flying, to instead try learning to pilot a stealth bomber. Ugh, I hate analogies!

Am I correct or is V12 super easy to develop with?

#6 If you're planning on altering any of the code you'll definitely need experience with C++ and if you want to compile it then you're going to need a copy of VC (which you get for about

#7 Well, every graphically powerful game engine is written in either C or C++ -- but you don't need VC++ to compile your code! I personally think that VC++ is for newbies; there are lots of free compilers.

As for what knowledge you'd need to use the V12 engine: well, any serious game developer needs C++ knowledge. However, if you look at Tribes 2 (which uses the same tech as the V12) you will see that quite a lot of the 'gameplay' functions are handled in scripts, along with AI functions. The scripts for Tribes 2 evidently compile into a sort of 'byte code', which according to a scripter on the meta makes it 'lightning-fast' compared to ordinary interpreted scripting. As long as you don't need to mess with the engine itself -- ie, change the terrain generation algorithms, or add bump mapping, or do funky things with the physics (although many engines let you change a lot of that sort of stuff in scripts as well; I'm speculating here), you can do most of your stuff with scripts. Even GUI creation is simplified, something I personally was very pleased to hear.

#8 Well, that's the underlying question of this thread. How far can you go with V12 without using C++ (if at all)? Maybe I missed an info paragraph or something, but I think the engine could use a little more description of A) the process of using it and B)what you need as far as other tools go to use it. Also, since it's based on a particular game, are other game styles possible without adding to the engine?

And still, unless I'm corrected, it's just not right to tell somebody who's looking into 3DRad that they should go with V12 unless it requires NO C++ code.

#9 The V12 is not the equivalent of a Rad like environment. Using the V12 will require a fair amount of C/C++ knowledge.

Eventually the demo app. will be sufficiently flushed out that you could develop games by writing new scripts and providing new art. Essentially a Total Conversion (TC) of the demo, but we're a ways off from that. Even a TC would involve script programming.

#10 The scripting capabilites in the original Tribes game was astounding compared to other games. Just look around some of the fan sites, and see what people have done on the client-side. Complete UI changes(Cowboy's HUDs), and totally new featuresets for controls/input(PrestoPack and Writer's scripts). Not to mention all the server-side mods that were done with just the scripting. From what I hear, the T2 scripting is even better than that. Should be a real fun time getting to play with the actual engine, if just the scripts are that powerful.

But back on topic, the scripting language in Tribes is very much like C++, I learned how to script in Tribes before I learned to code C++. I was constantly going "oh, ya, I know how to do that" as I was learning C++ afterwards.