Rts Demos

#1 Me too

#2 Well RTS pack was released recently so I guess that it will take some time until somebody release working demo.

#3 Then just download the demo---it has a full mission in it.

#4 There is no pubic demo of the RTS pack on the GG site. Might come with one if your purchase the pack.

Stephen, did you find a demo somewhere? If so where was that?

#5 Bleh, I apologize, you are correct: The "demo" I was talking about is the starter mission that comes with the pack. There is no "free demo" of the pack itself.

Sorry for the confusion.

#6 I saw a movie of the RTS pack in action a while ago. I don't remember where, though.

#7 The movie is on the RTS ad page. Look for the words "WATCH THE RTS MOVIE"

#8 Yeah I've seen the movie, but I was hoping for something to play with, like wathever they used to make the movie from. Or something that the community has created. You know a hands on kinda thing. I realize the pack is new, just kinda figured maybe someone had something they've been tinkering with.

#9 Part of the problem is that it takes so much to put together an interesting demo, not to mention meeting license requirements (for installers), as well as protecting your scripts at the same time.

For example, we've released our first milestone to our internal team for testing, and it does a pretty good job of showing off the RTS SK, but we can't release it external to our team for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which being the bitrock installer license (can use for internal releases, not external until licensed).

All I can say is that as the TST-Pro is to artists/coders, the RTS SK is to anyone even remotely interested in RTS type development (and even those that aren't!)--well worth the money!

#10 Hi Bill, glad you are interested in the RTS Starter Kit. There isn't a public demo of it available right now, but I'm sure some team using the kit will release a demo of their work in the future. We may also do a demo ourselves, if we get the time, but it'll be down the road a bit.

Right now, I think between the product description, feature list, screenshots, movies, user feedback and reviews that are out there, you can get a very good feel for what the RTS SK does and the quality of the product. But, it is hard to pull the trigger sometimes without seeing it in action yourself, I understand.

I honestly think Torque + the RTS SK is by far the best solution for anyone out there who wants to make a real RTS game today, and we've been really happy with the success of teams using it so far. If you're serious about making a game-- or if you just want to learn about game programming and RTS's in particular-- there's no better way to get going. :)

Whatever you decide about the kit, we wish you good luck with your project!

#11 Stephen -- why not use a free installer like NSIS? Or no installer, just the game folder, like the Torque demos?

#12 Ironically, while NSIS appeared to be able to meet our needs in the long run a lot more (specifically built in xDelta and remote patching support), it's not cross-platform, and the work to support all 3 major platforms would have been much harder (for us) than adapating bitrock for an xDelta auto-update capability.

.zip management was a nightmare as well (we went through a couple of months on that), and at least with bitrock we can have a cross-platform installer capability and hopefully be able to implement an xDelta auto-update capability in the future. It also worked much better for us in configuring the auto-build from our repositories to client specific installation/setup files.

EDIT: This is most definitely an area for severe improvement, and something that could probably make some money for a good dev. There really isn't an Indy targetted distribution mechanism that has the following features readily available:

--cross platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
--xDelta auto-patch capability. Standard stuff in the AAA world: you start up your game as a client, it checks a URL for any patches, and auto-downloads them and applies, then starts up your (modified) client.
--documentation/strong examples for the above. For example, NSIS forums and some example implementations imply that it would support an xDelta style auto-update capability, but one look at the resource/manpower needed to get NSIS working for our project made it appear to not be worth attempting. I'd much rather pay a (relatively) small amount then have to commit a dev from my team to the several weeks it appeared would be needed to get NSIS working how we wanted it to. Hell, I couldn't even pay anyone experienced with NSIS to get us configured with a one-time contract, and I tried!

#13 I've spent many hours locked in room with NSIS, and I agree -- there has got to be a better way. And, in fact, there is, but you just have to pay for it, as you already know.

NSIS is free, and that's pretty compelling for many people. It was for us. NSIS doesn't automatically delta your files for updates. Making a cross-platform NSIS would be a nightmare. Much of NSIS' scripting involves direct calls into Win32 dlls. Very ugly stuff. And the documentation is awful.

lzPack is a nice open-source x-platform installer, but it doesn't do deltas, either. http://www.izforge.com/izpack/

Sorry, I guess this is off-topic. I'd just like to play with an RTS demo too.

#14 OFF TOPIC
anyway speaking of RTSs anyone got a good 2d game engine in C/C++? if not im willing to learn a new language.....well maybe :(

#15 Yes, Grant. Look at Melv May's .plan files. Torque2D is comming soon.

#16 Is it free.... my fingers are crossed :)