Game Engines

#41 It is easy to use TGE for a non-FPS game. Of course, 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. I mentioned a while back about using tilemap code for a visual inventory and had a couple of WTF replies since they're only supposed to be used for maps...right? Well I did not think so. In fact, I thought they were to be used to display graphics and offer a number of ways to manipulate tiles...or graphics. It seemed a really nice visualization piece for a slot-based inventory and yet it seemed inherently bound to the concept of maps and levels in the minds of others. There are a lot of things that can be done, but we often get locked into a single interpretation of a concept (and coders do this as well, which is why some things are definitely tailored to FPS games (after all, Tribes 2 was a multiplayer game with little use for advanced single-player AI or physics that would slow network connections to a crawl (even on today's high-speed connections).

You will always have to compromise or contract or work like hell to make your game with any engine. For example, Unity has a nice FPS demo that comes with the engine, and while it supports ragdolls combined with basic rigid-body physics, it is slow on mid-line machines. If you're targeting the best of the best, it runs much more smoothly. A6 has a million caveats as well. Blitz3D/DarkBasic/"game languages" offer bang for the buck depending on your level of programming and optimization prowess. Things like C4 are tailored to high-end hardware with no fallback (as that is not their market). Irrlicht, Nebula 2, etc are nice but require a lot of optimization prowess as well. You will always have to either compromise, contract, or work like hell yourself.

#42 Matthew and David

Thanks for your reply

I have been using Blitz3d for 4 years, a great engine , in my opinion
Now I want to make a step further

I dont care about super performances, or very special features, being an hobbyest game programmer
I simply dont want to get an head ache to implement features which are common for some kind of game such as a mouse driven player or mouse picks and retrieving data

More important, I want to stay away from the source code

I wrote this post being concerned about Berseks's remarks, which has been also my first impression with Torque:

"... Torque really is not general purpose "

"I'm trying to make a beat'em'up out of TGE but it's done with firing weapons in mind, so the only choice the user could do is [firing weapons] or [no weapons at all], and even if there are some melee and hand to hand resources they're a bit messy."


However If it is just a matter of terminolgy , if things can be abstacted then it is obviuosly a minor issue

#43 Alberto - I'm going to say that, based on the preferences you've described, I'm not really positive the TGE is what you are looking for. Ultimately, it comes down to one thing you said:

Quote:
More important, I want to stay away from the source code

While this is possible in the TGE, it can actually be harder to accomplish things by staying out of the source code than to just dig in and do it.

If you are not interested in the source code, you can do everything in the demo that you can do with the full engine... except muck about in the source code (and access good documentation... heh). It certainly doesn't hurt to poke around and make sure that you don't want to use it, because my word should not be taken as canonical by any stretch.

With all that said... my thoughts are that you might be better served by getting into DarkBasic Pro or sticking with Blitz3D.

#44 Cliff

Thanks
Actually I like Blitz3d because it supplies just a few commands but with a high degree of abstraction
Combining them you can accomplish praticallly everything
Maybe the code is not optimized but as long as it works ,for me, it is fine
However Blitz miss a lot of important features :

World and terrain editors
Scene management BSP or Octrees
Advanced animations
Phisics
AI
Not to mention that a Basic scripting language is less suitable than a c\c++ based one for large projects

I suppose you got my point


Can you suggest an alternative engine ?

Thanks in advance

#45 Sorry, no... I do not know the middle ground very well. I have DarkBasic Pro for teaching my daughter to program, but I've been coding graphics for 26 years so I haven't spent any time in the middle ground between easy and hard in so long that what I did when I was there isn't even applicable any more.

#46 Alberto 3d Gamestudio may provide the middle ground youre looking for. ive never looked at it myself, but you may want to check it out.

www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=67

#47 Cliff and Sean

Thanks a lot
I dont know wether Torque is the best engine but for sure Torque comunity is one of the best