Is irrlicht 1.0 more powerful than Torque 1.4?

#21 My problem with Irrlicht (why I decided to go with Torque instead of Irrlicht) was (at the TIME, which was many moons ago before it went 1.0):

* No OS-X support for Irrlicht
* Vastly superior terrain engine for TGE
* Better tools support for TGE (including 3d model exporters, animation, etc.)
* TGE was a bit more stable and mature at the time (had been used in several commercial projects, etc.). I was still feeling the pain of dealing with obscure hardware issues in my own custom engine for Void War.

If I was doing a multiplayer game, TGE would have been an even stronger contender.

Still, I remain a fan of Irrlicht, and I'd like to see more getting done with it.

#22 Level editing in 3dsmax with game engine rendering in viewports. Nice to see lights and dynamic shadows in viewports.

#23 Hi guys,

Thats cool, but using Max for level building is extremely expensive ($3500 a license).

Constructor allows you to do the same when creating Torque levels, including full real-time editing and previewing:




Though Constructor is not yet available to the general public, there is a highly successful beta program currently underway.

#24 Yeah, but for those that have max its great, and also supports a lot of things that constructor probably wont. I'm sure that constructor is good for the price, and works with torque too.

With Ofusion there's a Pro and developer version as well as the free Community Edition.

The Developer edition includes scripting from within max with WYSIWYG view, seperate IDE and viewing tool for coders. As well as a C++ script loader and compiler. The guy hasn't stated the price for developer and pro versions yet though. So I'm not sure what to expect .

#25 I'm still very skeptical about Constructor, because I've had my hopes up about a lot of game development tools that are meant to be new and easy, but just end up being exactly the same as all the others.
I hope that theres a demo or something like Showtool (one that actually works, rather than letting you not export anything to see how it looks in-game)

#26 Hi guys,

Thats certainly understandable, that is why we're beta testing with some of the best artists, scripters and coders in the community. To make sure Constructor is as easy to use and efficient as possible, to a wide variety of people with varying backgrounds and specialties.


Adrian, don't forget that you can fully customize Constructor using Torque script in a wide variety of ways including primitives types, import/export, ui, and automating common operations (imagine procedural content generation! :).


Anyway I didn't mean to derail the thread, just wanted to point out some of the cool tools being developed for Torque!

#27 I'm really looking forward to Constructor. Definately getting that.

#28 Comparing apples to oranges again. I would worry more about working with a tool set and getting out a good product. Vs wasting time comparing products.

Power means nothing if you can't wield it properly...

#29 What I don't like about irrlicht is that it uses a mishmash collection of dated geometry formats who's use varies depending on what you need.

3DS is severely dated and not really suitable for modern game engines.

MY3D supports multiple UV's and a couple of useful blendmodes for multitexturing, but only allows for static geometry.

.X is a nasty kettle of worms, used for boned meshes, but is an awful format with most exporters not being 100% compatible.

-----

Torque has only DTS and DIF which have very different purposes, I havent much experience with DTS in TSE, but it doesn't seem to support multiple UV's or many blendmodes in either TGE or TSE. So as far as I can tell it's not that great for multitexturing with polysoup type geometry.

Ogre seems the best overall because it has the most diverse material features I have seen, but out of the box it's simply not a game engine. Takes a bit of work to make it into one.

So for a quick fix at game dev, Torque is probably the best to get you up and running initialy. But one of the others may be better long term depending on the kind of games your trying to develop. Whether your doing a simple MOD using mostly built in torque features or building something from C++ source, and the kind of licencing you need has a part to play.

Ogre is LGPL for the time being, but the next version will offer other licencing options, and letr you staticly link ogre into your engine and port to consoles.

#30 What is the link for Constructor?

Thanks in advance
:)

#31 What is the link for Constructor?

Edit: sorry for double post.

Thanks in advance
:)

#32

Quote:
Though Constructor is not yet available to the general public, there is a highly successful beta program currently underway.

...

#33 Just giving it a quick look over:
Feature Strengths:
Graphics: Irrlicht
Torque needs quite a bit of polish in the graphics to be AAA quality. Irrlicht also seems to handle objects much better than torque. It includes the equivalent of TSE, TGE, TGB, and ShowTool. It would be nice if GG had a common build for all the 4 platforms if you owned all 4. Hopefully the TSE will ultimately overcome the graphics & shader problem though, and you will be able to publish AAA quality games on Windows, Mac, Linux, XBOX360, and hopefully even the upcoming PS3 (since it will support a subset of OpenGL).

Editors: Torque
Irrlicht depends on 3rd party tools pretty heavily for any editing, and doesn't have the UI polish Torque has.

Terrain: Torque.

Hardware Platforms: Tie
Irrlich looks like it's getting PocketPC support, plus it has x64 support. Torque has console game support. TGB & TGE need Pocket PC and x64 support. Irrlich needs console support.

Network: Torque
Client/Server games would necessitate Torque at this point, unless you purchase the TNL or write your own.

File Formats: Probably a Tie. For me: Toque.
Irrlich supports more formats natively. I use Lightwave. Irrlich doesn't have a native LW importer. Lightwave Dave made a Torque LW exporter, so Torque supports my native toolchain better.

Source: Irrlicht
GG seems to take a lot of time between feature announcement and release. Until GG makes it easier for the community to share mods and features, the Irrlich sourceforge style may always have the leading edge. Hopefully GG can find a way to share source like we can share tutorials on the TDN and source files on sourceforge. Maybe make a 'community' CVS branch or something.

Input devices: Probably a Tie. For me Irrlicht. - I'm biased because you can't bind multiple keys to the same command easily in Torque.

Script: Torque
Scripting is a big help in fast prototyping.

Summary:
Network games, fast proto-types, & larger variety of games: Torque.
Higher quality graphics, shaders, 3D & 2D in same game, lower cost: Irrlicht.
Torque is a game engine. Torque needs better graphics. We all know it. GG just needs to commit more resources to the TSE & TGE.
Irrlicht is a graphics engine. Making a full fledged game is going to take some time.

I think Torque is one of the fastest 'idea to market' platforms out there. What it does need though, is quite a bit of polish in the graphics to be AAA quality. Irrlicht has that. If the TSE isn't available by the time I'm getting serious about graphics quality, I may look at taking some pieces from the Irrlicht graphics engine and putting into Torque. Both licenses allow that. Heck, GG could even pull in pieces from Irrlicht as long as they left the license comment in source files they used.

#34 I've used Irrlicht and I own TGE. I tried to write a summary comparing the two but it takes too long and an incomplete summary would probably raise more questions than it answers. So I'll just comment that I've gotten more done in less time with Irrlicht then with TGE.

#35 @Tim:
Excellent breakdown, thank you. It looks like tool support is a lot better for Irrlicht than it used to be, which is very cool. to hear. As for me, Torque Constructor can't come out fast enough :)

What about the animation path in Irrlicht? The last time I looked at it, the animation in Irrlicht still looked pretty rough, and it wasn't interpolating well between keyframes.

As to Torque's graphics not being "AAA" - well, they WERE AAA a few years back, but the updates are now all going into TSE. The problem I have is really that generating AAA content today is pretty dang expensive ... how well can an indie actually take advantage of the full power of Irrlicht's or TSE's graphics engine? (And no, this isn't rhetorical... I really don't know the answer to that. Because some indies look like they are able to do that, and on a budget to boot.... I just don't know how).

#36 BTW I think irrlicht's weak point is still the graphics pipeline. It still supports the same limited mesh formats with almost no decent material properties for realtime graphics. It's a real shame as the engine itself has a lot of potential. .obj .3DS .X .My3d .MS3D are all too simplistic for a modern day engine.

The new editor they recently released an early build of, is step in the right direction, but materials are still simple with only 4 texture layers, 1 UV set. I really hope the art pipeline tools get improved a lot as the engine itself shows a lot of promise.

more effort needs to be made into providing a geometry format that can easily be exported too with a lot of features avaliable for artists to access the engine directly. Something like these powerfull tools that acompanied by realtime preview make artists MUCH more productive. Even if what comes out the other end is just a .material Script that can be edited in notepad. These are the kinds of tools that make game dev for artists a joy to work with.

does require some knowledge about how a realtime renderer works in order to get the most out of it of course.

#37 I just tried oFusion, I have to say, It was alot better than I expected! Easy material-editor based shader editing and easy per-object lighting makes it really nice to work with.
Now I just need to learn Ogre... Then integrate Ogre into Torque.. and create a Beastly monster of an engine! I shall name it 'Torge' the Torque Ogre! A perfect mixture of game logic and scripting and graphical enhancement all strung together in a single, large Ogre pipeline!

Or I could get a cup of coffee, wake up so i can read over this, then say "WTF was I thnking?"

Anyway, I like the oFusion pipeline alot, I deem it a Programming Artists friend.

#38 *Drools at BobTheCBuilders screenshots*

Sweet! The thing that bugs me the most about Quark is your inability to see what the lights will look like in the engine. A problem Constructor will remedy. :D


Can't wait...any news on how close it is to a public release?

#39 I'd be happy with another EA release.

I doubt it'd be much buggier than QuArK.