Does Torque Engine supports bumb mapping?

#1 Neither TGE nor TSE has advanced lighting or shadows at this time.

You can get better lighting options for TGE by buying the Torque Lighting Kit, which will also give you some other nice features - such as detail mapping and decals, but it will not give you the shadow effects you are looking for. Still, it does improve the look of Torque quite a bit.

There is a resource to give you bump mapping with TGE (using CG). You would have to integrate this yourself. You would also need to modify the shader to do the parallax mapping that you see in the irrlicht demo.

You can of course get bump mapping with TSE, but you will NOT get lighting or shadows - they're just not done yet.

You may want to look at the C4 engine, which is comparable, but does have the shadows, bump mapping, and advanced lighting. But it also has other issues.

I recommend to download the TLK demo, and the C4 demo, and see which one works best for you.

#2 Most of the other engines out there aren't game engines so much as rendering setups. TSE will have all the fancy rendering stuff you'll want by the end of the year. What kind of games are you looking to make? I think that is a much more important question to look at first when finding an engine. I highly doubt you are making a game based around bumpmaps.

#3 Thanks for all replies.

- I didnt know C4 before. Looked for the demos and screenshots and liked a lot. But it leaks in others resources that TGE has, like physics, scripting, etc. The better solution would be buy both and learn everything involved.
- So, according to both replies, it is better to wait until end of the year. I can wait, tough.
- The game I am designing is a kind of Action FPS / Adventure / RPG, but with marketing inside it / Fishing spots. It will be two games: the first will be a very simple, focused to kids (I think I will use Torque Game Builder for it) and for the second the time is 3 years to develop and has to be a kind of next-gen / advanced game.

#4 There is a resource for bump mapping on difs. i just looked at it. it used CG for bumpmapping...
here's a couple pics from the resource page. i hope no one minds i post them here.

#5 Keep in mind, the CG bump mapping resource has problems with ATI video cards.

#6

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I didnt know C4 before. Looked for the demos and screenshots and liked a lot. But it leaks in others resources that TGE has, like physics, scripting, etc.

C4 has a graphical script editor. It also has a very clean code base which is extremely easy to follow. It will have an integrated full fledged physics engine before the end of this year. The physics in TGE/TSE is very basic, rigid body physics and doesn't work too well across a network. C4 has full-scene cinematic motion blur (as well as many other nice effects) and the most extensive material manager I've ever seen. Lighting and shadowing quality and optimization is amazing. It is not just a rendering engine, it has many features such as networking, audio, particles, character controller, etc etc. Having said all that, there's a few things it doesn't have but they are on their way.

C4 is only $100, TSE is $250. Neither of them are terrible expensive, if you can afford it I'd buy both!

#7

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The physics in TGE/TSE is very basic, rigid body physics and doesn't work too well across a network.

I take extreme exception to this...TGE/TSE has the best networked physics model available on the market for even 2 orders of magnitude price range.

Torque Networking and Torque Physics are written specifically to make for efficient and capable networked physics, and while other SDK's/engines/whatever you want to call them may have better direct, single player physics (or client side physics, or what have you), none are going to have them fully network capable for extended amount of objects/players. That's not an engine restriction, that's an Internet restriction.

#8 I think I will buy both (C4 and TGE), then. But you have said "TSE", Tim Heldna. If I buy TSE I will have TGE + shading extras? Or I have to buy TGE + TSE??

Stephen Zepp, about the network physics, it is good to know that it is good on TGE. But what kind of Physic capacity were you talking? Everything physic or only a limited part is optmized?

Ramen Sama, this resource look the right thing I was looking for. I saved it on my favorites, and if I buy Torque, for sure I will take a better look on your resource.

Thanks again for all the attention.

#9 This topic has been discussed endlessly, so I'll just make a few points and then bow out:

1) No engine anywhere has full multi-user across the internet synchronized networked physics across multiple platforms and operating systems on the order of things you see in physics SDK's such as Havok, ODE and the like for low number or non-networked implementations. The technology simply hasn't been developed yet--too much information required for too many objects for a fully networked and synchronized environment.

2) Torque physics are as good as you want them to be--each object class performs their own physics, giving you the flexibility to have hundreds of low calculation physics based objects, combined with dozens of high calculation and interaction based objects (such as the Player class for example), and of course since you have the source code you can increase this at will for your specific game---but you aren't going to magically network 10,000 boxes to make up a wall and have a rocket projectile causing them to all fall in a rigid body manner over a networked game.

3) The stock Torque physics are optimized per class for an example first person shooter game that is fully networked. Nothing whatsoever will keep you from doing research and implementing more advanced physics simulation algorithms, SDK's, or whatever you like--but you'll need to make the decisions for your game, and your game requirements for best gameplay. If that gameplay requires tens of thousands (or even high end hundreds) of objects that are all state of the art physics controlled and networked/synchronized as well, you (if successful) with have some highly profitable patents by the time you are finished.

#10 At the moment you have to buy TGE for $100, than an extra $150 for TSE. Making a total of $250 to own both engines. TSE cannot be bought on its own as it is not yet finished. When it's finished and released I believe the price for purchasing TSE on its own will be $300. This may change however.

As far as physics go, I don't get good results with vehicles or rigid body physics across a network with Torque. Whether it is on a high speed LAN or adsl2 internet connection. I am not alone in this, many posts have been made on the subject and many people have cancelled development of networked vehicle / physic intensive type games with Torque.

@ Alfred Reinold Baudisch
I think Torque and C4 are both great engines. They both have plenty to offer, and both have their strong / weak points. C4 is only $100 and I highly recommend it to anyone, you won't be disappointed. Torque is also a steal for the price and once again you won't be disappointed.

#11

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I think I will buy both (C4 and TGE), then. But you have said "TSE", Tim Heldna. If I buy TSE I will have TGE + shading extras? Or I have to buy TGE + TSE??

To answer that question a little further, if you want nice eye catching rendering TGE is not the best approach. Yes there is community contributed code to get things like bump mapping, drl, shaders etc into TGE but they are not well optimized and are prone to problems. TSE has been made to address this issue and would be the best bet if you need nice modern rendering.

C4 is superior to TSE as far as rendering capabilities go. Apart from having very decent lighting, shadowing etc it's capabilities go beyond bump mapping, i.e. parallax mapping. This is just one example, I use this example as you stated in your opening post you were looking for an engine with this ability.

Diffuse texture in C4

Diffuse texture with parallax mapping in C4

So, to answer your question... you will have to buy TGE to be entitled to buy TSE. You cannot buy TSE on it's own at this stage.

#12 No, of course, TSE is entirely incapable of parallax mapping.
It runs shaders. If it's something you can do with shaders, TSE can do it. Even if it's not a stock shader, there are endless examples out there for these shaders you could go add into it.

#13 I think Stephen is referring to Torque physics in general, and they are very very nice.
Vehicle physics is a totally different matter, though - just search the forums.

@Paul:

TSE cannot do it out of the box, which was the point. :) Like with TGE, everything can be added if you are determined enough. But yeah, not a very good comparasion to use Parallax Mapping.

#14 Adding shaders into TSE is trivial compared to doing it in TGE, it's an engine made to use them. As opposed to all the crazy hacked implemenations we've seen for TGE.

#15 TGE NO BUMP:


TGE WITH BUMP:


- Alan
Really Really Good Things Studios

#16 Alan,

Very nice pic.

#17 So there you go Alfred Reinold Baudisch, some very good straight forward answers to your straight forward questions.

@ Stefan Lundmark, I agree with both points. Physics in general are very nice in Torque. Vehicle physics is a different beast all together. Oh and yes, thank you for the out of the box comment, I appreciate your objectiveness ;)

@ Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia, that screenshot is not parallax mapping, it is relief mapping. It only works on PS 3.0 and is more suited for terrain. I agree with your comments about hacking in these types of effects into TGE, and that TSE is the wiser purchase if one is interested in these types of effects.

@ Alan James, yes cool pic. I was referring to parallax mapping though, not bump mapping. Put simply, parallax mapping gives a greater illusion of depth. Also, TGE (or TSE) does not have pixel lighting so effects like these don't look as good as they can do.

#18 Bumpmapping, parallax mapping, relief mapping oh my!

bumpmapping vs. parallax vs. relief

1) There is a bumpmap resource for TGE that uses Cg. It has issues on ATi cards. It isn't perfect. It adds a render pass to the interiors, which is *bad*. Out of the box, it does not work on macs, but it is pretty simple to make it work on macs.

2) Parallax mapping takes an additional three lines of shader code over bumpmapping. It would be remarkably easy to add parallax mapping to the Cg bumpmap resource. And before anyone goes off on "oh, that would require more advanced hardware though!" let me remind you that OpenGL shaders require a Radeon 9500/GeForce FX 5200 or higher which can handle dependent texture reads (and therefore parallax mapping) quite well.

3) Relief mapping works on a similar theory as parallax mapping, except instead of performing only one texture read, it performs 16 to do true self-occlusion, among other spiffy things. It's basically a raycaster in shader form, casting a ray from the eye to the rendered pixel and choosing the texel that intercepts that ray. The main issue is that it requires a lot of dependent texture reads. However, if you exclude self shadowing, it fits well within the instruction limit for 2.0 shaders. You could probably put relief mapping into the Cg bumpmapping resource with the minimum of fuss.

TSE vs. TGE

1) Shaders support is easy to add to TGE. Two hours of copy/paste work and you can have complete GLSL support in your TGE project. What's hard is using shaders at the proper place in the rendering pipeline, and rewriting the pipeline to use shaders. This is why TSE is preferred for shader use.

2) TSE has another huge advantage over TGE which it seems that no one talks about. TSE uses vertex buffers. Vertex buffers are a massive improvement over TGE's rendering system, which involves copying all the data from system memory to the driver, then to the GPU every frame for every object. Vertex buffers also make batching far more useful than batching would be in TGE. TGE is more limited by bandwidth than by number of renderstate changes and draw calls (not that it isn't horribly wasteful with its renderstate changes and draw calls).

3) TSE has true D3D support, instead of routing GL calls through a D3D translator. TSE will eventually have true GL support as well. Both D3D and GL will run at full speed in TSE, which is a huge improvement over TGE.

4) Atlas.

5) TGE can run on more hardware. TSE is currently incapable of falling back to fixed function (and I don't think GG has too much interest in implementing that at this time) so it's limited to shader hardware. The OpenGL layer will require a Radeon 9500/GeForce FX 5200 or higher, so unless your target market well have those cards (keep in mind as an Indie about 50% of your sales will probably be from macs, which use OpenGL, and only relatively recently went to shader hardware as standard) you might be better off with TGE.

6) TGE is stable. The codebase has not undergone massive changes since 1.3 came out. 1.4 added a lot of new features and bugfixes, but did not involve significant restructuring of the engine. TSE on the other hand undergoes many significant changes every milestone, which may make it difficult to keep your project up to date with the latest TSE code.

7) TGE has a far larger and more active community that TSE at the moment. This community has been making improvements to TGE for the past five years, not to mention five years worth of bug fixes and trial by fire that have gone into 1.4.

8) TLK. The TLK is lighting done right. TSE does not currently have advanced lighting, but it will eventually have lighting (and a TSE TLK). TLK owners also have access to the DRL resource

9) TSE has not been used in a shipping PC game (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong. I know it's done plenty of XBox/XBox 360 games, but that's a bit above most of us). TGE on the other hand has been used in dozens of commericially successful PC games, not to mention its use in a large number of simulation projects for organizations such as NASA.

Torque Networking/Physics

I'm just going to refer the reader to Stephen Zepp's post.

If you aren't happy with the physics, and don't need multiplayer capabilites, there are resources for adding ODE or Novodex/PhysX to Torque. Sure, its not Havok, but I'll take free over hundreds of thousands of dollars, thankyouverymuch.

I think that covers everything in this thread... Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions or whatnot.

#19

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If you aren't happy with the physics, and don't need multiplayer capabilites, there are resources for adding ODE or Novodex/PhysX to Torque. Sure, its not Havok, but I'll take free over hundreds of thousands of dollars, thankyouverymuch.

I don't know about you, but networking is pretty important to most of us. None of those are easy to get running over a network, mind you.

Other than that, good points.

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4) Atlas.

Come back from your vacation soon Ben! :D

#20 I'm not using those resources (every game I'm working on has multiplayer or multiplayer only). I just wanted to point out that you can in fact have really nice physics in Torque if you're willing to give up multiplayer support.