Your thoughts on recent Torque reviews

#41

Quote:
I just wanted to say that we are open to bad reviews.

You (edit: as in GG) have been deleting TSE reviews a while back without notifying the reviewers of those, so that's definatly not true. I'm not trying to provoce or anything here, I understand why you guys delete them.. but saying you are open to bad reviews is simply not true.

#42 Of course they're going to delete reviews that don't even apply to the current product. It's a in development product, so complaining about it in context of a "review" is pointless, you can make a "preview" if you want ;P. Once TSE is actually complete and released as a 1.0, then people can complain about it.

Now everyone stop writing multi paragraph posts reiterating the same point and go make a sammich.

#43 [somewhat offtopic]
@Tom Bampton

Saying that GTA3 looked like a PS1 game is incredibly ignorant. While I'm aware this has little to do with the main discussion, the PS2 was such a great jump up from the PS1 that even games with bad graphics really were massive steps up from the PS1's graphics. While impressive artistry could create graphics that looked good, (Megaman Legends, Vagrant Story) most games, even the ones that were considered triple-A at the time (Syphon Filter) did not look as good as PS2 games with mediocre graphics. Things like draw distance and polygon limits were incredibly limiting. There is no way you could honestly say that GTA3 looked like a PS1 game.
[/somewhat offtopic]

There are important features very conspicuously absent from TGE. TGE is a great value for a team of professional and experienced developers but it's target audience, the inexperienced is definitely going to struggle against them.

Getting a skeletally animated DTS (especially with LOD) into Torque is definitely harder than it should be.

#44 I don't see why this GTA: SA scene couldn't be faithfully reproduced in either TGE or TSE:


I see a bunch of repeated textures (residential windows, storefront windows, walls) and a higher polycount than we might be used to in development of games here (at least for the bicycle wheels and characters). Look at the store windows on the left side. I see the same texture repeated at least twice more in the other windows in the same row.

This GTA:SA screenshot from DriverHeaven.net illustrates this even better:


I haven't played GTA:SA, though I owned GTA:Vice City. Vice City reused textures like crazy (helps on video card memory and texture swapping), had some gawd-awful scaling in some points, missing polygons (usually if not normally seen) and a lot of low-poly buildings. But as a whole it looked really good because it put us in a city for which most of was just a passing blur (when in vehicles).

The engine is important in some ways, but it's all worthless if the artist(s) can only make 20,000 polygon building exteriors with 25 textures each. Where TGE may fall short is the lack of instance rendering. I understand TSE now addresses this, so that one building can be instanced to many locations for reduced overhead. TGE does run into problems when building a city in the editor, as well as lighting. Sometimes MIPmapping could be trouble.

I'm not saying TGE/TSE wouldn't have to be changed to handle things better, but I think that TSE could make locations similar to GTA:SA. TGE could as well, IMO, if it had instance rendering for interiors.

#45

Quote:
Of course they're going to delete reviews that don't even apply to the current product. It's a in development product, so complaining about it in context of a "review" is pointless, you can make a "preview" if you want ;P. Once TSE is actually complete and released as a 1.0, then people can complain about it.

Obviously you have no clue what those reviews said, because they were perfectly current and constructive.

To further expand on your flawed argument, the positive reviews should then be deleted as well because they are no longer current. Right? Hehe.

I absolutely mean no offence here, but the deletition of reviews has been confirmed in emails from a GG employee. So please spare me the fanboy comments, Paul. The email made me understand why GarageGames does it, but saying they don't do it is not fair.

#46

Quote:Saying that GTA3 looked like a PS1 game is incredibly ignorant.

I really don't care whether you think it was ignorant or not, though. Only reason I said it was to make a point with as few words as possible.

You have now ruined the word count budget, so an invoice for $30 will be in the mail for the wear and tear on my fingers and keyboard typing this pointless response to your pointless post. Payment terms are within 30 seconds of my clicking send, and it triples for every second payment is not received after that.

T.

Edit: Stupid typos.

#47 I have to go with: Torque is the WRONG engine to use if you don't already know how to code a game engine OR unless you don't mind years and years of time to experiment with it.

In fact, I'm pretty pissed that it's sold as though it's reasonable to learn from for beginers and how there's all the documentation and community help to learn. Bullshit. The documentation is for using torque out of the box. The documentation on coding the engine is spotty and mostly inconsistant and dated and sloppy. Due to it being mostly community created(resources, forum). The community help is half/half. On one half, you get some nice people who know how to be team players. Then you get people like Tomb who just ridicule you for asking 'dumb' questions and who sit and laugh with the rest of the snobs about how stupid noobs are as though a person who waste years and years dicking around is smart. You know, like how he's doing it above and what a waste of time his comments are. :)

See how I put the smiley face at the end there. :) That means I get to be insulting and get away with it because I'm just kidding. Chill Tomb. I'm just jokin, man. Haha. About you. But, you know. I'm just kidding. So, be cool. Be chill. LOL

Torque Fan Boys is right.

Torque is a great engine. It's great to learn to make games. But if you want to change the engine. Learn engine coding first. Then you can come back and change Torque the way an intelligent person would: will knowledge and skills. Don't be a time=money waster like the guys who claim tinkering works yet never make any games that sell. :)

See that smiley face again. :)

#48 Peter, if someone is making a AAA title and using TGE (instead of TSE for whatever reason), they went for it to save a lot of money on licensing the engine AND have full source, and possibly to afford a better team maybe even including a specialist graphics programmer who could bring TGE up to par with current eye candy standards in multiple of ways, either by hacking in shader support and then optimizing for the specific game, or revisiting the whole scene management/rendering scheme : as my competent comment was meant to mean, this is not man years of work, depending on how deep the changes to the graphics pipeline are, it's from negligible man hours (in the scope of a AAA game) to a few weeks/months, depending on the scope, ability, etc. Anyhow, if you're doing an AAA title in this day and age, you should be able to allocate the time in your production schedule to tailor the tech foundation to your needs....
If a team can't leverage any codebase with full source, and all the legacy headaches it implies, they're not in a good position to do a AAA title anyhow, in my opinion, based on my experience working with all sorts of gamedev teams, with widely fluctuating abilities and levels of experience.

#49 @Eric, the question wasn't if GTA could be ported to torque (if you were that good, yes). It was if the GTA for PS2 graphics looked good or not. I can't believe this is even a question. You have to remember that GTA3 came out it in 2001, 5 years ago. There was no such thing as next-gen. As a matter of fact, the PS2 had just been released at the end of 2000 so GTA3 *WAS* next-gen. I agree that looking back now it seems rather dated, but at the time those graphics were great. Especially concidering how much stuff was going on the screen at once. I understand they made a few sacrifices to get the performance smooth, but the city was huge. There were tons of stores with unique storefronts, all types of different cars, people, etc. The game was visionary. To say:

Quote:the graphics technology used looked extrememly dated when it came out, and even more so today

Is just completely bogus. Do you even have a PS2? Did you play this game when it came out? Do you remember what the other games in 2001 looked like? Seriously, don't even bother answering any of these questions. There is no sense arguing a moot point.

#50 If your making a AAA title, you could spend hundreds of hours tweaking TGE (costing thousands in development time). Or you could start with a modern engine. Sure it can be done with TGE, but if you got the cash you might as well buy the modern engine. When TSE is released, I know I will be porting my TGE game over.

#51 I think one of the things that hurt Torque is there is no good map builder out there. People has been waiting along time. It is outstand engine, for the price. Another thing is there is no good AI, AIGuard solve some of AI, at least for me. I have been using A6 Gamestudio and Torque for about same time, it good thing that A6 have not fix there terrain, that where Torque goes beyhond A6. If I could combine the two you would have one heck engine in my opnion. I think one aslo people who cant program very well get in to Torque, Newbie, I have seen thread was not very nice to them. Now may it because I stay in military for 20 years, to me people you want help out the most is the Newbie. If you make the Newbie mad who dont know there way around in Torque and the community you going get bad advertisement. It like going to dinner at new place if you get bad service you not going back. I can hear the words now from this.

#52 Andres, it's not bogus : by 2001, no middleware vendor was even close to being ready to leverage the "power" of the PS2 (for widely documented reasons), and to boot, as you mention, the extent of the game environments precluded higher polycounts, bigger textures, and this coupled with them using the Renderware engine as it stood back then (or more likely, at least six months before then), they did what they could.
But this were far from cutting edge graphics back then (by the time it cames out on PS2, the xbox and GeForce 3 were about to hit market...) : why do you think that when both GTA3 and Vice City made it to the xbox they had eye candy features not present on either PC versions or the PS2 ? Because it's a lot easier to leverage the xbox's computing power than to do the same with the PS2 (and it's the same with the 360 vs PS3), and that it was a lot easier to optimize for xbox and milk its abilities than it is to run on as many PCs as possible.
GTA 3 was a great game not because of its graphics, and I don't think you'll find a single review that says that : it was all about the open ended gameplay, the ability to have fun in the game without just following the plot driven by the missions : you could just f""k around if that was your inclination (and that's certainly how I played it for the most part), spending/wasting hours on just exploring the city.
Again, there is nothing bogus about the eye candy of GTA3 (or Vice City, or San Andreas) not being up to par with the hype comtemporary to their respective releases, which in my opinion is a darn fine thing : add water to the mill of people who say the pursuit of the holy grail of photorealism in AAA titles is detracting from their play value : the 3 games are great with their sub par graphics, and I for one, never, ever gave it second thought while playing them....

#53 Andres,

Maybe you'll notice I didn't mention the PS2 anywhere in my post?

The thread isn't so much about GTAIII and PS2 as it is about whether or not Torque engines are good (and their associated reviews).

#54 Peter : specialized 3d graphics programmer for a year, depending on location is in between 50K and 125K US, not more in 99.9% of cases.
The commercial licensing of TGE is negligible compared to it, and Unreal, Doom3, etc are still more expensive than the upper bound of the salary fork...
So you might have the cash, but rather spend it on getting work done, tailored to your game since you have the full source and a programmer for a fraction of a binary only version of Unreal, or another "top end" engine : working on the game with the money you save by using it on manpower rather than licensing stuff.
What is it you don't get ?
And before you say the so called "big leagues" engines are inherently better, because of their pondering to eye candy : as everyone knows, the demos targeted to getting licensees spend way more on content, than they do on programming, and even so, they spend a fair amount on making sure it runs properly...
GG brought Tim Aste on board, he did some stellar .dif work for them, and people wondered what engine he was using, when he was just being what a gamedev artist should be : working within technology constraints and leveraging it properly. The Unreal Warfare (aka Unreal 3) demos are NOT representative of what you can do with it : the exes used were optimized for each demo, etc, implying costs beyond just licensing the darn thing.
If you're going to make commercial games, AAA or not, your team needs a certain amount of ability to pull it off, even with the best PR/Marketing dude around...

#55

Quote:What is it you don't get ?

I suppose you should ask that question to all the game studios that agree with me and purchase the high-end engines. A souped up TGE at the end of the day is still TGE.

Another big factor is time. The money saved in engine costs is lost in development time. Its basic business.

Edit: We obviously have a difference of opinion. This thread is starting to degrade rather quickly into a flame war. I'm going to make this my last post.

#56 I gave you an example where no money was saved by licensing the so-called "big league" middleware/engines, in case you didn't get that, but where you could actually afford to have one, or more people working on tailoring the technological foundation to the needs of your game because you didn't pay a 5 or 6 figures licensing fee for one game on one platform... :)
And don't fool yourself : a lot of mainstream studios will go for the 5 or 6 digits solution just because of its pricetag and marketing, don't fool yourself into thinking it's less work for us "code monkeys"....
I never said that managerial imcomptence wasn't a rampant problem in the mainstream game industry....

#57 Hey i think torque is just fine graphics wise (especially TSE. The water is AMAZING!). I like the physics and particle system, and i really like the lightning. This guy is obviously either mentally ill or trying to sell an engine of his own. I dont know how anybody could say this.

#58 The Golden Rule: You get what you pay for.

#59 Good way of putting it.

#60

Quote:Is just completely bogus. Do you even have a PS2? Did you play this game when it came out? Do you remember what the other games in 2001 looked like? Seriously, don't even bother answering any of these questions. There is no sense arguing a moot point.

this was in a response to my quote, so I will respond.

Yes. I have a PS2. Yes, I played this game, though not for long, as I knew I did not have the time to play it (it was well done and really addictive). I remember very well what the games in 2001 looked like. I was paying particular attention to ps2 and xbox titles at that time as I was then working on a game that was going to be released on both of them.

when GTA 3 came out, I remember very well remarking to others that I was amazed that a AAA title that was selling so well looked so bad in comparison to other things that were coming out at the time. The graphics were good looking (adequate) and the gameplay fun, and the game did well.

It may be a moot point to you, but it is not to me. GTA3 did not compare well graphically to other games on the same platform at the time it was released, and subsequent releases looked very dated compared to games launched at the same time. This is my opinion, and I stand by it. You may disagree with me, and I will agree to disagree.

You may think my opinion is bogus, and you have a right to think so. I am not going to argue the point or be as disrespctful to you as you have been to me.

As for the current crop of games needing super looking graphics.. I really don't know what to say. It seems some want to believe this so badly that they will not here what I am saying.

I do not know if a game will need current gen graphics to be accepted by the game purchasing public. EA and all the other 'big' companies think so. I know that Epic does, and of course they beleive it because they make their money selling said technology.

I do know that the statement of current gen games and future gen games will need TSE graphics or better is not one I agree with, and not one that makes sense from a historical perspective. It may be true, but that is something that remains to be seen.. and if it is true, I will be happily surprised.

but, it seems I am getting nowhere here, so, I give up. Y'all win.

my comments have strayed pretty far from the original topic, so I am going to try again (probably not sucessfully) to not post in this thread anymore.