Gears of War on TSE?

#21 It would be fun to make a non- playable demo of this quality thou- with collisions turned off, animation scripted (or even recorded in DSQ) and all other dirty tricks one can drag out of box it's quite possible to make some jaws fall on the ground (especially when showing it to people that are not aware how many calculations have to be included in normal game)

#22 Ya, you won't see full Doom 3 lighting on everything for a while because it's extremely expensive in a high poly environment. Shadowmaps are also very expensive and GPU intensive which is why its easy to being the TGEA demo to a crawl when you start throwing lights/models around. Every time you add a character you are multiplying the work the GPU has to do (more lighting, more shadows, reflection.. etc). It's not so much a limitation on the engine as it is on the GPU. Granted U3 is probably a bit more efficient, but I'm betting not as much as you'd think; it really depends on the situation.

I saw Tim Sweeny give a talk at the last XFest, and what they've done is actually create some tools to help the level designers identify the shadow-intensive areas of their maps. So they can go in and reduce them to help out the performance. That's how critical it is, shadows are very expensive for everyone. The impression that some engines let you throw as many shadows around as you like at high speeds is false.

GoW is also optimized for the XBox 360 which has some advantages they can count on like SM 3 shaders, a super fast bus, and the hardware is the same for everyone. It'll be interesting to see what the system reqs are on UT 2007.

Again though, if you want to compare Torque vs. Unreal, they are ahead of us on tools more than basic tech. We've got most of the hard problems solved. You're still going to work pretty much just as hard adapting the engine to what you need for your game, but your artists will be happier with the fancy tools. We're working on it...

#23 Adding SLI support, and dual CPU support into TGEA would lend well to aiming at making a next-gen game. I havn't checked any of those threads recently to see how thats coming along but even without it I'm excited to see what the final release brings :)

#24 If you want to have an idea of how much efficient UE3 is over TGEA, download the RoboBlitz demo. It's probably the first PC game using UE3, and it does run slower than our internal TGEA prototype in my machine.

#25 I doubt if GG would be interested in putting a lot of effort into making TSE next gen engine- main market for Torque are not companies with large budget but smaller players and they simply can't afford development of fully fledged next gen game. Of course I'd love to see such an improvement but financially... well, it does not sound like best possible idea