TGEA VS other Engines

#1

Quote:Instead of going thru what all the features are for both TGEA and http://unity3d.com/unity/ maby someone can just tell me what TGEA does not have that unity has?

Support for Mac's?(openGL). Of course as I'm sure you know, you must have a Mac to use Unity. TGEA has support for HLSL shaders where as TGE does not (unless it's hacked but still not even close to TGEA).

Sorry wish I had more time right now, but I'll leave the other questions for someone more learnid than me on server clusters.

LK

#2

Quote:
If there are other ENGINES out there SIMULAR to torque let me know also

Free:
It sounds like you are wanting a complete package. Irrlicht3D is pretty good. It's just a rendering engine, but you can also download irrKlang which is the audio engine and irrEdit is their level editor. You can also use jirr (java wrapper) or pyrr (python wrapper) if you want. They have a fantastic community and irrXml if you want XML parsing. No it's not a all in one solution, you haft to piece if together, but it's a nice setup.

You can also look at Reality Factor. It's a complete engine\editing environment.

Commercial:
3D Game Studio works alright. It has a physics engine and terrain engine(Although the terrain is not nearly as nice as Torque's).

Visual3D by Realmware seems promising, but their website and community still needs work. Along with their documentation. It's based off the XNA framework, and you can use any of the .Net languages to program your game.

#3 But are any of the ones you listed better then tgea? For what im wanting that is. I like the sound of Visual3d I havnt researched it yet but I like the fact that I can program it in the .net langauge as thats what I do for my RL job.

#4 Well, as far as ease of use, I still think that Torque is better. Visual3D isn't far enough along yet to compete. I think when it is finished it will be the better engine just because it uses XNA and the .Net languages, but I already own a license to Torque so I will continue using it.

#5 Wow after the last few hours of reading thru everything I can on visual3d its pretty amazing/promising! I think it may offer more what im looking for then tgea maby by then we will see what features torque 2 will be offering. Well thanks for the comments!

#6 3D Game Studio is a joke. As a previous owner and long time ago active member of the community all I can say is that anything beyond a basic single player game with their engine is a joke. If you have even an inkling of doing a multiplayer game and you are considering 3DGS I urge you to have a quick read through the network forum.. It only takes 5 minutes reading in there to realize that the company has ZERO intrest in getting multiplayer to work and that all their claims of being "MMO capable" are utter horse pies.

Do I sound bitter? Yeah 12 months of hard work and being publicly ridiculed by the company principles on their forums because they wouldnt make good after our project spent over $2000 on team licenses for their trash product.

You bet Im bitter

EDIT:
Just to show Im not a disgruntled whiner..
http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/794811/an/0/page/0#Post794811

In that link the moderators actually are finally (some 3 years later) admitting the network code is pretty bad (in their own words) and recommend the guy try making a 4 player game with it as anythign beyond that is laggy. :)

This isnt about bashing 3DGS, Im just passing on my own personal experiences with Conitec. It was bad.. all bad. The script engine is not nearly as powerful as Torque script IMO and you get no source with the engine.. that means that if you wirte a game and something doesnt work you have to wait for Conitec to fix it.. When I was actively part of the community and had major bug fix requests it usually took 4-6 months to get those bug fixes rolled out.. even major ones that completly disabled functionality of the engine.. (Like the massively large multiplayer bug list) It took me over 12 months of major bug fix requests to even get their network engine to the point that it would allow more than 2 peopel on a server at a time without crashing everyone.

#7 I have an engines section on my new forum that I am hoping to add exactly this type of faq type nfo and feedback in comparison of the various game engines on the market. www.noobgames.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=1

#8 The mother of all engines list ;-)

Remember: TGE-A = no Open GL support.

#9 Perfect Stephan I seen this list a while back befor I bought tge 1.5 but couldnt find it in my searches again! And I will not be looking into 3dgs, so far im sticking with tge or going to be going to visual3d there progression seems solid and if they meet there goals it will be a awsome engine.

#10 That's cool I added a forum for Visual3d had not heard of it. It looks like it's in beta.

Even if you didn't ship a game with TGEA, learning it and making test games etc is worth
the price 100 fold in terms of education and knowledge. More is better.

I am way out of touch with TGEA's status even though I was on there everyday when it was
EA era. But I assume OpenGL support is still coming down the pipe in the future?

#11 I'm a big fan of Ogre3D, especially if you use 3dsmax for world building. It's a render engine with a lot of addons avaliable that will enable you to extend it to a game framework easily.

There are a couple of really nice portal scene managers, a Crysis like terrain editor, paged geometry scene manager for doing vast amounts of static meshes. 5 physics API's that are easy to plug in.

Only thing it doesn't have an out of the box solution for is MP. There's sketchy user created TNL and Raknet support but not much else.

A nice Ogre based engine thats been in development the past year is NeoAxis, has editors a lot like Torque, and a pretty cool UI system that renders to a poly in a similar fashion to Doom3.

http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/history.htm

#12 @Adrian: Ogre is nice, but you haft to have some nice 3D modeling software to do any good level design.

@FlyByNightStudios: I totally agree with you on GameStudio. The engine and it's tools are a joke. I too owned a license to the engine and could never get anything I wanted done to work write. The scripting language is to simplistic (although the learning curve is rather large I think) to be of any real use. I just through the engine out there cuz it was an all in one solution. Better than Torque? It's like asking if charcolle tastes better than cake.

Another good engine is the C4Engine. I really like the looks of it, I just haven't messed with it yet.
www.terathon.com/index.php

#13 Try NeoAxis, www.neoaxisgroup.com/. It is C#, it uses Ogre3D, is updated every month, and is designed to support multiple platforms using mono post 1.0. Also Visual3D, www.visual3d.net/, is coming along nicely as well and that team has engine building experience from developing RealmForge on Axiom, the C# port of Ogre3D. Both groups are planning to support XBox360 and possibly other consoles after their 1.0 releases.

I'm actually waiting on Unity, unity3d.com/unity/ to come to Windows, which could very possibly happen prior to the launch of Torque 2. I have had an eye on it for some time, and enjoyed reading the review of it in the latest issue of Game Developer magazine where it was praised by three reviewers, a designer, an artist, and a programmer.

I guess I am a bit spoiled by Simutronics' HeroEngine www.play.net/playdotnet/platform/, which is what I have been working in as a World Builder, but once you use an engine designed for designers, there is no going back to these programmer centric engines. Over two years ago after taking a game design course using Virtools I mentioned in the forums that GG needs to "get it" and focus on developing a tool for game designers. Artists have 3ds Max, Programmers have Visual Studio, Musicians have Reason, etc, finally there are some tools coming out for game designers, and I'm sad to say that GG is getting left behind.

Meanwhile I still play around with TGB, finally came up with an interesting 2D game concept, and I do have hopes for Torque 2, but if Unity hits Windows first will I ever look back? Probably not...

#14 The far off horizon is bright! 2009 seems to be a promising years for indie technology.

However, its 2008 and none of the afar off tech is here. TGE, C4, Q3, are all old engines and are growing more so every day. So what are the viable technology options for indies in 2008? Everyone is in love with OGRE, however, any implementation using OGRE is not for your average indie as it is a rendering engine NOT a game enigne.

For those of you who are strictly windows developers. The upcoming TGEA update is probably one of the best options available to you. If you are looking for a change use some of the afore mentioned .NET engines.

For those of you who are mac users, or are willing to develop on mac Unity Is the by far the superior solution. Its documentation, rendering, and integrated Physx engine are superior to the Torque counterparts. The down side to "some" is that is currently only has a Mac Development environment. While you have to develop in mac the game ports to windows natively.

There is a windows dev environment in the works as well as a linux port. But we all know how longs those things can take ;)

The bottom line is that until all the 2009 tech arrives. The best solution in my opinion is Unity

#15 I actually got to play around with Python Ogre last year and even did a few tutorial conversions for the community, it was fun, but not a game engine. I'm all for the iterative development philosophy, get something up and running as soon as possible and build from there, so my interest is mostly geared towards game prototyping engines aimed at game designers. GG is moving towards that with TGB and Torque X, and I'm sure Torque 2 as well by the looks of the new TGEA update that is coming.

If I had a multi-platform 3D game that needed to go into development right now I would probably buy a Mac and Unity and load up Windows on the machine in a dual-boot configuration. I would need the Mac for testing anyway. However, if I was going Windows only I would be tempted to wait a bit. According to this recent 3DAttack magazine interview a Unity IDE for Windows is 12-18 months out.
www.3dattack.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=25

For now though I am focused on a 2D game, so TGB is my tool of choice. In fact, if TGB had full 3D and Real-time Networking capabilities I wouldn't be looking at anything else. My hope is that this is the vision of Torque 2. Another tool I have been playing with is the Torque X 3D beta, which would be nice to use, except it could be a while until the 3D and networking is fully implemented complete with docs.

But you are right, 2009 is looking really bright for us, luckily I found a way to amuse myself with TGB for the rest of the year...

#16 I'm really, really tempted into buying a Mac for Unity. It just looks fantastic. As a side bonus, I can test my current TGE and TGB projects on it as well; although to flip development platforms entirely would be a big change. I do like that whole UNIX-based OS since I enjoy those nerdy things.

#17 Were pretty far along with a Blitzmax based Ogre engine that works on PC, Linux and Mac. It's more of a game dev framework that also comes with a world editor loosely based on 3dsmax's interface. It uses the Ofusion scene loader library as the scene format but since you can build levels from scratch within the editor you don't need it. If your a 3dsmax user Ofusion is a great exporter though, and has shaderFX support built into the latest beta of the pro version with realtime ogre viewport in 3dsmax.

The editor has a max like gizmo with Shift drag instancing, quick heirarchical linking so its dead easy to make mount nodes. Just load a mesh and its scene node is at the point you left the local pivot in your 3D app. Creating and naming a node is the simple click of a button. To link something you just select the link icon, multiple select children and drag to the parent just like you would if using 3dsmax. you can call entities by name in the source code so its pretty simple.

Currently theres CEGUI or Blitzmaxes MaxGUI for the UI, Newton physics, Ogre rendering, It uses Blitzmax built in input and audio. Were currently using if for a commercial project which has the high probablility of a 360 version of the engine being avaliable. So far we about 14 months of development time has gone into it, and were hoping to release in the next couple of months :)

Pretty excited about getting Flow3D and FlowED out of the door.

#18 I was actually following Flow3D on the Ogre forums when I was playing around with it. I also own Blitz3D and learned my first game programming on it building a small RTS prototype and have always kept an eye out for a decent 3D implementation for BlitzMax. I'm looking forward to seeing your final product. It sounds like it would be perfect for a small 3D puzzle game I designed, which I'm holding off on prototyping until I get my hands on Torque 2, Unity, or I guess Flow3D.

#19 Terathon comes out with updates for C4 once a month...I wouldn't call that old technology. I tried the demo and was very impressed.

#20 It's not once a month, though Eric has worked at that schedule in the past. It's not usual. The last update 145 was released at the end of November and the beta for 146 will be up when he gets it to the state where he feels safe releasing it into the wild.

C4 has regular updates. Cipher, on the other hand, has just recently been re-picked up by another developer and hopes to start a release schedule again.