TGE vs TGEA? (learning curve)

#1 The most significant difference between the two IMHO is the all-new graphics pipeline in TGEA. However, otherwise the engines are fairly identical (well, there's been new developments with TGEA 1.7 that you obviously don't get with TGE).

My opinion is that except if you don't have specific reasons for going with TGE (e.g. Linux support), then TGEA is the proper choice.

The learning curve should just be about the same in either case.

#2 You can get Indie licenses for both TGE and TGEA for the same price as TGEA alone by buying the TGE license and upgrading to TGEA.

#3 What? lol

#4 I think what Dunsay means is that for the price of TGEA, you can get an indie license for both TGE and TGEA. Buy TGE first, then pay the upgrade price for TGEA, hence getting two engines for the price of TGEA.

#5 Ohh ok i got it. thanks for the tip haha :)

#6 Like Rene mentioned, one of the main benefits (IMO) of TGE is that it supports OpenGL, which means support for Mac and Linux. To me, this is important as an indie because I want to appeal to audiences that the bigger companies are not; like Mac and lower end PC's.

TGEA is actually faster and more efficient with larger amounts of objects such as projectiles, buildings, etc., due to the way it was designed. TGEA also has the new polysoup implemented, as well as mega terrains, which seem pretty nice if your game calls for it. So, if you are ok with excluding Mac and Linux, TGEA is the way to go. Again, this is only my opinion.

#7 J.P. is pretty spot on in his assessment on the differences. One more to add:

--TGE is relatively better positioned for backwards hardware compatibility than TGEA at this time. While TGEA does now have fixed function fallback (which means it can reach farther back in the compatibility chain), it is still optimized for modern hardware, which can cause older hardware to not perform as well as it would with TGE.

#8 TGEA is for newer software, but how new? Or rather, what are the oldest standards it will work with? (broad question I know)

#9 The breakpoint is effectively having a GPU on the video card (Shader capable). Hardware without a GPU is "old school", in that they expect data to be sent in one way, while about the time GPU's became common, it also became better to optimize the data transmission to the video cards differently.

As I mentioned, TGEA does have fixed function (which means you don't need a GPU/shaders) now, but the data is still delivered to the video card in "batches", instead of organized by vertex/tri-stripping strategies, so that can be less performant on older cards (since they prefer tri-stripping for the most part).