TGE -> TGEA porting
by Ruairidh Barnes · in Torque Game Engine · 01/08/2009 (2:00 pm) · 4 replies
Assuming I purchase a TGE licence to learn to ropes a little, to see if it's right for me, the $150 investment isn't too much. But, down the line somewhere I decide my project is good enough to be commercial and I want to make use of the more advanced features in TGEA. Is it easy enough to port between the engines? I assume the tech is mostly the same, so it shouldn't be too hard?
Thanks.
Thanks.
#2
01/08/2009 (2:10 pm)
Thanks, Tyler. 
#3
01/08/2009 (2:36 pm)
Yep, easy enough. Takes a bit of patience if your code is heavily modified, but it's no problem. 
#4
Whilst TGE and TGEA use the same scripting language Torquescript and a lot of that will port quite easily they are beginning to become very different under the hood in the engine (the C++ code) where the Graphics, Sounds, Resource manager, textures management, lighting and a bunch of other stuff is either completely different or has changed majorly... so for C++ developed in this area you're quite probably going to need some major alterations to your code between the two engines.
There are also bugs to deal with which can eat a lot of time to track down - to give a few examples of what we hit:
- Items rendering with a pink hue in game - turned out to be a bug in the supplied map2dif tool for TGEA thats used to create interior files, unfortunately GG no longer supplies the source code for that tool with TGEA and we got no response from GG on the forums offering a solution or advice, now whilst we've found a work around it took a lot of trial and error to find and has added extra time to our art pipeline.
- Script based TCPobject - doesn't work in TGEA, turned out to be a bug in TGEA 1.7.1 that somebody had posted a fix for, but the search function doesn't appear to show up bugs so I had to scroll and read through many pages of bugs to find a solution.
- In TGE when a player takes damage a red damage flash is shown on screen, in TGEA though that code is missing from the engine with just an empty stub routine ... again no response when I posted as a bug.
- Short sound files in Vorbis (.ogg) format don't work well in TGEA 1.7.1 and often fail to load problem - turned out to be a known bug with the vorbis loader and libs that is going to be fixed in TGEA 1.8 that is just released... however there's no release notes for 1.8 so without upgrading I'm unsure whether it is.
- Theora video support doesn't work in TGEA.
There were a lot of other things and with 2 of us focusing entirely on the port it took around 3 months in total and that time does not include adding any of the bells and whistles with TGEA i.e. shaders, normal maps which will take longer.
Also you should know that whilst TGE and TGEA used to be very similar products there is no development going into TGE anymore and TGEA is the product that GG are developing, which will be renamed to Torque 3D in the next release which looks like being a big big update (you can read a blog from GG about it here so as time goes on the port from TGE to TGEA will get harder and harder as the two products drift apart.
In Summary - If you have a simple game with none to little engine modifications on the C++ side you may have an easy time, however if you have made changes to the C++ for the engine you're task is likely to become a much much bigger task.
Yes we've had a pain converting but would I go back to TGE now? NOT a chance in hell!! TGEA is an amazing product, I love the shiny new features, our game performs a lot better (direct-x texture compression in TGEA is a godsend to us :) )
Currently you can buy TGE and upgrade to TGEA for the same cost of buying TGEA so it makes sense to go that route either way... my advice would be to get TGE, have a play and learn what you can from it.. see how you like working with the product, the community and developing a game with Torque and build a prototype or two or some simple games and then to reconsider whether to purchase an upgrade to TGEA before starting to write a lot of code - in hindsight I'd pay the $145 to upgrade from TGE from TGEA before we started our game to avoid the last 3 months of pain.
01/08/2009 (3:24 pm)
Actually I'd disagree having just completed a port of our game from TGE to TGEA it's not been the easiest of times.Whilst TGE and TGEA use the same scripting language Torquescript and a lot of that will port quite easily they are beginning to become very different under the hood in the engine (the C++ code) where the Graphics, Sounds, Resource manager, textures management, lighting and a bunch of other stuff is either completely different or has changed majorly... so for C++ developed in this area you're quite probably going to need some major alterations to your code between the two engines.
There are also bugs to deal with which can eat a lot of time to track down - to give a few examples of what we hit:
- Items rendering with a pink hue in game - turned out to be a bug in the supplied map2dif tool for TGEA thats used to create interior files, unfortunately GG no longer supplies the source code for that tool with TGEA and we got no response from GG on the forums offering a solution or advice, now whilst we've found a work around it took a lot of trial and error to find and has added extra time to our art pipeline.
- Script based TCPobject - doesn't work in TGEA, turned out to be a bug in TGEA 1.7.1 that somebody had posted a fix for, but the search function doesn't appear to show up bugs so I had to scroll and read through many pages of bugs to find a solution.
- In TGE when a player takes damage a red damage flash is shown on screen, in TGEA though that code is missing from the engine with just an empty stub routine ... again no response when I posted as a bug.
- Short sound files in Vorbis (.ogg) format don't work well in TGEA 1.7.1 and often fail to load problem - turned out to be a known bug with the vorbis loader and libs that is going to be fixed in TGEA 1.8 that is just released... however there's no release notes for 1.8 so without upgrading I'm unsure whether it is.
- Theora video support doesn't work in TGEA.
There were a lot of other things and with 2 of us focusing entirely on the port it took around 3 months in total and that time does not include adding any of the bells and whistles with TGEA i.e. shaders, normal maps which will take longer.
Also you should know that whilst TGE and TGEA used to be very similar products there is no development going into TGE anymore and TGEA is the product that GG are developing, which will be renamed to Torque 3D in the next release which looks like being a big big update (you can read a blog from GG about it here so as time goes on the port from TGE to TGEA will get harder and harder as the two products drift apart.
In Summary - If you have a simple game with none to little engine modifications on the C++ side you may have an easy time, however if you have made changes to the C++ for the engine you're task is likely to become a much much bigger task.
Yes we've had a pain converting but would I go back to TGE now? NOT a chance in hell!! TGEA is an amazing product, I love the shiny new features, our game performs a lot better (direct-x texture compression in TGEA is a godsend to us :) )
Currently you can buy TGE and upgrade to TGEA for the same cost of buying TGEA so it makes sense to go that route either way... my advice would be to get TGE, have a play and learn what you can from it.. see how you like working with the product, the community and developing a game with Torque and build a prototype or two or some simple games and then to reconsider whether to purchase an upgrade to TGEA before starting to write a lot of code - in hindsight I'd pay the $145 to upgrade from TGE from TGEA before we started our game to avoid the last 3 months of pain.
Torque Owner Tyler Slabinski