Torque 3D?

#21 I think the point Vector was trying to make is that by deciding to move to a higher price point, GG will be chosing to lose a good portion of its current audience. I own TGE and TGEA... I enjoy tinkering with it. Like many of the people who have purchased a license over the past years, I will probably never make anything worthwhile. Nonetheless, I enjoy playing with it because the price was reasonable. At $1000, I am 99% sure that I would never have gotten started with Torque in the first place. Even at the $500 pre-order upgrade price I qualify for, I will probably not be upgrading. I'd like to... but that is just too much for what is really just a hobby that I dabble in.

I think what GG has to decide (and what it has apparently already decided) is whether or not the loss of people like me will be offset by the additional revenue generated by those who stick with it, even at the higher price.

Even if they continue selling TGE and TGEA at a lower price, as a new customer, I wouldn't bite. Even though there is nothing "wrong" with either of those engines, I don't think I could bring myself to learn something I knew was 2 or 3 "generations" old.

I dunno. I wish GG the best of luck, I like the company and I like the product, but I don't like the new price. :(

#22 Hmmm But from the Torque3D info screen, they are still doing a "standard" version for $250, its just missing a few features, for those that want the "Pro" license its $1000 (unless you've covered by an upgrade).

Seems a perfectly sensible business model to me.

I've yet to ship anything under Torque in the (I think half dozen) years I've had a license(s). Personally I like and use Torque (and will be upgrading to Torque3D) for my home prototyping and knocking up ideas. And when the stars align and I'm ready to go proper Indie (and quit the day job) I'll be happy knowing I have a pretty capable engine and toolset all ready to go (and if/when I get external funding or earn >250,000$ off it, having to pay more will be a problem I'd like to have).

#23 True... but I don't think I'd buy an engine license without the full set of tools and definitely not without the source code. Neither are included at the Basic price. I understand why there is a basic version... though I'm not sure someone interested in a purely torquescript project would choose the basic version of T3D over something more user-friendly like TGB.

#24 Go Garage Games! I agree. Everything's going to be fine.

#25 @Vector: The first question you should ask yourself, is why am I here? And the second question is, how can I find treatment for my condition. Your not coming in with an opinion and wanting to hear answers. People have attempted to respond to you but you respond back with something intended to incite them. That's not how normal, rationale people act.

#26 I don't necessarily disagree with everything Vector has pointed out (though I don't particularly appreciate the snide manner a few remarks have been made in).

However I think Vector is missing something here, based upon this sentence: "This is the sad thing, for Indie (Sub $300) development there is nothing even close." (On a side note I'd rate C4 as being quite nice in this price range, but that's another discussion. You also still have TGEA as an option as far as I know.)

Indie development is not "sub $300". If anything, that is purely individual hobbyist level. If GG wants to engage more indie studio teams and retarget away from individual hobbyists, I think that's great.

In the industry, "indie developer" simply means self-funded, and not (in the long-term) completely beholden by contracts to a publisher. Lacking funds from a publisher means resources are much more scarce, which is what gives indies the "low development budget" stigma. In any case, an indie generally is assumed to be a studio with some sort of functional pipeline (however meager) to design, develop and release a title. Id Software is technically indie, even if they have considerable in-house resources.

At the end of the day, $1000 really isn't a lot of money. I can afford this for just personal purposes; it's even easier to justify from the perspective of a small studio team. Max is $4000, Photoshop is $700. The proposed T3D price is inline with other tools of the trade, even though it's arguably the most significant component.

All that being said, even though my interest is the pro version (for source) I think that the individual hobbyist version (binary only) would do better as a feature-complete release. I'm also troubled by how the new T3D seems (to me) to just be TGEA with the equivalent of a few shaders/"community resources" added. GG needs to really stress the differences here, to prevent the misconception that we're buying TGEA a second time, or just purchasing what should have been an incremental update - for example, why shouldn't I just get TGEA and add in SSAO (which isn't terribly difficult) myself? Exactly how is the editing / pipeline noticeably improved over TGEA? Perhaps this situation should simply be approached as a price-raise of an existing product rather than T3D being a "new" product?

Edit: This link was posted earlier and provides a little more info on what's been going on: tgeaenhanced.blogspot.com/. Interesting. I think two of TGEA's biggest issues previously were probably tools/pipeline and documentation. Hopefully these are beefy for this release...

#27 Garage Games, you just crushed the niche I was living in, I will not be 'upgrading' my TGEA licence, the price is too high, I am no longer the market you are pushing this product at, its a shame, I hope you can find the new customers you will need to make this work, and to replace the many you have no doubt lost, I have a horrible feeling that you have shot yourselves in the foot with this pricing structure.

#28 Vis just stick with TGEA or TGE there will always be people in those areas. if you cant afford T3D then its more then likely not made for you like they have been saying as its complex its not simple like TGEA and TGE.

#29 Go Garage Games! I agree. Everything's going to be fine.

#30 The updates to Torque 3D are significant. We're showing them here at GDC right now. You're certainly welcome to wait until we've shown more directly on the site. "Wait and see" doesn't seem unreasonable to me. As for the pricing thing, we've done our best to make the upgrade pricing fair, and the license very generous. If it's too spendy, TGEA is still a great option as is the Basic version of Torque 3D. We haven't crushed anyone's niche. We're adapting like any smart company or individual would. The landscape changes almost weekly. I think we provide an unmatchable value to developers. BTW, there are a LOT of people here who are making the move to the new tech. It doesn't mean everyone does, but so far, there are many more new Torque 3D owners than I had expected we'd see this early.

#31 What I don't understand is why I should buy a preorder without knowing the full specs of the engine... I mean, we all know how pretty looked the demos made with TGE and TGEA, but then when you had to go out of the classical FPS scheme and, just to say, make a space shooter game a la Elite, you found yourself against incredible problems. Now I would like to know: did Toruqe3d change this way of doing things?
Nothing has been told about the pipeline. In other engines world editors I can also edit BSP brushes directly, in toruqe I have to make details in a 3d engine import them in constructor and build my map adding brushes and then go into world editor just to discover that maybe I have to start again...
Or the fact that you have to start mission with clients and servers also if you want to make a single player game...
Or again the limited mountpoints of the meshes and the fact that you cannot mount everything on everything in a hierarchical tree model.
So instead of showing us a lot of shaders and cool efects that anyway could be implemented by every good programmer... why don't you show us how the world editor really works just to make a huge world with lot of details (also decals) and to a decent framerate (and that doesn't look blocky like barricade). Don't get me wrong, I'm seriously thinking about buying t3d but since now there are also viable less pricey alternatives (like c4 but also Neoaxis) and I would like to get advantage of the preorder, I would like to see if Torque is useful for the kind of game I'm making before doing a preorder. For what I've seen since now there are a lot of cool effects... good, but games are more than only shaders..

#32 well i would think the specs for T3D are the same as TGEA. T3d is just TGEA 2.0 and its not really using anything different it might use just a tad more then TGEA but i don't think its going to be a big difference as long as you can run TGEA you can run T3D.

#33

Quote:
So instead of showing us a lot of shaders and cool efects that anyway could be implemented by every good programmer...

Well, I'd say all of the other things you mentioned could be implemented by most good programmers too, so what's the problem? If you can properly implement SSAO, DoF and soft particles, then there's no reason you can't also implement a custom interior object type, or new mesh types with more suitable mounting features. The rendering pipeline in Torque makes this pretty easy.

In fact, the eye candy effects they've shown can be used across a wide range of different genres, while mesh and static geometry types more often benefit from game specific customizations.

#34 @ Brandon

I didn't mean computer specs sorry I did mean engine specs.


@ Gerald

Yes and if I have to build all the engine by myself why buy it?
Let's be serious and don't start criticizing the words instead of the concept, you know what I was meaning: If an engine is modular and you can easily add and modify things as you like than it's good, if an engine is convoluted with pieces of code scattered all the way around it's not a good working engine. You maybe know how many people tried to increase for example the resolution of the terrain in TGE without coming up with a good method cause everything you changed broke something in other places... So what I'm asking if pipeline and customizability of the code have been made easier to modify without losing a lot of time that should be invested to program the game.

#35 @Andrea, what I got from your words was that the graphics features were less important because they're easy for a good programmer to create on their own. I just pointed out that this is true of everything else too. Since I learned my way around the engine I haven't had much trouble implementing anything that I wanted to, but maybe my definition of a good programmer is just different than yours :p

However, the question you're bringing up has been discussed a bit on the blogs, so I can probably answer it to some degree.

T3D does not represent a rewrite/redesign of the engine structure, so many of these types of things will suffer the same design issues. Some things will be easier; the systems that they did overhaul utilize a nice modern design paradigm. The render management system design is clean. The terrain system has undergone a facelift and is going to be much easier to work with. A few other things have improved on that end.

But overall the engine is still using the same basic structure, so don't expect miracles. The next iteration of Torque is when the miracles are coming :P

#36 I just wanted to add on the "So instead of showing us a lot of shaders and cool efects that anyway could be implemented by every good programmer" comment. While some of the visual things shown are just eye candy, some of those things, such as the new terrain and the new lighting system were a whole lot more complex than that.

#37

Quote:Dude ignore the fan boys and their idiotic input.

Remain civil, or stay out. If you wish to attack the engine, fine. Bring up details and back up what you say.

If you wish to attack the community or employees, then I'd prefer you just go your own way.

Sorry if this seems harsh or "defensive." I'm tired from GDC. Believe me, the impression of Torque 3D was lasting and positive during our demos. If you can drop names, I will drop names. Sound fair?

#38 Go Garage Games! I agree. Everything's going to be fine.

#39 1) Calling everybody who uses Torque, and anybody who defends its use, a fanboy, is most certainly an attack on the community and the employees.

2) Dismissing anybody who disagrees with you as a fanboy is hardly what I'd consider "without an almost completely partisan response".

3) TGEA just recently won the GDM Front Line Award for best engine, ahead of Gamebryo, Unity, CryEngine and Source (Unreal has its own category now). That's an awful lot of fanboys voting for them for being such a desperate company and all, eh?

4) Fanboy is a tired term, time to stop using it.

#40 Go Garage Games! I agree. Everything's going to be fine.