Sales Information for iTGB

#1 @Fahim - I can go ahead and answer your questions. It is true that we cannot currently provide an iTGB demo due to source code access. For the same reason, we have tightened our refund policy. Once you make the purchase, you own the full product, source, assets, and docs for life.

If you want, e-mail me directly: michaelp@garagegames.com and tell me a little about your project. I will be able to aid you in the decision.

I can tell you for sure that if your game is 2D, iTGB is your best choice compared Unity. This was unanimously accepted during Casual Connect when I talked to any 2D developer. There was even a sponsored session during CC where an industry veteran compared the two engines point by point, pros and cons. He claimed iTGB was the best choice due to source code access, plethora of tools, excellent community and employee support, and being pure 2D (development and game play).

For future reference, you can also use the contact@garagegames.com or moderators@garagegames.com. Hopefully, a reply within 15 min on a weekend night shows our dedication to the community and eagerness to help =)

#2 Thanks for the super-fast response, Michael :) Composing a longer e-mail to you right now ...

#3 Yea I agree with Mich, iTGB is best for 2D projects. Plus you get access to the source, which makes it easy for developers to extend the engine according to their needs. Even if you're not going to do engine modifications, it's a nice feeling, knowing you have access to the full source.

Just be a little bit more patient with iTGB, they're working on it (including the eventual upgrade to iTorque 2D.) Meanwhile, take time to get yourself fully accustomed to the intricacies of this engine.

#4 I did receive a much more detailed response from Mich via e-mail and he was kind enough to explain things and work with me to see that I had the best experience with GarageGames. Which I really appreciate :)

Just wanted to add a counter-point to what I said above ...

#5

Quote:employee support

How much did his company pay for that?
Sorry if thats harsh, but as the community definitely does not receive that ( we don't even get devs to take part in major bug threads. At least to majority of the industry, memory leaks in an engine for example are considered a major bug, that needs to be adressed immediately especially if it happens for a mobile platform technology. And over 2.5 months for an 1.2.1 hotfix to adress any of the problems with iTGB 1.2.0 is not immediately) I would love to hear how that is available.


I though agree that iTGB might be better suited than Unity for a 2D game, just because Unity has no 2D functionality, so you need to code it all yourself.
The source access is a pro and con.
Pro: you can modify it as you want
Con: iTGB breaks common principles and practises for iPhone applications
Generally, its to keep in mind that TGB has beeing primarily focused on Windows, Mac always was only the second platform with small to large problems and the iPhone is just in a similar situation sadly. But if you are willing to invest the required time you can get out quite a lot of it as you can cut down, rewrite and optimize the technology to your needs.
The second con is the price. iTGB costs $750 ($250 for TGB Pro + $500 for iTGB) for a pure, currently not iphone optimized 2D technology, whereas you get a fully fledged, continously further iphone optimized, 3D tech with occlusion culling, VFP support etc with Unity at a lower price ($598 = $199 for Unity Indie + $399 for iPhone Basic).


Best thing when you want to evaluate it against each other likely would be using the TGB trial.
Take its performance on a regular system, devide it by about 10 and you get the non source optimized performance on the iphone more or less.

#6 @Marc - Forgot to mention the $1499 for Unity to get source, which is something most developers I talked to ask for. Also, $499 for their proprietary asset server since you cannot get full source control software (such as SVN or Perforce) running with their tech.

These were all deciding factors when companies, like Big Blue Bubble, Bitwise Design, MusiGames, and Bioware, chose our engine.

$598 + $1499 + $499 = $2596 for Unity with source and source control, which has no true 2D support, and will soon be behind us when comparing features.

#7 How soon are we talking about here? :D

#8 You don't get sources to unity at all, neither with Indie / iPhone Basic nor Pro / iPhone Advanced.

Unity handles it like professional technologies, sources in 5 to 6 figure ranges for business customers only, as only those need the actual sources to alter the tech. Unity exposes all gameplay relevant things straight to the external programming end (JS and C# aren't really scripting although its called like that. they are compiled to full .NET assemblies in case of the iphone they are compiled to native platform binaries, unlike torque script which runs 8-12 times slower than that within its byte VM)

The difference is you don't need them. Unity is optimized.
With torque its the most common excuse that you have the source and can opt it yourself if you require more performance and specific things.
I say excuse because actively ignoring apple guidelines on how to use the OpenGL ES pipeline efficiently and leaving this basic task to the licensees who bought $500 for this half baken addon really is an excuse.

If I wanted to do it all myself I would have taken TGB Pro which I own since EA and would have implemented it myself.


The source control is a thing thats a drawback, right.
But thats something thats likely beeing adressed as the roadmap shows.


But thats not the topic.
The topic was that it was claimed that the devs are even interested in posting here which isn't the case or at least has not been the case anymore since around 1.2 or earlier.
Also iTGB is often claimed to be an iphone tech yet it lacks basic stuff from apples own guidelines on optimization, not considered more advanced things that could be expected at a 2x base price addon like iTGB.

If T3D was as badly unoptimized for the pc as iTGB is for the iphone, it would require 4x GTX280 to run at 30FPS on a Core i7 940+

But as I've mentioned variosu times: I'm open to be proofen wrong by an itgb game that does more than a simple "tab to shoot" carneval alike game and similar "complex games", thats not fully done in source and that runs at 24FPS+ on an itouch 1st generation (keep your advertisement on iTGB in mind, which is still present on the website, although enough people have already posted on the topic of it beeing false advertisement and totally missleading, nobody cares to correct it as it sells more licenses than the truth would, which goes along the line "TGB like technology, thats not optimized for the iphone yet and requires you to use sources to get more than a diashow").


Just to point that out, I as well as various other people have posted the current problems with iTGB that would need to be adressed to at least base optimize it for the iphone, just to be ignored, so I will repeat them here:

1. Integrate pooling. Can't be that you instantiate and delete objects all the time on a phone, thats totally destructive

2. iTGB MUST GET A BATCHED RENDERER!
Not the opposite as it is currently the case with each particle and each tile on a tile layer beeing rendered as a single distinct vertex array!
Also, the possibility of using interleaved arrays need to be considered as a serious option

3. Stop claiming that you have multitouch support in iTGB if you don't have it, as it is the case right now by iTGB 1.2 (although you claim to have it since its original release 8 months ago)

4. Finally get the compiler flags fixed. With that I don't mean the linker flag error in the current release, with that I mean the actual compiler flags which are not optimal, you can gain 10-15% performance by just fixing this oversight in the projects.

#9 Its one thing that these problems exist, thats already bad enough.

But I'm seriously pissed by the attitude thats shown when it comes to comment and adress these problems. Meaningless postings are the best to get, commonly ignorance of the whole topics or denial of it beeing a problem is the more common thing though.
Thats worlds away from professional. iTGB is no garage dev tech due to its price, so don't expect paying licensees to accept garage or canalisation class handling.

I know its not your fault micheal, you are the documenter and potentially Q&A, so its not your field actually.
So it would be great if one of the responsible persons would finally get at least on a level of base activity here, comment on bug reports which people don't post because they don't have more stupid hobbies and especially take active part in cases of major problems where the devs MUST take part to either offer an intermediate work around till 1.3 or to even get an idea what the problem is.
And just to ensure that: I don't care if the situation is related to iTGE. I payed for iTGB the full price at release. There was no beta before the tech was released and I'm not willing to keep my mouth shut about iTGB 1.2 still beeing a beta quality release.

Hell even the editor build thats provided for mac is totally broken, not even the menues work, not talking about the build system beeing totally messed up


Next time you compare yourself to Unity, try to get en par with their Q&A and the release quality, from which you are dimensions away with iTGB.
Must be really hard to use the processes that are behind TGEA and T3D, which are worlds ahead in this department, and apply them to the iTGB development and deployment process as well to get at least a base level of quality and bug freeness.

#10 Wow, Marc, some interesting input there. Your post does make me wonder about even considering iTGB. I agree that it's much better suited for 2D game creation (I don't think anybody will argue on that point) but given all the issues you mention, which is exactly why I wanted a demo for iTGB in the first place - to see how it actually performs, I'm now re-considering my options ....

I was told that iTGB, once bought, was non-refundable. If the system has as many issues as you mention, then I would have paid $750 for something which wasn't really optimized for the iPhone ... Definitely something to think about. Thanks.

#11 People have released games with iTGB. Take a look around the site for links. The lite versions of games would really be the best demos for the iPhone engine. The TGB trial is the best demo for the development side of the system.

#12 Ronny, I do realize that people have released games with iTGB. But to say that using the game is a demo for the iPhone engine is absurd. A player perspective and developer perspective are two different things. And a developer needs to know that things will work as s/he expects (or wants) before purchasing a development tool. That's the function that a lite version of a game serves for a player. But to say that the two can be interchanged is not realistic :)

#13 I'd have to agree with most everything that Marc has said above. Torque has some really good features and I've found the C++ base to be very easy to use and modify (compared to other engines that I've used).

However, there are some very big performance issues that should be addressed immediately, such as batch tile rendering (I'll probably just end up optimizing this myself...).

#14

Quote:I was told that iTGB, once bought, was non-refundable.

Thats correct

#15 Don't forget there may be a significant population of iTGB users who have no native C++/Objective-C skills, such as myself, who are basically at the mercy of those who do and are generous enough to post their tweaks, hotfixes, and various implementations. I'm forever thankful to some of those users here like Dave and Justin who brought multitouch, swiping, and datablock-level loading code to help get my game released.

#16 @Fahim: I suggest you get the TGB trial and familiarise yourself with how it works, see if you can build something neat with it. Then check back here in the iTGB forums for the current status of the engine. You can tell by Marc's posts :)

#17 I've already tried out TGB and built a few demos. But basically, that doesn't tell me anything much about how easy (or hard) it is to develop for iPhone with iTGB and if it even supports all the stuff that I want to do. I find the lack of a proper support structure and the whole "trust me, it will work but we won't give any refunds" attitude a little unsettling.

Plus, why would I waste a lot of my time "trying to build something neat" when desktop games development is not what I'm after?

Overall, given everything that I've heard here, I think I'll look elsewhere unless somebody from GarageGames can actually answer my questions. (Mich appeared to want to but he's grown silent after our initial exchange and so I have no idea what the official GarageGames stance is ...)

#18 @Fahim - Had a busy Sunday yesterday with the family, I'm going to reply when I get into the office this morning.

#19 @Marc - wow, i sense a lot of pent-up rage =D

EDIT: ok i just noticed that this thread is not showing up in the iTGB thread list anymore. weird ..........................

#20 Yep, the thread doesn't appear on the Torque 2D forum. Is this intentional or just happenstance? If it's intentional, that gives me a really bad feeling about this whole thing. But won't get paranoid just yet :D