Survey Says ... TGEA 1.7

Collecting information can be a tricky thing, especially with a community this large and diverse, but with your help and these fancy interwebs, we can try to learn all that's necessary to make smarter decisions. I don't want to imagine how I'd get this kind of info without it. Southpark painted a scary picture for me though. Back when I was a kid, I remember my father and me paying $3.95 per minute on the Sierra phone hotline to solve a particularly challenging puzzle in Conquests of Camelot. Now, if my sister tells me a ridiculous story about an elephant being able to paint pictures, I can verify her story pretty quickly.

With the TGEA 1.7 release we asked you guys for some help and suggestions. We've received a lot of information in the form of blog discussions and other on-line posts. We also asked you to take a survey about your thoughts on TGEA and 3D game engines in general. This is really important to us because we want to provide you with solid technology to make awesome games.

While we're already hard at work on our next release, there are plenty of open questions and we have a lot of ideas of what to do with TGEA, thanks to your feedback. In the interest of keeping the dialogue open, I want to share some preliminary survey results, as of April 18, 2008. All the charts are shown with the percentage response as well as the number of people who replied in that category. Of course, we know the survey has bias and is not the end-all of where we want TGEA to go, but it's good to get a little feedback on the feedback we received from y'all! ^_^


What do you want in a 3D game engine?




This is what you guys said want in a 3D game engine. As you can see, source code available, easy-to-use editors, smooth art pipeline, and extensive documentation were the most valued by users who participated in the survey. People are torn on whether they want to create games for the Mac, with almost a 50/50 split between caring a lot about Mac games and not caring at all. People seem to care least about actual development on a Mac. Some other things that people cared about not mentioned on this list were an affordable price, frequent updates, starter kits, and a good physics system.


How do you feel about TGEA?




After knowing how people felt about game engines in general, we wanted to know how TGEA ranked. The above chart shows all the responses we received, regardless of TGEA version number. TGEA's main strengths lie mainly in the community, which is no surprise to us. TGEA also scored high on PolySoup Collision, MegaTerrains, and multiplayer support. We scored just "all right" on our art pipeline and support, as well as the newly released Forge demo. We also received a flood of comments about TGEA, so here's a small subset I'd like to share, completely unedited in original form:

• "The docs were nice but it didn't go into detail about mega-terrains. I would like to see a better physics implementation with a nice user friendly gui some day and same for particles."


• "I used TGEA for a prototype. I think that there were many things that may be improved like importing custom shaders and how easy to use they were. I see that many features have been solved in TGEA 1.7 but havent tested them yet."


• "It can be difficult for newcomers to the engine to pick up. Tutorials would be of immense benefit."


• "TSE was a huge disappointment. The lack of OpenGL, and the poor performance of the engine made me consider it unusable, so I stayed with TGE. TGEA1.7 is the first release that I've seriously considered using for development again. I'm hoping that this trend continues."

How do you think the TGEA 1.7 betas went?




Of all the data gathered, nothing is quite as clear as the chart above. You guys obviously loved the TGEA 1.7 beta process and we loved it too because your input helped us make a more solid release. Some other comments you made on the beta process:

• "I thought it was the best release of a Torque product. Just the smashing of the nasty bugs that put a bad taste in buyers mouths when the final is released and they are still there, was a great feeling. Having the community involved was really nice, because you were able to see the process of what was going wrong, and everyone actively fixing the bugs, rather than you wondering if a bug was actively being worked on (getting fixed)."


• "The open development, fast communication and updates make this an example of how it should be done. Great job."


• "For a short while there, it felt like we were back in 2002-3 when the GG community was really active. In my opinion, that community is 50% of the engine(s)."

So what does this all mean?

We're still figuring that question out. We know some of the directions you guys want us to go:

• "I hope you guys continue to make GAMES, and not just develop tools, because I think that is the best asset for making a good engine. When Marble Blast Ultra was the only GG game running on TGEA progress was slow, but just having you guys working on Legions helped us as a community know that problems we might run into making a FPS game would be addressed because you guys would run into it first in testing. So I guess I'm saying whenever you are going to make a new big release for an engine, it would be nice to work on a demo of something, internally, that would really push the engine in the way that buyers would want to (like FPS, RTS, RPGs, the norms)."


• "I want some kind of editor to make 3d games with 2d gameplay (for example, placing "3d tiles" in an editor and having them automatically aligned, having an isometric view camera, having optimized organization and rendering for that)."


• "TDN Docs should be compiled together and made available offline. Spidering software for offline archiving does not work well with the TDN."


• "I think you guys do great stuff. Since we need mac support we stuck with tge 1.52 and now could not change even if we wanted, too much custom code. I'd just love it if the new tgea terrain or at least its texture size would be ported to tge, thats the only thing sorely in need of a better look."

We have our own ideas about TGEA, ranging from improved documentation to specific features. I'm hoping in the comments that follow, you can expand on some of these results and keep giving your two cents. So type away. We are listening. We want to keep an open dialogue. We'll struggle some if we try to please everyone, but the more feedback we get from you, the better decisions we can make for the future of Torque engines.

And for you slackers out there, if you haven't already, take the survey. We have 160 responses so far, but I would be thrilled to have 1,600. Let you voice be heard and we'll do our best to keep Torque rockin'. ^_^