TGE/TSE differences?

#1 Well, that really depends on the skill sets of your programmers, your target audience, and the type of game your developing. TSE is mature enough to start developing on now, but atm is windows only, and yet to be optimised. Really, the only key pieces missing from it are dynamic lighting and shadows, and a few genre specifc classes. The good news is GG now has a Bounty system, where they are paying for certain features to be ported over, so, i'm sure most of these will be addressed soon..


good luck

#2 Basically TSE is in Early Adoption phase. Stuff will break while in the process of making TSE a feature complete stable product. TSE builds on TGE technology with Shaders which basically makes everything look pretty :) like in the screenshots. I'm sure others can be more specific.

#3 Lisa,
The development team I am working with have resently had this same disscusion. After much debating, we have decided to start working with TSE. Mainly because our programmer has assured us that TSE is stable enough for him to work out what errors we come across.

#4 You might want to spend some time reading some of the older posts here. Will help
point out a few differences. There is still some grey area for me .. a fog.. some things
are getting chopped.. some improved. TSE has more potential than any of the 3. err 4
engines (4 is Supertorque T2d and tge mixed)...

#5 For all intents and purposes, TGE and TSE are interchangable from a game development standpoint. The only major differences in terms of game production are in the code which requires access to render themselves, so GUI controls and anything user-renderable need some work.

The effort required to port from TGE to TSE is actually quite minimal, so my recommendation would be to create most of your game code in TGE (more stable mature codebase) and once you have that code, simply port it across to TSE. The only caveat there is if you outgrow the bounds of a specific part of TGE, for instance, my game is a flight sim and REQUIRES a specific scale of scenery which precludes current TGE landscapes. I still did a large amount of my prototype codebase and most of the vehicle work in TGE as its generally a little easier for debug render methods.

Our port across to TSE was literally a few hours one day and then spending a short time defining material properties.

This should definitely be left until a late stage as it tends to change a fair amount.

I would highly recommend having a TGE build of your game though, as it increases the potential audience a lot. We are considering back-porting the atlas code to TGE so that we have a TGE build available across PC, Mac and Linux.