Gears of War on TSE?

#1 Tech wise? Of course.
The fact that Torque lets people at the source code, among other things, lets you do anything if you have the dedication to work at it.

As for a more complexe answer dealing with art specifically, Yes, yes you can make art on par with Gears of war, no problem. The issue lies in the fact that it requires a lot of time and effort to make such art, and unless you dont need the game released soon, or have lots of people or contracts, it's hard to make a whole game with that level of quality. Nothing it TSE will directly limit your ability to pull off that level of art, only your manpower and dedication.
Doable? Most certantly.
Feasible? it depends on the team and the game.

#2 Yeah, I could do that.
I'd rather get my game finished then spend 2 months on a player model in ZBrush though.
As long as you have a good programmer and a dedicated team of artists you can basically do anything with torque.

#3 Hmmm, its a very comlex question. Technically, there are some issues I think TSE as it is now would struggle with.

But its a bit of a moving target, because the unreal engine is designed specifically for that type of game. TSE and its predecessors are targeted to a more open environment.

The sheer polycounts of some of thsoe unreal scenes is scary. But realistically its tuned for a close-in fight rather than a ranged sort of stand off battle, TSE is tuned the other way.

But it could potentially be done with a good amount of work.

Its a moot point really, because if you have that quality of artwork, you can just use the GOW engine and have done with it :)

#4 With some basic math and use of occluders such as walls/buildings
and good LOD i dont think it would be such an issue.
normal mapping for buildings and characters i think the tsea has
amazing possibilities for stunning visual graphics.
take ghost recon advanced warfighter,or the game gears of war for
example,once you get over the stunningvisuals,
the large city they made would probably be the max polycount
all normal/bump mapped but once on the ground the buildings themselves
would occlude and limit the view to a comfortable "max" polycount.
its all in the specular,normal,post processing and of course
a really good photoshop artist lol

oops old post sorry :P

#5 Basic math and good LOD? "OK"

#6 Ok i can do basic math, is there someone here that can do "good LOD"
Let's make a game!!!!


(i couldn't help myself)

#7 My LOD looks good from a distance!

#8 Has to look good up close too...

thats like bieng "My math is good as long as were only using addition"

#9 I would say you would definitely have to tune TGEA to this type of game, like Phil said. I would guess that even Epic did a bunch of tuning on the engine specifically for Gears of War.

One of the largest limitations of TGEA and Torque products, when compared to next-gen titles is the art pipeline. Even though TGEA can handle relatively high poly interiors, we don't have very good tools to bring them in. I'm hoping that Constructor plugs that hole. Bringing in detail meshes from modeling apps like 3DS Max is critical for highly detailed interiors, and the Constructor guys are working to make that happen.

#10 I think Constructor definitely fixes that problem from a tool standpoint. I've been doing experiments with BSP terrain. Currently I have 7800+ brushes in an interior with virtually no performance problems. This being said, if I were doing a game like this I'd optimize DTS and interior rendering.

#11 The more I play with TGEA, the more I realize how limited it is in terms on next-gen graphics. Sure, you've got shaders and psuedo-HDR lighting, but it still limits you to BSP brushes for interior geometry. This is the main reason why Gears of War looks so much better than other high profile shooters like HL2 or Doom3, they arent restrcited to convex geometry. In terms of characters, it could probably be done, but there is no way to create a seriously detailed next-gen level world using the tools for Quake1. Period.

#12 Actually, GOW and UE3 levels aren't entirely polysoup: they are a mix of BSP, curved surfaces and meshes (called detail brushes in UnrealED). The BSP structures are responsible for providing the zones and portals. The thing is that Unreal Engine offers proper integration of the three.

The first thing we did when moving to TGEA was to develop an in-house poly soup-based static geometry format.

#13 Andres, I mean this with respect but I disagree with your statement.

Quote:The more I play with TGEA, the more I realize how limited it is in terms on next-gen graphics.

You're not limited to the default shaders. I've ended up rewriting/modifying most of the defaults to suite my needs. TSE stacks up well in terms of a material/shader system. In terms of BSP I strongly believe Constructor will solve this problem. I completely agree with you that using current public tools is extremely limiting. (Cartography Shop for example.) Also, poly soup collision isn't a wise approach. From what I've heard/seen it's fairly processor heavy and should only be used on specific objects.

-Matt Vitelli

#14 Hey Matt. That's coming from someone who's not a licensee of any of the engines mentioned in this thread.

Quote:
Assuming I was an exceptional 3d artist, would it be possible to create a game that looks as good as Gears of War using TSE?

I mean just look at this question. A 3d artist cannot make a game that looks as good as GOW in TSE. A programmer cannot make a game that looks as good as GOW in TSE. You need both. Alot of beginners ask this question. The same can be applied to any engine. Doom3 or Source, whatever. They were customized to fit the games they are powering.

Other than that, people comparing engines they haven't even had any experience with is quite silly. People comparing non-released engines with existing ones is.. well.. ;)

#15 Engine wise, TSE is not capable at this point. You may be able to have a few characters that look similar in detail, but with the way that Torque manages memory, there is no way it could achieve everything else that is going on in this game and hold up on performance. I was playing with the newest TSE demo that just came out with the realtime shadows and I added a few more orcs and 2 more reflective walls and the framerate dropped dramatically.

BTW, I have played through Gears of War already, it is by far the most graphically impressive game I have ever seen, technically speaking. Unreal Engine I just dont think should even try to be compared to TSE. I am no way trying to dog TSE, but its just not a comparison. TSE cannot make a game like GeoW, and I dont think it was ever designed to.

#16 So you are using the most performance intensive features in a demo designed to show off those features, with zero optimization for your intended result, and claiming TGE-A can't make a highly graphically impressive game.

Funny, I don't see any reflection in the screenshots above, and 4 characters, not to mention extremely basic shadows...

#17 I agree with Stephen. If you're doing this in stock TSE then it's definitely not practical. Of course you'll need to optimize a lot of features such as dts and interior rendering. You'd also need to make some changes to stream the amount of textures a game like Gears of War uses. The bottom line is you really can't compare the two. If not being able to create a Gears of War clone prevents you from purchasing TSE then you'll never be happy with any engine. Gears of War was created by an expert team with dozens programmers and artists and millions of dollars in funding. It's not a very probable feat for an indie studio.

#18 As already mentioned a few times. GOW and the UE3 engine are customized for their respective games, TGEA is not. It's a general purpose engine.

I found that upon making our own game, we made many optimizations to TGEA that probably wouldn't make sense for most games out there, but gave us a big performance boost in return. Because our game works in a specific way, it's easier to optimize the engine than it is to make a general-purpose engine (TGEA) that will fit all game types.

#19 I would imagine that someone gets paid solely to profile EPICs stuff.

I wasn't very impressed with GoW.

Shadows are gimmicks in my opinion. Necessary yes, but they never look anything like they do in real life so why bother approximating and looking stupid? But being positive about shadows I think John Kabus' shadow implementation in TGEA looks much better than the shadows in F.E.A.R. or any other game.

Many optimizations need to be made before TGEA is capable of such a thing. Realtime interior relighting, instancing, and conformant decals sure would go a long way to helping on getting the detail.

#20 While GOW has great graphics, it's 70% art direction and 30% code. Also, since they only turn on most cinematic effects during the cutscenes (and also toggle to the higher res characters and better skin shaders), those end up looking better than gameplay and being fresh in your memory.

I was seriously dissapointed with GOW's lighting system. UE3 promissed lights and shadows beyond imagination, but the result in GOW is:

- Low res static lightmaps (you can rarely see objects cast shadows unless they're massive) with a fixed light vector per surface to make the normal mapping show up on static structures

- Only the characters sport real time shadows, not much different than TGEA, and way different than Doom 3's fully dynamic everything-shadows-everything system. The shadows aren't even filtered!

- Dynamic lights (mostly weapon fire) doesn't cast shadows either.

- Static structures don't cast shadows on the characters (much like TGEA).

After all those UE3 demos, I was expecting something like Doom 3, but with soft shadows and whatnot.
But since the textures are nice, the models are nice, and the levels are nice, and everything works well together, nobody is complaining.

I suggest you manage to get your art up to GOW levels before worrying about the host engine not being optimized enough. Programmer art looks bad on both UE3 and TGEA.

As example, the lighting model in GOW is very generic, but they use occlusion maps for the characters and some objects/structures, which help a LOT in the CG-ish look and are very cheap on the video card.