Torque 3d whats the point.

#1 Hi Morrie - I don't work for GG, but from their blogs and posts, you can see that TGEA 1.8.1 is done. It may receive bug updates (possible 1.8.2), but the future is T3D. Which, really is TGEA plus a bunch of really cool and expensive to develop stuff.

#2 I heard that there is going to be a 1.8.2 version of TGEA, to speed it up and fix some bugs.

#3 UT3 engine costs $250000 price.
And it's forum support costs over $100000.

#4 The point is nobody works for free, and the GarageGames developers have bills to pay and mouths to feed. You can pretty much consider T3D as "making the previous engine better". It's just not a free better.

Quote:UT3 engine costs $250000 price.

Actually it's quite a bit more than that. UE2 still costs $350,000 plus royalties. The price of entry for UE3 is about double that.

#5 I'm not trying to compare the 2 engines not even in price. I'm just saying that I would like for TGEA to keep going, so I don't have to buy another engine.

I just feel that TGEA should not be put on the back burner over T3D, because it has alot of potential, I would like to see it keep going unlike some of the other engines.

#6

Quote:I don't want to spend $500 to $700 to upgrade another engine it just doesn't make any sense.

I can't say that I "enjoyed" the money spent, so to speak, but I have a good feeling that I'll enjoy what I get for it (I enjoy what I get for the money spent on TGEA and TGB as well). The fact is that T3D is TGEA 2.0, and Garage Games is a lot larger than the 4 guys who started it almost 10 years ago (around 40 people now), so they have to pay bills too, and bigger bills at that. There's nothing wrong with cringing when looking at any price change, but everyone's got to make money- even them.

#7 You're free to keep using TGEA, obviously. I'm sure you're not alone.

#8 I'm sure upgrading from Unreal2 to Unreal3 must be free of charge too. ;)

#9 Its not so much the price, but it seems like every time GG gets close to completing a really good engine it gets pushed to the back burner. I've been using GG engines since 2005 and it seem as TGE is the best so far, but I like the things TGEA supply me with.
I'm afraid if I buy T3D they'll just start working on a new engine again then it'll get pushed to the back burner or put on hold.

#10 I kinda get what he's talking about... I mean, hell... there's TONS of stub-code in TGEA still. It's obviously not complete. Plus, I'd really like to see the video playback ability come back to TGEA, luckily there's people working on that still.

#11 I am all for GG making money to stay afloat.
I am also for: not waiting 2 years for 2 year prior advertised features like TGEA.


A pinch of sarcasm:
I am sure the rendering performance increases spoken about in IRC (600%) will remain only a T3D feature...but in an ideal world, it shouldn't be.

:P

#12 Isn't there only so much patching up the foundations of older code you can do before you need to make a full rewrite?

#13 Here's my dilemma...

I am trying very hard to find reasons to upgrade to T3D. It looks beautiful without a doubt. But.. I don't really need forests, I don't need flowing rivers, and I can make roads that look just as good as whats advertised (not meant poorly). I can add physics into TGEA, and can add specific shaders.

-Is performace better in T3D? if so, how much and in what way. I suppose I will need to wait on more blogs/info to find out some more information.

edit- I made a mistake in what I wrote. The forest kit will come separate as an add on and not part of T3D. But, even though it will cost more as an add on.. it still applies since it will only be compatible for T3D.

#14 @Tom: Actually, that would depend on your license agreement with Epic and I know of a few cases where UE2 was licensed close to when UE3 was coming out, so UE3 license was included. Of course, if that was always the case, people would just wait till the "next big thing" was on the way before bothering to license.

Similar to how things are going to be for Windows 7, since starting in June, most purchasers of Vista/including downgrades to XP will be eligible for free upgrades to 7.

As for the other comments here, I could care less personally what happens with T3D, since its out of my price range for an "Indie" product and based on how TGEA was handled, my expectations aren't exactly high. I do hope they will honor their promises to roll things back into TGEA from T3D that need to be, but sadly, the TGEA forums have been pretty much void of GG presence lately and I don't see that improving.

Same thing happened in TGE forums though, so I guess just have to chalk it up and move on, whether things or broken or not.

#15 TGEA will not be phased out, but no new features are to come, only bug fixes. Outside of Atlas, TGEA 1.8 is what TGEA was promised to be: TGE with a new graphics layer. Physics, revamped editors, SSAO, revamped art pipeline, new DTS features (everyone seems to forget about lightmapped polysoup that is inevitable to come alongside the collada support), new terrain features (river and roads), unified dynamic lighting with real-time shadows and day-night cycles were never part of the original promised feature set.

Since those features cost money to develop and put Torque closer to "big-boy" engines, I find it fair that they put them as part of a new engine with a higher license fee. And since TGEA still exists, nothing prevents anyone from implementing most T3D features on their own.

#16 When ever you see T3D, just replace it with TGEA 2.0... or TGE 3.0 and consider the $505 an upgrade fee for new features added to TGE/A. The Torque three dimensional engine is alive and well it just changes names as it matures...

#17 @Steve - T3D is not a complete rewrite. It's an upgrade from TGEA. Some things were removed, somethings were added, some things were modified, but Garage Games did not start from scratch to write it.

But to answer your question: That depends on the skill level of the programmers maintaining the code.

Programmers with less skill will write code that eventually get so high in entropy that they're no longer capable of maintaining it.

Or, sometimes a programmer will simply push to the point where the software is more complex than he's capable of maintaining, at which point he'll simply declare that it's time to start over.... but what many people don't realize is that unless this person doesn't improve his skills, he'll write the new version and hit the same roadblock.

Rewriting software is generally a Bad Idea<tm>.

/offtopic

@Morrie - It's been hashed and rehashed, but to keep from getting totally off track... Since T3D is an upgraded version of TGEA with new features and improved performance, how long do you think they should maintain TGE and TGEA?

Obviously back-porting a few of the bug fixes would be nice, but since many of the improvements is part of the upgrade you can't expect them to backport that... but I will be disappointed if at least one more TGEA "bugfix" is never released.

#18 @Jeremiah... while I suppose it's possible that Epic made a license arrangement to "include" UE3 when licensing UE2 close to the release of UE3, I'm sure they paid a premium price for it since UE3 was quite a bit more expensive than UE2. So it basically would have amounted to pre-ordering UE3. And they're generally per-platform, per-title licenses.


@Andrew... you can add anything to any engine... you can make TGEA run faster too if you put the work into it. The question is, is it going to be more economical for you to add those things to TGEA than it is to upgrade? Unless you're a magician, adding a complete physics system will most likely take you at least 100 hours of work, so unless your time is valued at sweatshop rates, $505 is worth it for that alone (assuming you want full physics).

And the new deferred shading system and PSSM is a bit more than just "specific shaders".

#19 @Gerald

Never said it wasn't. don't misunderstand me, I think T3D is quite spectacular. That doesn't mean it will be more useful to me than TGEA, which already does the things I mentioned above (my version at least).

$505.00 is definitely worth it for T3D imo, but I'm not sure I need it right now. That's what I was saying above.. it has nothing to do negatively against either product.

Side note - Does T3D have a complete physics system? That would be news to me (not meant sarcastically )

#20 @Andrew, look up the blogs and watch the GDC videos (the latest ones). They show off the physics there. However, there's a strong community effort into integrating Physx into TGEA, so you don't really need to upgrade if that's all you need.

The new lighting system is a very strong point IMO. From the forest videos, the HDR and tonemapping looks much more advanced. Also the PSSM and point light shadows, which I always entertained implementing myself, but always shrugged off on the amount of work needed to do it.

However, each one has to look at their projects, at what kind of games and what kind of public they're creating games for. All new features are geared towards mid-to-high end, and if your projects target lower end machines you probably wouldn't benefit from them.

As example, Marble Blast Ultra runs very well on an Asus EEE PC 701, with specular maps and refractions. That netbook would melt at the very idea of running SSAO or PSSM. TGEA is *very* fast: if you keep your assets under control, it performs much better than TGE on Windows machines. But in the past, when it was EA and the market was still flooded with non-shader capable PCs, it was a different story.

A round of bug fixes is likely to hit TGEA, since a lot of the codebase overlaps T3D, just like TGE and TGEA shared bug fixes during the early days. I plan to upgrade to T3D, but since I still see value in static lighting I am cooking some TGEA resources involving lightmaps for the future (if I ever get time... sigh).