Reasons to use A6 in professional product?

The target audience has nothing to do with the engine as well as the type of game.

More important are talented people in your team - but not only graphics guys. It is very important to have at least two people in a team which have excellent knowledge of the engine you are using to really have a motor in your development. Imagine a programmer who drives the project and then he leaves or he is ill or whatever. So you have everytime a fallback person. You should also consider if you build a local team together in one office or if you are spreaded and you really announce hardworking weekends (from 8 AM to 3 AM) one or two times a month to compensate crunchtimes or if you take the risk to rely on a spreaded team. It is also a cost factor. Even if you have theoretically 100k euros... you have to pay software licenses (A6 team edition, Maya/Photoshop.. etc. licenses if you employees dont own them already legally), website hostage, office costs, charge for gasolina if your members come to you or so, hardware (you cannot work with a member who has a crappy PC from 1995 ^^), of course the money to pay your teammates, etc.pp.

It is also a difference which type of technology you choose. Let us say you want to develop your game with an open source engine like Ogre or Irrlicht just to name two major brands in the OS scene: you can enhance it if you have the skilled persons and behind them there is a very vivid community which pushes those engines forward. The risk of them is which leads us toward commercial engines. The are relyable.

Actually, gamestudio is one of the most used and developer friendliest engines on the planet. Ok, most people will come now and blame it, but we know the pros and cons and we debated long enough about it. So, if GS fulfills your needs, use it. When you started your project with it, finish it. It would be a horrible case when you switch the engine. YOu dont just have to port it, but you have to learn it. Learning curves and so on. If you have skilled people again in your team which know the other tehcnology - good. But also suboptimal.

I see no reasons why gamestudio isnt good enough to be used in a professional product. There are hundredthouasands of sold copies of games which are developed with 3D Gamestudio. So I think its reasonable - I say that also because I'm involved in such a project so my arguing is purposed by that fact. Nevertheless - it doesnt count for your (theoretically ) decision.

serious greetings
Christian

In addition, There has been a number of professional products released that used GS.

I think with good ideas and a little talent, the sky is the limit.

The biggest problem with released titles is the amount of time it usually takes to finish a product. Sadly, theres a lot of dreams, but a lot of people dont want to work hard to realize them

GS is a great application, and I think its perfect for independent developers!

Jason

i guess if you consider a6 capable to do what you want or need it to do, than its no question that 3dgs can do a lot.

atm. i am a bit unsatisfied, because i have a huge environment and at a sudden it is clipped away for no obvious reason. these are the moments when i think that a6 isnot the tool of choice because now i cant use a big model and well, its a bug and will be wiped out:)

considering you have a bunch of knowledge about 3dgs is another point to think about as a "yes"

If you already know how to use A6, then it's the way to go.
Otherwise you need to get used to the workflow anyway, so you can choose the msot powerful, easiest, fastest whatever engine.

One thing which impresses me is the fact that you can get and do some things in GS with only one or two lines - whereas you have to do MUCH more in other engines. This comes from the enriched toolset and commands GS offers as well (from a programmers POV) and you can easily add your own routines, etc by scripting and DLL.

"Also many people who buy these games aren't serious gamers with up to date PCs."

I realy have to beg to differ about this line.

There are more crap games being produced now then games that ran on them none up to date machines.

Building a game on a machine platform with limitations forces the developer to consintrate on the elements that will make the game FUN to play and keep the players focus and attention, not eye and ear candy of 'modern games' that seem to so often forget anything about the words, enjoyment or fun associated to a game.

One game I'm replaying now is almost 10 years old and it still plays better than many titles I've tried that are recent releases.




( Battle in the Hoth asteroid belt in Shadows of the Empire 1997 )

Nice one Grimber

Yeah I guess its a matter of calculating tradeoffs.

I'm pretty pleased with what A6 can do when used with good modelling software, artwork and code.

C-Script really does compile, right? So would it run faster than Lua or Python? It's really light and quick, it seems. Maybe it's just prejudice -- maybe I am worried if I were to present a game prototype to a publisher or similar, I would be a little to reluctant to say it was made with the gamestudio engine, just out of fear that they'd think it's too low end or something. I guess if the end product is good enough, who gives a damn right?

But I myself see it generally being pretty high end-- well, except for octree/shadows/lightmaps/scene management-- stuff announced for A7, but is it wise to count on those features working well before they are released? After all, it wasn't till about 6.4 that polymesh collision started working well enough.

I think I read an interview with jcl way back when A6 came out that said something like "A6 engine is powerful enough even for an AAA game, even something like Jak and Daxter could be made with it". (referring to the engine, not wed/med)

Anyone agree /disagree?

For professional applications, I dont' know, being an amateur
The reason why I have chosen 3dgs after testing 4 - 5 other engines , it is thanks to its perfect balance
Some other engines can be better for some specific tasks, but if you are looking for a mutipurpose engine I dont see honestly any competitor

I am also interested in BV , it is already a great engine but if the development team keep their promises it can become the best one for Indie developers

Getting back to the original topic, I asked a question , sometime ago

Can you guess which game engine has been used for game development, just playing the game ?

Actually , it seems it is possible but just for details

The main reason for using a game engine is, in my opinion, "Time savings" rather than the final results, unless you are targeting on some specific features ( graphics effects, phisics etc)

From this point of view 3dgs is still the best choice, in my opinion

every engine will be 'behind in the technology'. Becuase even good teams of programmers can't keep up with the advances in hardware.

In my opinion 3DGS only real weak area is the age of its fore interface
(panels, text handling and other 2D displays elements) these havn't kept pace with the rest of the advancements and changes to the rest of the package.

I see complaints about lighting and shadows and shading or model on model collision problems. but all these people forget that the engine is STILL a BSP engine yet and so many of its fundamentals will be optimzed for BSP operations. As the transion to octree continues, many of the 'complained about/for' elements will take be taken care of. It's not an overnight process, its re-write to implement new without sacrificing the old at the same time and not creating more complications/conflicts then the addition was worth.

From other side, look at amazing TripleX work with panels in LevelEditor

I'm in regular contact with him and I swear, its no magic trick. It could be painful even with nasty tricks to do his menus... copy&paste.. modifying.. copy&paste.. modifying.. (*choke*)

I thought about a window renderer yesterday evening, if it would be faster or so if you write your own window-renderer. So you could define your windows as XML file or so and a script parser runs through it and renders everything into a bitmap. So you could do really horny things muhahaha

seriously, I wouldnt even hesitate to use cscript for this. Before _I_ define 100 panels to simulate a window with checkboxes and so on I would write it on my own.. by the way: its good that Johann implemented that checkbox emulation... but we are far away from a good GUI toolkit/toolset here.