Evaluating engines and A7 Pro

I am trying to decide on which game engine to commit to.

I remember seeing a demo for A6 that showed everything it could do but have not really seen a good one for A7 with the shaders etc.

Is A7 Pro capable of producing good graphics like S2 Profenix ? Basically it is the lighting that sells this one so well as seen in some of the videos on the video page.

I have been looking at Beyond Virtual or rather Game Core and S2 Profenix and A7 Pro. Game Core is a young engine yet but I like Gekidos philosophy on game engines.

A7 has a lot of great resource tools like IceX and IntenseX AI. Those two are big pluses for going with A7.

My fear is that A7 will not be able to handle larger outdoor terrains for a role playing game in space as flying a ship around is going to take up land space like driving fast cars. You need to be able to have large levels for that.

Is A7 capable of handling good frame rates for outdoor scenes and indoor scenes with shaders and a lot of models. Think what most rpgs have in their levels.

Good lighting really sells a scene and I heard that A7 could not handle a lot of lights. Is there any way to get out of baked lighting here? I am going to have day and night and weather systems so baked in lights will not work with the type of game I am making. The player will also be having the capability to carry lights with him so baked in lighting and shadows will not work with that.

Lighting can really make or break a level!

If A7 Pro is capable of creating scenes like in S2 Profenix and handle the light issues then I will go with it.

Please do not think I am trying to sell these other engines as I am not. I am trying to talk myself into going with A7 but I really like the lighting in S2 Profenix. The AI for S2 would have also sold me but IntenseX AI blows S2 Profenix AI right out of the water.

The frame rate of A7 is certainly better than BV. I dont know how it compares with Game Core or S2. A7 claims to support more dynamic lights than other engines but I have not used this many dynamic lights yet.

For sure you wont need A7 Pro just for lighting, there is no difference in the lighting of Commercial and Pro. So you can find out with the trial version if it works for you.

- s2-like lighting in a7? -no, not even close
- bv fps slower than same scene a7? -no truly comparable demos out there, but wait until gameCore 2 is released (shortly, some weeks), but i truly doubt tobias' statement
- s2 is a first person shooter engine, and if you don't invest your cash in the whole pro package, you won't be able to pull off anything else than shooters
- s2's scripting is still limited, so is their model file format support (yet), you'll still need 3ds max for animated models
- gameCore2 seems to be the most user friendly and complete package with a great variety of supported files and an easy scripting language, but it's not available yet and you can only guess about its performance

if you are looking for a cross platform solution with great lighting and the possibility to play your games in a web browser, try ShiVa/Ston3D

you can have the same lighting in a7 and a7 isn't slow. other engines are also only cooking with water. they don't do magic. with gamestudio there is no out of the box artist friendly solution though. the tools are a bit lacking. you will need some shader programming knowledge.

Thats no big deal. You can use LOD and many many other tricks to make big levels. I have thrown some huge levels at a7 and it responds extremely well. It all depends on what your doing. On a very large flight simulator type of level you will probably need to flatten your textures, but thats only if your levels are absolutely huge.

RPG's where your player walks around through the forest from village to village you would just use some tricks to create the illusion of a huge level. You could load in levels on the fly, you could just move things around like a treadmill, there are a lot of tricks, but there is no question in my mind about what a7 can do.

If you mean a game like freelancer or something in space then these levels are the easiest to make extremely huge. One technique I have used is to actually make the player the center of a very large sphere with the normals inverted, essentially everywhere the player moves his universe moves with him also. Then you could change the texture of the sphere and it made good LOD type effects when you moved a planet through it.

There are a lot of ways of making huge levels. Im sure you would get plenty of help here if thats what your trying to do.

watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrsxrptxCzU, pay attention to the moving shadows, the character lighting etc. to my knowledge, a7 has no unified lighting system. prove me wrong.

you can do pssm and also what matt aufderheide did with sphere without plugins now in a7. so you can have unified lighting in a7. the weakness of gamestudio isn't so much the engine but the studio part. an artist who can't program shaders won't come very far in this regard at the moment.

What is pssm please?

From what i have read, PSSMs (aka Parallel-Split Shadow Maps) split the view frustum into separate parts using planes parallel to the view plane, and then generate a shadow map for each part. I remember reading a good article in "GPU Gems 3". If im wrong please correct me

Exactly - so I guess its not a question of whether 3d gamestudio can do it, but rather if the programmer has the skills to do it ^^.

I guess the main reason for not seeing this type of thing in 3dgs is because there is no out-of-the-box solution, as most of these other engines seem to come with.




That would be a problem with every engine - dynamic lighting and baked shadows not working. Although I am sure you could use shaders that dynamically light objects, plus some version of shadow mapping + AO/SSAO or similar to create nice lighting

Thanks ^^
Adoado