Ortucis, I understand your points very much. I also have my doubts regarding IA and T3D. Did you see that id Software is making their own online gaming platform (QuakeLive)? We could try to guess who wins more attention, id or GG.

And when their Instant Action mission fails then the IA investors will probably stop pouring more money into GG. T3D will be more expensive and has to fight against Unity3D then. It will be hard for this company.

My personal issue with Torque is the lack of decent tools (shader preview, material editor / library and similar). Unity3d and C4 can easily beat this.

This will be an exciting year for 3d community. Newtek is working on a completely new Lightwave, 3ds Max gets very interesting features. Modo comes up with 401. Unity3d will be on Windows, T3D might release. C4 gets extremely professional features these days.

I am looking forward to all of this.

http://www.terathon.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6369
This thread says it all. :p

I agree with everything you said. As far as tools are concerned, the terrain editor in Torque was fun, for first 10 mins after which I discovered how pathetic the tool is overall. Forget low res PNG texture support for like 8 textures (who does that?), the terrible GUI and any way possible for a first timer to even know what is the 'right' way to even do something simple as adding water to the terrain was just pita.

Anyways, I am just pissed off cause I wasted a lot of time and money on GG being new to all this (and taken in by hype of course). I apologise if I offended you or someone else.


I for one am definitely following two tools at the moment, A7 and Unity3D (2.5). Unity 3D will also let me mess around with JavaScript (which I did a bit when working on Flash) so I am definitely looking forward to the commercial edition (I hope it's NOT lacking shaders though).



PS: Will Autodesk consume Newtek? :P But then again, Autodesk pretty much owns the CAD market like Adobe does 2D.

I see. If you prefer scripting over programming C++ then this is a logical choice. Maybe you also should look at Shiva. It is similar to Unity3d, less expensive and supports more platforms (even Linux).
But Unity3d is also very impressive. The editor is the best of all indie tools. And the workflow is great as well. You can change a texture or model in external apps and when you switch to Unity it just reloads the assets. Perfect. Shaders are just a dropbox away in your material panel, just like in Shiva or C4.
Gamestudio is somewhat similar, you have to rely more on scripting, tools are a bit older. But you should compare yourself if Unity goes public on Windows.
But Unity is more expensive than GS and Shiva.



I dont think this will happen. They just released news about their new product "Lightwave Core". And I really hope that they continue to stand against Autodesk. Newtek and Luxology are our hope to have a little bit competition and affordable prices.

I have browsed through Shiva page a few times but I didn't see any Mac support. Even though I am interested in Windows only atm, I would like to work with Mac ports as well, I don't really care much about Linux though. Is there a proper Mac support for Shiva?



So far I have only been working with trial betas of 3ds, I was about to get the commercial edition but then I saw (today actually) that Unity 2.5 will be out around the end of Feb, so I have decided to wait and compare both. Like you said, I am more into scripting than messing around with C++ (the reason why I didn't progress much with C4 :P) so a big plus on Unity's side atm is how instead of a custom script I will get to learn a useful scripting language (since I design Flash sites, I can really use some extra learning :D).

So, keeping watch on the news for release..

I don't know why so many people keep whining about Torque.
It is well known that the documentation isn't the best of all, but it contains all functions the engine delivers. If people don't get informations about the engine and it's pro and cons before buying it, they shouldn't complain about wasting money.

I'm still statisfied with Torque, especially with TGB.
TGEA is great to make nice looking games and you don't always need to know C++ to modify the engine. The most stuff is also shared in the community so you just have to recompile. And you can also create awesome stuff just with the scripting language.

I admit that i had problems to start with torque too, but after i bought a book about how to work with torque, i fully understood the engine and am happy with it.

Currently i'm also working with Unity (got the commercial version and the pro beta version).
I like it so far, it's really like 3dgs, just in a much better way.
It always depends on the game style you want to create. I'm focused on 2D and 2.5D games and both are easy to create with Unity, cause you get a Ortographic cam just by one click, and you can have 2D physics.
Though i don't like the scripting yet. It's kinda weird.

The big boo about this engine is the price difference to get shadows and shaders. The Pro would be awesome for many games i have in mind (really crazy ones) but it's too expensive right now for me (for ME, not in general).

the big boo about this engine? it's one of their three supported languages. it's a python dialect with static typing.

their javascript implementation (which is also a dialect which isn't prototype based for example) is written in boo by the way.

unity commercial supports shaders but no render to texture.

I don't understand why people expect to create the new gear of war with torque. I mean just to accomplish crappy game like wii sport company invests and hires programmers, artists and such. You expect to be able to compete with them just because you paid few hundred buck on a software. This is just wishfull thinking. Even team which purchase unreal engine need to tweak it and create their own tools. You will never find a game engine which suits perfectly to your need that the reason you have to choose or you do small game with the workflow limitations and such or you start almost from the start with a 3d library such as ogre or irrlitcht.
But basically if you don't know how to tweak the source code, it may be always some problem.

torque source is a spaghetti mess though and if you want to work with engine source you can get better for free.

You missed the whole point why GG + (Insert the name of their software) is a waste of time and resources. Just in-case, here > http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/15999/