Torque 3D :

Torque 3D final is out

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/18393

Anyone owning it, that could report on stability, ease of use, bugs ?

Yesterday i tried the demo.

- The Advanced Lighting of T3D is very slow and the shadows are sometimes noisy.
- The Editors are good.
- The documentation is a joke.
- There is a external lightmapper for Torque called pureLight. If you use Basic Lighting and the lightmaps generated by pureLight you will get very impressive scenes and a very good performance.
- Garagegames does not say much about portals. So behind "scene management" is a big question mark.

Torque3D is not the big step we all expected. In addition to it, a lot of users are going to C4.

The Advanced Lighting of T3D is very slow and the shadows are sometimes noisy.

-Slow lightening : i think in their videos , they uses big PC
with big configuration to make a fluid video
(For shadows , real time are always somewhat slow and always
not perfect even in AAA today games.)
- Pay again more for an extrenal lightampper
- Documentation is basic needed feature, just developping an
engine and selling it without good documentation: is like
doing half of the work !

Ok ; so improved , some teams will perhaps do something with it, but lot of things remain the same state finally !

Yeah , i know C4 is going strong, and the author is big 3D specialist !

I also checked the demo yesterday. Just like Wicht I was not impressed of the Advanced Lighting. But the standard lighting together with the excellent static shadowmaps (and vertex lighting) from pureLight looked very convincing and rendered extremely fast. I found no lighmap errors like I found in Torque Constructor or like you can see in A7 WED light-mapper.

pureLight is the new star there because it can render professional lightmaps with all tricks like big render applications do (global illumination, control over samples, lightsources, geometry as light sources, automatic uv-unwrapping with lots of different uv-methods, the option to switch between light-maps and vertex-lighting, depending on the struture of the geometry and many more).
You will not find a better LM tool, even if you check the big boy engines.

So if you want to make a fast and good looking game with multi-player running in a web-browser and on Mac / PC, then this might be an interesting solution.

Nevertheless many hobby- and indie users are switching to C4, especially the experienced C++ coders. They feel ripped off because of the heavy price and the fact that GG wants to remove TGE/A from the shop. This will destroy the hobby base of Torque very fast. Hardcore users and serious users with real projects will probably stay.

and the fact that GG wants to remove TGE/A from the shop

I don't understand , remove from teh shop ???
Only available for big pros like developpers on real big games or PS3 ?

No, you can buy T3D. It is up to you. You dont have to be a big pro or a studio. But a beginner will not spend 1000 $ for an engine and another 400 for the lightmap solution.

So the students, pupils and newcomers will rather buy Unity Indie, GS (Lite-C) or will use free alternatives like Irrlicht and Ogre instead.

Yeah and not only students there are a lot of indie guys !

Specialy making Iphone games :
less intensive work to have textures and models working in a game (no AAA quality that requires a good team)
Just check Unity showcase Forums


Yeah T3D , personnaly i think really for people making something good looking and realistic, that have a talented texturer, modeler, animator, particle and special effects coder.


But there are special cases, where people lonewolf or little teams could make little games with good graphics effects and next gen stuff :
Trine game for example !

Garagegames made three big mistakes:

1. Their new flagship comes with two versions. Basic (~250 USD) and Professional (1000 USD). The Basic is useless because you dont have the source code. So it is impossible to add external libraries. But a beginner will never pay 1000 USD. GG is destroying their user base of "new blood".

2. The documentation is very very bad. A beginner will never understand the engine completely because nothing is explained very well. In my case i did a different way. I bought TGE and three corresponding books. Now i have a very good insight. This way i can switch to Torque3D without to be overwhelmed.
The three books mentioned above are only for TGE and written by a user and not a employee of Garagegames.
But what will a beginner do? He is reading the spare docs (including the Torque Developer Network) and is wondering how things work and... very important... WHY things work.

3. Most developers dont know how to create a project from scratch. Instead they use a sample application from the SDK and modify it. This results in unstructured code. This is not a way a developer should go.

I think it's going to be for real teams , having very skilled coders that would be able to study and understand it's complicated code and bring on new stuff !

For indie and lonewolves , others engines i htink are lot more suitable with their simple scripts and better documentation/tutorials.

But Garage games also provides other very good products like their Torque 2D or incoming Iphone (only 2D for the moment)
But will their Iphone product will be as easy of use as Iphone of Unity ?

Torque2D (currently known as TGB) exists as iPhone-Version called iTGB. But there is also a engine for 3D called iTGE. So both, 2D and 3D, for the iPhone are supported.

The problem of GG is: They do a lot but nothing right.

$350 for static lighting? They gotta be joking! Have you seen the videos? You could easily reproduce that with Gamestudio! And Gamestudio Commercial is $150 less than their static lighting alone!

haha

PigHunter:
I tell you why Wicht was laughing about your statement.

http://www.garagegames.com/products/purelight
As you can see from the feature list there is a huge (and I actually mean very huge) difference between the light mapper of Gamestudio and pureLight. pureLight can create automatic unwrapping with different methods depending on the geometry. It can switch between light mapping and vertex lighting to save memory and prevent light map leaks. It renders shadows with all the tricks like a professional rendering software does (global illumination, multi-threading and much more).
You have lots of different light-sources. You can even use geometry as light-source. This will produce very realistic and soft shadows.
You can import all geometry and light sources via Collada files directly from your modelling software.

pureLight it the most professional tool at the GarageGames shop. It is worth the money. It is only sad that the actual engine (Torque3d) did not get so much love and perfection.

Why not asking 3DGS Team to integrate that tool and offer it for same price in A7 Bundle ?

Yeah Basic Torque 3D price is too hight for beginners or low budget people , and for just quality lightmapping.

Personnal advice , now perhaps some people enjoy this basic version for the price ?

Because pureLight can handle ASE (from 3ds max) and Collada only.
But you can ask JCL (the Firewall against new technologies) to create a port for pureLight. Good luck.

I personally do not like the idea of plugins, the less integrated something is the bigger pain in the but it can be....it is also not as powerful(generally)as something designed for the engine....if that makes sense.
...in other words, good old "C/C++" directX/openGL, and some elbo grease go a long way if you can use them...what jcl has given us is a completely competent well integrated tool for application creation....generally used for games, but not limited to.

sorry for this additional post, but the lighting is semi impressive, but I always feel like for a marketing intellectual technology, they should be able to offer more.

@Machinery_Frank: Fair enough. I understand all that. But when I watch the videos showcasing pureLight, my jaw does not drop. BTW, looks like pureLight is a third party application, exports to .tga... So why shouldn't it work with Gamestudio? (May not be practical and a bit of a pain, but otherwise it wouldn't be fun. )