Why We Love and Hate the 3DGS Engine...

Hello all,

I thought it would be fun to discuss why we love and hate the 3DGS engine.

I have tons of stuff that are pro and con, but I will start out with a pro and con, and hope everyone else continues the same way.

One Love and one Hate per post please.

Love: Many years ago, when I first started getting into Game Dev, 3DGS was a affordable, capable, and easy to learn engine.

Hate: After 7 years working with engine (you can check my join date), Conitec still doesn't listen to me when I mention the word bug, and won't even take the time to download a 100 mb movie that shows the bug in detail. I guess they assume my server is as slow as their's is and will take a few hours to download or something.

Carry On,
Loco

Love: Powerful, fast engine which can be modified almost without any limits.

Hate: Users who complain about bugs when it is rather due to their own inability.

love: used it for years, know the stuff not code... never get that) to get nice looking results, can produce whatever i want with the right people

hate: never find the right people, slow with many models on screen, no real widescreen support, no real multiplattform support, no real streaming into engine support...

HATE: Theres no 'Make GAme Button'
LOVE: Its alwaaays there

Love: The community of the engine
Hate: The reputation of the engine

Love: very flexible shader and plugin system
Hate: WED

Love: Features, stability, Lite-C.
Hate: C-Script, ugly screen when starting, no Multi-Platform.

Love: c-script (my first real programming langu... script ), lite-c, DLL's, easy to start with, easy to perform the more advanced things with.

Hate: the lack of proper 2D support, the lack of advanced examples.

Hate: If i have a problem...
Love: If i can solve it !!!

Love: extreme ease of use and unlimited scripting possibilities
Hates: outdated implementations (eg: ode)
Wonders(couldnt help it ): does conitec pay attention to threads like this...

Love: Learnign lite-c with an easy understandable engine..
hate: Idiotical bugs wich needs much time to solve..


don´t know.. but i hope so ^^

Love:Easy to use,easy to learn.
Hate:Reputation of the engine.
Some people is thinking in my country, the engine have a button , to make a game. So, if i create a game... No! I did not create the game. "Make game" button, created the game. I hate this.
i don't see any button to make a game.

thats because of, ummm, the name and come on, look at the demos... i would say the same.... even tho i kno its not true bt from an outsiders perspective...

anyways, sorry for off topic

Love : All features
Hate : Take too long time to release new features

love: I've been using this tool since 1997 and I'm still using it
hate: my own lazyness and lack of motivation to get something done

love : stability
hate : outdated programming language

Love:
- By far the best community out there
- powerfull and flexible shader system
- easy, yet powerfull script language. Option to move to C++ if you want even more.
- flexible plugin system
- rapid prototyping is a piece of cake
- Lots and lots of great updates in the past few months
- Most stable engine i know (Tried Trinigy Vision, Gamebryo, Unreal Engine 2.5, Torque & Torque Advanced, Unity, ShiVa, Lawmaker, C4 . When i comes to stability, GS is way ahead of the others (except for the Unreal Engine, that one is pretty stable, too))
- Licence & Price

Hate:
- Lots of entities on the screen is (of course) a fps killer; instancing would be sweet. You can't use model clusters in all situations.
- No WYSIWYG Editor (yet). I'm really looking forward to GED
- More or less Windows only
- No Web-Player
- People who think there is a "make game button". Because of that i mostly refer to GS as "The Acknex 7 Engine" when talking to others. Sad but true.
- Users like me who always blame conitc for selfmade bugs

Love: The increadible amount of features and its "Lego" approach. Every day you got another toy.

Hate: The increadible amount of features and its "Lego" approach. You can´t know every little feature because they evolve quite fast.

(will)Love: GED

Hate: WED

Love: Flexible indie level engine suitable for the most needs.
Hate: Model Editor should be more flexible and WED should have more WYSIWYG feel.

Love: The entire package. More than enough bang for buck and ultimately a near-perfect tool for the kind of games I like to make.

Hate: The lack of a proper multiplayer lobby kind of thing? After all this time that part of 3dgs still doesn't seem to be quite mature yet. I'm not bashing it, but I'm just saying.

Needs better tech demos like the ones for torque

2nd love: blades idea
2nd hate: conitec for not using blades idea

Love: Speed and features of the engine.
Hate: The name "Gamestudio".

love: hear to the users
hate: nothing
check the new beta page

love:
- very flexible
- price/no license costs
- community that creates great things - mostly for free
- community-suggestions are more often realized than in other engines
- lite-c

hate:
- some features are outdated - like WED
but i gues this is a result of the engine evolution - new engines dont have to handle legacies
- sometimes not reliable beacuse of bugs that are hard to find
- compromise between 'newbies' and 'pros' - but this is nowadays much better than in times of A5 oder A6
- hard to unterstand (or simply extreme buggy!?) collision-system - at least i havent unterstood all aspects yet, and im trying since 2003
- reputation of the '3D Gamestudio'

love :

* because it was one of the first to help newbies create games with limited coding skills!

* Price

* because i was one of the first to get a3 for free ;p

* Some Tutorials but far from complete!

Hate :

* No Real Book that teaches how to use it. You must create in the dark!
* It needs to support collada file format.
* Med is shite! Use wings3d or buy it (even if wings3d is opensource i am sure they have there price hehe ;)This would be a site to see
* Better animation core is needed. (if med was dumped and wings3d bought then you could build the animation core around it!)erlag or no erlag!!!

i could go on but i wont these are the main things required apart from killing bugs!

LOVE:
- It opened to me a world that I never expected to step in before. This happened 1999 with A4.
- I actually reached a level of skills to understand, how this and how an engine in general works, I learned to model, texture and animate, and finally I got the grip how to program, and I am full of good hope to learn more advanced languages as well. I do my own prototypes what is absolutely necessary, because almost nobody understands my concepts without a prototype.
- The manual, the tutorials, the AUMs - I wished they had been so good right from the beginning when I started to use A4.
- The successful projects that showed what is possible with the engine and that gave hope that I finally would be able to do so as well.
- The extraordinary contributions of many forum members - beyond all others: ventilator's exporters and - what a highlight - his second skin/shadow plugin!
- That I met so great and interesting members in this community.
- That I finally met people from the game industry.

HATE:
- The documentation of the old versions were awful, the templates were too complicating and not really useful to extend them and learn by modifying them.
- It lasted 9 years until I understood the last main concepts of the programming in c-script.
- All the projects that were doomed to fail because of unrealistic and exaggerated goals.
- The lack of reliable highly communicated fast collaboration. My lack of skills to assure a leadership that maintains a close collaboration.
- All that fruitless efforts to build up a shader system, which always were too slow to be of use. (Has changed in the last times, though.)
- All this changing level, starting engine, waiting, testing the level, shut down the engine, changing, starting, waiting, testing, shut down - just for building up the visible parts of the game...

Love:

• You can do anything with it if you want. Period. And if it can't, you can do it by yourself.
• The community.
• The coffee mug with my A7 logo. Makes my coffee wants to be some game code.
• JCL's lines. Seriously.
• The state of the engine. It is really cool. It has grown so much that I can even use in serious environments while not being ridiculous with it.

Hate:

• Everytime when I am away for vacation nothing changes on the beta/forecast page for months and when I am back, it looks like their was a feature explosion somewhere in San Diego!
• Me, checking the forums, the beta and forecast page ~100.000 a day.
• The wait(1) instruction. It isn't really suited for writing the whole game programming in C++.
• All the editors, although the feature list of MED is rapidly increasing in the last months.
• The manual for abandoning the C-Script examples.

Love: rapid increasing amount of nice little features, the possibility to create what I want in a very short time

Hate: the editors (except for SED), lack of some important features that other, years old games have (light engine, sound...)

Hope this isn't too old. :P Still wanted to comment though:

Love:

*Lite-C... It's a wonderful language, and perfect for getting things done in reasonable amounts of time. You can make apps in Lite-C, and your users will think it's done in C or C++. It's one of the most powerful, compact languages I've yet to see.

*The community! I don't know where I'd be without all the friendly folks here. I'm not a n00b to programming, but I just started with Lite-C. I think I'm on the brink of mastering the syntax and all of the language's nuances, thanks to your help. With the workshops and these forums, learning Lite-C is a breeze! <3

*The flexibility of the engine, and how such a cheap (compared to others) engine can give you the power to *potentially* compete with top game dev companies with the right people on your team and enough experience.

I've actually seen some silly people look at simple games made with the templates or by n00b users, and say "Ew... This engine doesn't have very good graphics!", which is utter nonsense. The engine doesn't have graphics, because the user is who makes them! If you use cheesy models and skins, your game will look cheesy and cheap. If you have excellent, professional looking artwork, you can make graphics that rival today's top titles. You only get out what you put in! Poo in, poo out; Excellence in, excellence out!

Hate:

*C-script! Ugh! >:(

*When people say "Help! I need some code to make a <fill in blank> game!"

*I also hate the name "3D Gamestudio". I think it undermines the power and flexibility of the engine, and makes it sound like a kiddy toy. It also bothers me how it is advertised as being so "easy" and "simple". It's almost like they're saying: "Gamestudio: So easy a caveman could do it!" or "Gamestudio: Two clicks, and you've just made WoW II!" Lol! I actually saw a forum once where someone posted the 3DGS ad from the main site, and there were actually people saying "Oh cool! I think I'm going to get this Pro version for my kid's birthday. He turns 8 next month, and he will love this!" <- Boy, will that guy's kid be disappointed... (That's a true story, honestly.)

*I also hate the name "SED" or "Script Editor". I don't think it's appropriate for A7. It was probably great for old versions, when C-script was the way of life, but I think it needs to be changed to "CED" (Code Editor) or something better. It's not just for simple scripting, after all...

*MED... Maybe I'm just no good with it, but it seems that it can't do decent UV mapping at all. If I choose "Atlas Mapping", it looks like the model is unwrapped, and then torn to shreds like a bad dog does to a newspaper. I can't build crap with it either. I also use Wings3D when I need to make a model on my own. But I usually leave modeling to my artists, because I suck, lol. It also seems that you can't really "fine tune" the position of objects, vertices, bones like I want to. Even with snapping turned off, it still snaps a little bit, and always out of line with the place I want it. The only thing I use it for is applying skins to a mesh that's already UV mapped, and doing animations/adding bones. But, if we could combine the pros of MED and Wings3D, I think it would be a awesome modeling app for what its worth. Ooh... Did I mention I hate how you have to select things in MED? Lol, it's a major pain, and far too tricky...

*And finally, I hate how there are so many (needless, imho) restrictions on all the great programmers out there who can't afford Pro! Mainly, things like surpressing the startup window. I know Conitec has to pay their bills and feed their families, but still... I'm glad I can surpress it, but I think it kinda ruins a lot of good projects for people who don't own Pro. It's like they force you to advertise for them if you only own Commercial or lower, and it makes your game look less professional and independent. I think there should also be a simple, straightforward resource editor to give your exe's unique icons, rather than magic copy n' paste tricks with a resource hacker. :S It's really a HUGE jump in price from Comm to Pro, just to do a few little things like hide the window, among others. It's also kind of annoying how it says "Compiling Main.exe..........." if you don't hide the window for a published project.

Not really ranting, just dreaming out loud and making suggestions. I do hope Conitec actually reads these!

______________________________________________________________
P.S. @ clown - A gun has never killed anyone. It's always been a person who either mishandled a gun, or intentionally used it to kill. So it's really people who kill people.

It's why I use Wings3D instead of MED, because except for skinning not too complex models, it's pretty much a disaster. I do use it for bone animation, but that's because there isn't a better alternative. It's because I need MED bones in my models and 3DMAX is not an option.

I have to admit though, I haven't done any research into modeling applications since the first days of A6 or so.



I also feel very restricted in not being able to drive in a Ferrari. Very frustrating.

Doesn't mean Ferrari should lower the price just to make me happy.

Of course, whether the difference in price is worth it or justified is somewhat of a different topic, but if you want it, you'll have to buy it.

1. Well now, I actually am used to MED, WED now so its no bother to build worlds and models of the quality I want and thats good.
2. I love the mesh bubild mode
3. The community where some one, some where, sometimes will help or solve hard probs with me for me or care enough to correct my mistakes.
4. AUMS...yeah baby!
5. GED looming on the horizon...yeah baby too!
6. The discussions
7. The fact I have a fully capable working application suite.

on the other hand....
1. Hate that Wed is only pertinant to Pro version, thats like giving me a lolly and saying I can only have 2 licks.
2. Block build mode is too tricky
3. Where are the experts who like to help???
4. Need em bimonthly
5. GED's not here yet
6. Subjects need more sophistication, its all to 'school child' like for me.
7. The fact that I have to learn programming to get it working for me.

So wheres the online school around here?

Love- Oh yeah, lets not forget indeed, the AUM magazines are awesome.

Hate- When I run out of coffee, cola or redbull ??

"3. Where are the experts who like to help???"

Time is money, knowledge is valuable.. the same old same old. That's why some are too busy, but it doesn't mean there aren't any that do like to help.