Getting started with GameStudio is easy

Just begin!

Here's a video I made showing something I threw together demonstrating how easy it is to get started with GameStudio. I compare it to how things operate in Unity because I've been using Unity for over five years now. I figured the comparison might help others as well. I'm a programmer not a PR/marketer so the video is more verbose that it needs to be.
[video:youtube]https://youtu.be/y-4LzmL-fhk?t=210[/video]

Hey! Welcome to the forum!

It's great to see new GameStudio related videos and newcomers on the forum!
If you don't mind, I would like to make few corrections to your video:

• LiteC isn't a scripting language, as you can see from the features page:
  
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  Still, lite-C is not a script language but a real programming language. It can access all functions from Windows libraries on your PC, including DirectX classes and OpenGL functions. You could write your own 3D engine in lite-C! Unlike many scripting languages like Basic, Python, LUA etc, lite-C is compiled - translated into optimized machine code. Thus a lite-C program runs up to twenty times faster than interpreted scripting languages. This is important as in an abitious game with several thousand actors, 10,000 program functions could run at the same time!
• GameStudio was lastly updated back in Mar 9 2016 (~5 years ago) and it's not going to receive any updates soon
• There are bunch of terrible bugs which were never fixed and never going to be fixed (because no updates)
• There are never going to be any new features added from the Conitec (because no updates)
• Some of the statements from the ads aren't applicable to GameStudio anymore (f.e.):
  
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  With purchasing a Gamestudio Edition from the Gamestudio website, you aquire the right of lifetime free updates of your engine version. Updates are released in regular intervals as long as the engine version is developed.
• GameStudio never made it to became OpenSource because of LiteC compiler (and maybe some other under the hood junk)
• About 90% of the community left GameStudio because of those problems, you can join user-made discord server since it's more active than the forum

So the biggest draw back is, that after buying GameStudio you won't be getting any support/bug fixes/new features. Because Conitec's owner (jcl) switched from GameStudio to his precious Zorro project (trading) and doesn't really care about GameStudio users (old/new). Back at the times when forum was yet more or less alive, there were pro users who offered their help with developing the engine if it because open source, but this never happend and it resulted in GameStudio's death. Jcl does say that he might update the engine in future, but this goes for 5 years straight and he never made any clear statements about this (which is very tasteless on his end).

If you will need anyhelp toying around with GameStudio, feel free to join discord:
Gamestudio Discord

Also to backup some of my statements, take a look at the latest responce from the jcl:
Few update suggestions

My best regards!

Is there a list of the terrible bugs somewhere I can look at? For example what in the manual isn't working as stated? I've seen some posts online, elsewhere, where someone who made a game and released it commercially said the pro version of the engine can't handle modern resolutions. I compiled a project at 1080p and it ran just fine on my computer which uses Windows 10 Pro.

One bug is in ent_animatefrom in combination with ent_decal fex. The decal will use mesh of the animation source only. One example of a known bug. I dont use decals i dont care, just a example. I would not say its terrible but its a bug.

You can check out bug hunt section btw
And like 3run pointed out lite-c isnt c-script.

I'm sorry, but I guess the only person who (I hope) kept track of all bugs is jcl himself. Aside from that, feel free to browse 'Blame the Manual', 'Bug Hunt' and 'Ask the Developers' threads.

Just to backup my words, here are few problems/bugs I found after a brief searching:If you are really into it, I'm sure you'll be able to search/find even more bugs which were never fixed, but what's the point? If this engine was indeed a 'gem' it would be up and running nowadays, it was left by it's users for a good reasons.

From my personal experience, few things that I can recall:


I can only guess maybe it was related to ultrawide monitors? Anyways, you also should know, that there is no 'out of the box'/buildin solution for getting all monitor resolutions (also multimonitor is a bit tricky, but possible). You will make to make your own solutions with WinAPI (there are several ready to use solutions made by users, but no build in feature to this exists).

I'm not trying to convince you here, just wanted you to know more about the engine before purchasing the license. Because you as a newcomer might not know all the issues.
Anyways, welcome once again and good luck.

Edit: Those bugs might not be as terrible as they are in reality. But for me they are terrible, because all those never fixed bugs + jcl not giving a damn thing lead to the death of the GameStudio. Working with this engine for so long and seeing they way it died is very sad.

Never get commercial edition. It has no resource compiler to protect assets etc. Just my point of view

Most the time iam spending to find work arounds.
Is engine worth money? Still i say yes

ok, thanks for the info

I would only add that something like Unity also has bugs. I hear Unity people complaining all the time, but yes, they are still releasing updates so that's fair.

I still think commercial games are feasible with Gamestudio, but set your expectations. They will likely not look as good as other engines without a ton of extra work. It is harder to get things to work at multiple resolutions etc... I have three 3D Gamestudio games on Steam and they are all in the positive to very positive range as far as reviews. But of course there have been a number of technical issues. Mos of those were my fault, but it's possible some were directly related to the engine.

One good thing is that Linux systems with WINE and Proton seem to be able to handle Gamestudio games fairly well.

I only mention this because a lot of newer Windows games seem to be designed to require certain hardware or software features that are not available on older systems. This makes them less likely to work on Linux.

Another thing I saw was how Unity handled their web player. They just stopped supporting it at one point, and all the games made for the web player stopped working. I guess this may have had more to do with the browsers and how they handled graphics, but it shows how easily a feature can get removed even in a modern engine like Unity.

I love how enthusiastic you are about this in your video!
It is an awesome engine, but you are definitely seeing it through rose colored glasses

It's a lower level engine (as in C is a lower level language than C#), and that's great for understanding how some of the things work in an engine. It still abstracts away some stuff but not as much as unity or unreal. Apart from that, i think that it's not a good engine to start a new project in 2021, because of the limitations of the engine. It catered to a different era. Also when compared to others workflow sucks. Though I admit these limitations and dated workflow has a charm of it's own and forces you to get creative. But if you hit a hard limitation or a project breaking bug it's not fun. Last time i gave up, I was trying to implement a passable PBR shader. I gave up because cubemaps did not have mipmaps, and workarounds were too much work.

I still think JCL should throw away propriety parts(Lite-c compiler plus whatever) and open-source the parts they own the rights to. I just want to plug a new renderer and scripting language to it for old time's sake.

I would like to add something on this subject. Most of the bugs are tolerable but they are not few in number. The terrible thing is that the bugs haven't been fixed for years and there is a possibility that there are bugs that are no longer reported. For example, I didn't even bother to report a problem I just discovered. Let me share it here as a sample.

I somehow managed to get a new generation AMD graphics card. After installing, I saw that my old projects were not working on this card. I was getting black screen error. After much effort, I found the cause of the error: Using anisotropic filter (1,4,5,6,7) causes black screen error. I tried all the drivers from AMD but the situation did not change. You can watch the video below;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J3jzUnRMnQ


Also, for some unknown reason, I can't get high performance because the new graphics card doesn't work at full load in some projects. There is definitely something wrong here. All of this may be caused by amd (probably driver issue), or it may be caused by another third party program. Or there may be something JCL can do about it. But in the end, it is clear that these problems will not be fixed. That's why I don't bother to give a feedback/report the bug.

If this situation continues, I'm afraid that with new operating systems and new technologies, and with Gamestudio not adapting to the evolving ecosystem, it will become unusable after a while. Hope that doesn't happen.

For now Gamestudio is still functional, still a powerful and handy engine in its own right. I would say that "old but gold", if it was still updating. It can be recommended for hobby or educational use but for a commercial project, it is more logical to take a look at the engines that are up-to-date and supported.

Wellcome again btw.

I also discovered very poor performance on AMD cards when utilizing a lot of "draw_line" commands. Nvidia handles it perfectly, so I tend to think this is more an issue with AMD than 3DGS (i.e. it's not the only engine that does not perform as well with AMD), but the point stands. If certain functions are no longer considered to be important for card manufacturers, then the engine will definitely suffer.

Hi!

I am encouraging you, just use this engine, suit.
It is old, outdated, obsolate and so on... It has issues that is right, I think most of them can overcome.
But making programs for that is fun.
The Lite-C is a strong language and the built-in object system in the engine has lot of features. Combined the two give great freedom to create lot of cool things.
I enjoy the work with that. I am continually develop an application. Maybe that can i share in the future.