Yes, I know and it's all because of some kind of idea you had that 3dgs would someday get the magical 'make game' button. Or at least it sounds an awful lot like that to me, no offense.



Right, but maybe I didn't. In these kind of discussions people aren't really interested in what an engine can actually do, they are only talking about what an engine should do and how it's lacking. I've never said 3dgs is perfect, torque is not perfect either, I did say though that 3dgs probably can render the same amount of geometry and so on as this torque demo does.



You're talking as if A7 and Lite-C never happened. You are basically talking as if Conitec did nothing the last couple of years and I really don't think that's fair.

"You are basically talking as if Conitec did nothing the last couple of years and I really don't think that's fair."
Well they might have as well not done anything , all they did was add lite-c to A7. A6 was a big step up for gamestudio , C-Script was well implemented , Shader support was added , Sed was added (i think it was in a6) , and over all gamestudio was in the right track , things were looking good , and I had very high hopes for A7. Thats was my problem , I thought we already had a good engine , a good render , a good scripting language , and good third party support for making plugins through C++ and other languages through Dll. The last thing I thought GameStudio needed was Lite-C , much less have it basically be the only major new thing to A7. To me , there really was no upgrade , A7 is basically A6 with Lite-C , why in the world would I be happy about that ?

On another note , who said anything about a "make game button" ? All I was looking forward to was better shader implementation and solid fallbacks , now shaders were already implemented in A6 , it's only obvious that the next step would be to make them as compatible with as much hardware as possible by adding fallbacks , how is it you people dont feel the same way about this ? And how is asking for that asking for a "make game button" ?

Do you realise companies pay over half a million dollars for engines like Unreal 3 , project offset , Doom Engine ? Do you know why ? Because it's a very complete , solid , technologically advanced game development suite. Game companies feel having solid development software is so important they pay over $500,000 for it. Are you telling me those people are stupid ? They would be better off coding it all themselves ? Or are they smart , and understand that investing in a good and complete engine will shorten a game's development time immensly ? I've never asked gamestudio to be Unreal 3 , or even compared it to it , I'm comparing it to another engine , which is in fact , cheaper than gamestudio is (considering you need pro to get all features for gamestudio) , I'm comparing it's features , it's incredible to me that anyone with a brain would argue that gamestudio doenst need this features THAT OTHER ENGINES ALREADY HAVE , and that we are lazy and want a make game button by asking for them.

I think you are all insane to think this way , no matter how much you like programming , but I can imagine how you can not miss this features if using gamestudio for you means typing in SED all day long , then i guess all you really need is notepad and a compiler , right ? But for people like me , who use Wed , Sed , Third party modeler tool , third party painting tool , and basically work on all aspects of a game , the more feature rich the editors , the better , the faster and easier things can be done , the better.

And again , I am not critisizing gamestudio , I am critisizing A7 , I've been using gamestudio since A4 , and have always loved it , I hated the A7 update , and feel in the time of A6 and A7 , other very competent engines have emerged , and torque has updated quite a lot , and I feel A7 is staying behind , and is no longer the best choice as an indie game development suite. And to be honest , the engine i'd really like to give a try is Unity , but I dont have a mac , so i'd say Torque is my next choice. Still , I'm not saying gamestudio is crap , just the A7 update , I guess it's only a matter of opinion , but it's true nevertheless.

Phemox is totally off in at least 2 points:

He says that the "evil" Torque trolls did not make any games. First of all show me your game!

Then I can tell you that Wicht (as an example) made games in 3dgs and showed me about 5 different prototypes in Torque (working projects). Sure he works hard, found problems to solve and has to get help in the Torque forums. But he works on it rather than spamming only one-liners in forums like other do here.

Kiyaku also made several prototypes in TGB, TGE and even TGEA. I could see some of them and they look amazing. Even his 2d game "Angela's world" has re-made in TGB. I am sure he can provide you with images, I know a few of them.

Your assumption that I have no idea how to import static geometry and such show quite clearly that you don't have much experience with WED and Gamestudio. Even the fanboys know that the level- and shadow-compiler still is buggy. That shadows often become very distorted if you import static meshes, no matter if they are imported from mdl or from other formats.

And you suggest me to make the entire level in WED from blocks. Then I understand you perfectly, still living 10 years ago.
Time has changed, games use more details today. Even old games like Unreal Tournament 2004 used huge amount of detail-meshes in BSP levels.

But I talk only for myself. If you want to make another tetris game, then you don't have problems in WED. Everything is fine then.

And your question why some of us do not switch has been answered before, but you just forgot. Some still have projects to finish in 3dgs. We are not any trolls from outside, we are just CUSTOMERS daring to talk about some issues. Is a customer forced to throw a product away if there are some problems?


WhyDoIDie:
I understand you perfectly. If someone claims to be a skilled programmer who is only impressed by (advanced) programming like AI (Inestical as an example) then he will not have any problems to work through Irrlicht, Ogre or TV3D. I read tutorials of all 3 and I am a C++ newcomer (but with about 20 years of pascal experience). It is a piece of cake. And programming these tools offers a lot of freedom and is even fun.
And yes. If the same programmer claims that shaders are piece of cake then it will not be a big issue to make such fallback shaders with conditional statements or a good material-editor.
But all that is still missing.

And yes, tools like GameEdit or the first alpha shader editor took several years and are still not finished or even dead projects.

I can tell you that I was so amazed about GameEdit, about IntenseX and other promising tools.
Ok, some of you could make it in a few weeks how they sound here

I prefer tools for making games, not only a programming language because I know how hard it is to program software. I do that myself for my company. That is why I never would choose Ogre although it is a superior rendering engine.
And this is the point we are talking here, we don't complain about programming at all. Programming is only one tool of a few others that you need for making games.

I have to agree, that im also not fully convinced about the "new" features from A7. i havent bought it yet, justbecause i see no difference except an awfull level editor. however, i, as designer, dont really know the new features, simply because they are code and shader based.

but when slin showed me some stuff hes currently doing (that come close to that implement my shader for me thing why_do_i_die is requesting) i said to myself. okay, now i need that engine.

ive downlaoded the A7 demo yesterday, and ran a project of mine im currently developing in secrecy.

the results you ask?
more than just impressive. the cozen graphcsi style looks brilliant with the shaders added i got from slin, and even WITH the added shaders and all the effects, full resolution (as much as my monitor supports, that would eb 1600*1200) and everything set to high detail, the game run FASTER than with A6.

that tells me that there is a progress.

nothing more to say for now

edit: in fact, some things: the shaders:
Normal mapping with bump and specularity, water shader, old film shader (post processing) and of course some toon shader )

Great. I am looking forward to see your shots. I understand your excitement.

I even know this situation. As we changed "Dexon Knight" to A7 we also had better rendering speed. This is because of the ABT and because we have small outdoor levels.

But I also know an indoor project that became awful slow after converting to A7. This is because of the lack of BSP and no other indoor scene-management option like zones, portals or similar.

So this means: A7 up to com edition is only suited for small games and outdoor projects (like you can see in the last official demos as well).
For indoor you need the pro and I know not a single demo that can proof if the new A7 bsp really works (especially in combination with shaders on level geometry).
So it is hard to upgrade to A7 except you do small outdoor levels or puzzle games.

In your case (and in Dexsoft's case) everything was fine. And I am happy for us, really

very true!

i am not interested in achieving or coming near to AAA quality at all because you will never finish anything as a lone wolf if you have to do characters and models with doom3 quality (which also is outdated already). with better graphics you also need better AI, animation, physics, sound and so on to make it not look awkward. that's why games spiral to 20 million dollar budgets.

which doesn´t mean that some features like nice realtime shadow mapping wouldn´t help. such shadows wouldn't add much work.

like already has been mentioned, the map compiler is faulty. it doesn´t produce useable results if you would like to use meshes.

and you call this a good engine? are you serious? the map compiler is faulty, i heard several complaints about the speed of lite-c, and the graphics you can produce with the out-of-the-box-tool feel like a decade behind. after all, it's not free, you pay for this. no open source project would be allowed to be released in that shape.

like you can see from my name, iuselitec. i like it a lot. it isn't slow. it doesn´t come with the map compiler. i don´t need it. i only did a quick test with the demo and read complaints by others.

open source most of the time gets released early and often. it´s an important motto in the open source world. early means incomplete and not fully working.

You are both right. Lite-C is fast in small projects. But bigger projects like GameEdit moved from C-script to C++ because of very long compiling times and 5-times longer starting time compared with the old C-script version, when it loads into the engine.

Maybe this will be improved though.

the compiling time issue will be fixed in the next release and it only happens with certain projects with lots of numeric constants. i didn't have any problem with it and my project isn't very small.