that is good news indeed. doesn't solve the map compiler issues though.

So, hm,
I am using GS ince the first A4 version. I always used Extra-edition. So I can't tell anything about shaders.
But I have to say, that I was very disappointed from the upgrade to A7. First I was happy and said, juhu I can import meshes and compile shadows with them.
But I saw the results and my eyes became seriously ill.
Ok, for an absolute hobbyist the extra A7 engine is enough, because I have nothing to do with gamedevenloppment except in my freetime.
But I thought since A7 came out, to change to another engine like Torque, because they brought a ready to use product. A7 is not a complete product. Every opensource programm is more complete than A7.
I don't like products which features are updated on a such slow time.

Hm, enough,
MfG
Patrick

Uuups... I was amazed, when I read over the new features of tgea. And I was shocked, when I saw the video "gears..".

Most of the really impressive screen shots of the 3dgs galery came from projects which are never realized (like sunset down).

Maybe this is a time to think about a change.

If I am right, the "Venice Demo" and the "Warehouse Demo" should be the new flag ship demos of 3dgs?
They are very good looking... for 3dgs ... but compare it with "gears".

Imho, Conitec can't pay as the needed money to get an AAA quality demo for Gamestudio. You need professionals for this and professionals are.. expensive.

Maybe that is the point. If you need quality, you need time and money. Most of these three are mostly seperately seeded along the broad range of Gamestudio developers and this community.

The reason why most of the "outstanding" screenshots and videos which are not done by Conitec or by people who were hired by Conitec, is that these people/teams/studios/companies like to make a living from it or have other reasons that require them to do such quality (for their portfolio, kick other a%%'s or just for research and satisfaction).

If Conitec would give a 3rd party a budget of 12k Eur (or 16k $) for one month of work I guess you would get a super kick ass demo. Just my thoughts.

true. but even those great artists couldn't fix the map compiler, increase fps to, say, irrlicht level, use a shadow system for alpha-trasparent-skinned trees without serious changes in the toolset (plugins, rewrites, bla). yesterday i played CSiS, our upcoming space action shooter based on A6, and it almost knocked me off the chair, the visuals our team has produced, mostly BoH_Havoc, has not yet been ever realized in 3dgs in realtime (at least that i know of, you know, i like to criticise a lot, so if i say so, i mean it) and it runs really smoothly. but i know that it took us literally years to get there, the plugins that were written, the endless hours he must have spent on the shaders and hanging over gpu books. but even he cannot build a hard edges feature for models, he must take detours to get there. several pp effects need their own dll. the tricks micha had to invent for the MP part are numerous.

the point is, whatever we did in 3dgs, we mostly avoided its own features and had to take detours. otherwise we could never have achieved what the project is about to become. that is not what you can call a "workflow", is it?

Nope. But there MUST be a reason why you stick on Gamestudio, fella. And as long you evolve with it... keep on going!

with blender's split edge modifier (which allows hard/soft edge workflow like in maya for example) you don't need detours for getting hard model edges. except if blender is a detour for you.

i don't believe that irrlicht is much faster than gamestudio. irrlicht uses a simple octree, gamestudio uses an ABT tree which is quite similar. because the map compiler doesn't really work for meshes at the moment, people often use single models for whole levels which don't get split up then by the ABT tree. so (like in the venice demo) there will be no frustum culling and no front to back sorted drawing.

the map compiler is a problem. i think conitec should just release the specifications of the wmb format. then maybe (i don't know how complex the wmb format is) a blender exporter which completely gets rid of the need for a level compiler could be done quite easily.

I guess you already asked for that, did you?

i mentioned it in a beta forum thread today but jcl didn't answer during the afternoon and now is weekend.

i should have asked sooner (at the beginning of a7) about this. the possibility to directly export to wmb from applications like blender would be great even if there were a working map compiler. i could imagine that it wouldn't be that hard to do because it would only be about exporting. i don't care about compiling a BSP tree and light mapping would get handled by blender.

i am not sure though how complicated the wmb format is, if it contains any encryption or keys or anything like that and if conitec is interested in having it open. if i remember correctly in a6 or a5 times there already were some enquiries about it and conitec didn't seem to be very eager to give out informations back then.

we could also try reverse engineering but this would be a lot of maybe not so fun detective work. hm... with open source software you don't have such problems.