what do you know about a7

in your opinion, and comparing the pro features of the two engines is not comparing equal things, the less advanced versions of both torque and unity are nothing featurewise where comm. gstudio is what is the closest equivilent to the pro versions of those engines.

As far as cross platform capabilities, gstudio is lacking it, but again its a situation of choose your engine for your demographic, not many indies are going to make it big selling wii games, Iphone, yes this is something that would be nice to dev for but again if your not planning on deving for iphone why would you need it. Its like saying that you should get a game design prog, or engine for building a business app, yes, it adds features, but if your not going to use them anyways (and for a lot of users, windows is all that is needed) then it doesnt matter. again, the choice is about the need of the dev.

Well how about developing a game and being able to publish it to pc , mac , and web delpoyment as well ?

"the less advanced versions of both torque and unity are nothing featurewise where comm"
They're still better engines to make smaller games with.

@Why_Do_I_Die :
and am now serious about developing a commercial title , as opposed to back then when I just thought having a game engine to play with was the most incredible thing on earth
Yep, seriously thinking on making a game and 3D art (lot lot lot) is different from just watching , coding some features or playing with the engine.

But it isn't a reason to consider A7 as bad.
It's a good engine, with it's own strenght and weak points,
some people like it a lot caus of the control on code, the BSP,
and other things ...
A7 is A7 and it's like that, it will be great for some people and bad for some other depending on personnal goals and taste (more or less coding).

I target Casual, arcade little games, so Unity commercial versions are OK.
And i want to go fast , so Unity is perfect in my case !
Example of lot of time i gain in Unity :
To have some basic meshes i want them to use Physics , by one or two click you make it : that's a lot better than typing 10 lines of code in A7.


Well it has been said too much, but i have lot of hopes in A8 ,that i hope will be totally new !

People that really want to use a different engine, wouldn't be here anymore if you ask me. I think a lot of people want A7 to be the Unreal Engine 3 but minus the price tag and plus the user or newbie-friendliness of A7's c-script and so on.

I am fairly certain some people that are complaining are using this engine with a wrong idea of what's possible and what's not.

No. They compared to Torque3d. Just look at the headline of this thread!

@Phemox :
I don't said i wanted it to be Unreal 3.
Just said A7 is a real good cheap engine (for commercial version) with it's strong points and some weak points compared to some other engines for same price.

And personnaly i would only want A7 to have an all in one editor, nothing else
You'll find some indie engines that are not Unreal3 that have an all ion one editor (Torque 3D have that from long long years).

Now i don't ask anything to A7
I know some of its weak points and workflow but i hope to do some cool indie game with it.

Let's talk Torque 3D : wasn't it the Thread subject ??
Let's stop the WAR : A7 Vs OTHER ENGINE (or make a special thread for it) !

just fucked up on entire textured wmb block while rotating it. some textures got disorted and couldnt be rendered. then one ground block wasnt lit correctly because the unseen faces i placed "none" placeholder materials to. had to get rid of it to make it work.
spent 1 hour testing and calculatind lights and textures because for every little shit i changed i had to recompile the entire map. ended up in cutting it into peaces and merging it one by one once finished. this of course leads to welding issues and some light misplacements. to top this the unexplainable snapping modes of gs added a funny little pain in the ass for every single block that needs to be moved.


the really sad thing about this ist: i could have written the exact same text 3 years ago because nothing really has changed since then.


the problem about sticking to an engine: after spending 8 years with it, knowing the tools is also a big bonus when creating something. having to change means having to start very low again to "learn" how the engine works.
this is also a value that needs to be concidered.

but the harder it gets to create games with gs the less its worth sticking to it.

grass

i also find WED unusable. i already had nightmares from it. it constantly fights the user. doing selections is a pain, fbx import is a pain, the viewport is a pain,...

if i couldn't bypass WED by exporting whole scenes directly from blender then i wouldn't have been able to complete several of my projects for clients (without taking 10 times longer and going crazy) and would have completely given up on gamestudio already.

Actually the FBX import works quite well. I also had never problems rotating imported meshes in A7 WED, the textures stay fixed, maybe you were using some old version. Aside from that you're right. As an editor itself, WED is unusable or only usable for simple levels. Same with MED, for simple models only. I dont think that this will ever change. Probably both will eventually evolve into mere converters, with GED as the only editor for editing levels.



Threads like this always also attract a good amount of trolls, who post lengthy comments about A7 but admit that they don't even have A7... It's strange how some people spend their time.

Hiya.

I 'just' (a week ago?) upgraded my TGEA to T3D for their intro price of about $505 (don't tell my wife! ). I was almost off the fence (on the not gonna' buy it side). Last day of the intro price I decided to take another look and see what they were doing with it...

Road editor, river editor, physics...I was VERY impressed! The native COLLADA as the file format of choice placed me firmly on the fence again. Then I found one example/demo that pretty much kicked my ass over the fence: it was the rain/weather demo ("Weather and Precipitation" I think it's called). How it automagicaly clips the rain-drop textures when they hit the ground if the ripples go 'over' and edge, and the general quality...and this is in Beta!...well, I whipped it out, stuck it in and blew my wad (re: got out my credit card, put my card number into the online order page and spent my wad of money).

So far, I'm not regretting it. I'm waiting for more documentation and tutorials to come out for it, obviously, but it's still fun to just push random buttons and see what happens. The biggest problem I have right now, is there is an alpha-clipp problem for those with ATI cards, specifically dealing with the leaves of trees. The grass is fine, so is everything else...but I think they "hard coded" a limitation thingie into a rendering doohicky because NVidia cards can't display some whatchamacallit bit-depth somethingorother...but ATI can, and so this confuses the ATI cards.

(Can you tell I'm not a programmer? ).