now that beautiful of an analogy takes some skill.

Do this in 3DGS or Unity:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/17567

what, that video at the end? thats nothing.

Hey lostclimate , since you claim all this things are so easy in gamestudio , why not put together a simple shader template that will work properly ? Kind of like what Matt tried to do with Sphere , but properly working , since Sphere is useless for an actual game. Maybe Matt didn't know something you do , I think the whole community would enjoy something of this nature , and you seem to think it's cake to do. Oh yeah , and maybe a small easy to make precipitation script kinda like the one from Torque 3d , would be very handy , it shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes according to you to put together , and EVERYONE here would love having a nice script like that that works properly. Thanks in advance , this things seem to be a bit complex to the average gamestudio user like myself , but gamestudio gurus like you seem to say it's nothing more than a 15 minute job , I'm sure you can spare 15 minutes and help us all out while at the same time restoring gamestudio's reputation ?

i never said it only takes 15 minutes, but again, if you compare gstudios comm to the pro features of these games (actual capabilities, not hand holding, toggle generic dynmic shadow mapping on switches) you can do with gstudio all the effects that you have mentioned. all the post processing shaders have been done and packaged before several times, by both slin, phemox, and much much better, boh_havoc. sphere isnt useless, it just doesnt have any built in optimization, but thats something the designers should be doing by hand anyways (lod, setting up a portal system etc.) and as far as ssao, i have done it a couple of times just recently I rebuilt my old ssao shader so that it looks damn near the one in the torque demo. and for dynamic shadow mapping, hasnt been finished yet, Im working on one, slin made one (albiet needs work) boh_havoc is working on one, and chris_b is working on an advanced one using a custom plugin. so just because you cant do it doesnt mean it can be done or even that its all that hard. IT JUST MEANS YOU CANT DO IT. Btw, if you cant figure out how to do that stuff with a scripting language, how do you plan on ever making it to anything past these little indie games, you'll have to learn that stuff eventually if you want a full fledged in-house job at a game studio some day. That is unless you want to make indie games the rest of your life, which is ok for some people, but some people feel its stuff that needs to be known anyways.

again, no one claimed it was easy, its not, game design isnt easy ever. the sooner you learn that, the sooner you can make some real money, and stop screwing around with "a very impressive tech demo". Click together games suck.

Honestly, I don't get you. I still only use 3DGS, and I never considered buying Torque, but this huge landscape and the flawless real time shadowing in it is beyond anything that I expect to see in 3DGS in any reasonable time frame.

Although, I would like to know how fast it would run on my pc.

you can easily make a large landscape run well in a7 and look at chrisb's plugin, flawless real time shadowing at its best.

From a German thread in Ask Developers I read that it it still doesn't work under all circumstances:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=249412#Post249412

- bigger levels than 14.000 quants give problems
- it doesn't like tgas and fog


All shaders, that I used, were too slow for a commercial product. (Although, as mentioned, I don't know how fast the Torque example would run on my pc.)

"you'll have to learn that stuff eventually if you want a full fledged in-house job at a game studio some day"

Who ever said I was a programmer ? I'm a full developer , with experience in gfx scripting designing and over all project management. My goal is not to become a programmer , if it was , I would be reading some C++ and DirectX books. My goal is to create a game development company , starting with indie games and move to console games. By that time , I would hire a programmer if needed , for more complicated things , but I could care less for becoming a programmer or for working for any game development company , that is not my intention , it has never been.

So the more features an engine has out of the box , the better for me , because I could care less for setting it up myself if I can buy a tool that already has it set up for me. I model/texture and do environment modeling , however , a lot of times I purchase 3d models and textures rather than making them , because it saves a ton of time. So you can see why I'm liking how the new Torque 3D is looking so far.

And again , one of their biggest strengths is cross platform publishing, it's such a great feature I'm learning Javascript right now for Unity and as soon as I get it down I'm moving to C++ for Torque (hopefully I can get by with minimal knowledge as I hear C++ is HARD).

I love GameStudio , and will probably always have a copy around , but I feel the more serious I take game development the more important an engine and it's features start to become, as even though right now it's much easier for me to develop with gamestudio , learning and developing with unity and torque seem like a much better investment of my time, as it will give my games a much bigger audience.

@lostclimate
"i never said it only takes 15 minutes"

Your right , you said it took 5.


"Bull, it takes about 5 minutes to set that up."