I''m almost at wits end looking for a decent outdoor rendering engine for the alpha phase of my project. Anyone got anything good, bad or ugly to say about the Torque engine? I feel like an idiot spending $100 on something I can''t even see first but I''m really tired of dealing with hodge podge disasters that waste hours of my dev time that could be far better spent on other things. I mean hell I''ve got 4 servers sitting sround idle, fully licensed SQL server 100+ pages of design docs and everytime I think I''ve come up with a promising engine I waste 40 hours learning about it only to have my feet blown off from udner me because of crippling drawbacks of the engines. Anyone tried modifying torque for Client/server funcitonality rather than p2p? thanks for the feedback all Mark Fly by night Studios C++ Coders needed

My goodness, no one here is using the torque engine? How about 3D GameStudio? Both are great entry level commercial engines. Well I mean if you call $100 USD Comemrcial heh.

To me my time that I''ve wasted investigating other engines is worth more than $100 USD

I''d appreciate any feedback.
Mark


Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

I would reccomend you start by making your own engine for something simple, and then work you''re way up. That ways you will learn more and not rely on things that cost money and may not help you.

-~-The Cow of Darkness-~-

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Original post by cowsarenotevil
I would reccomend you start by making your own engine for something simple, and then work you''re way up. That ways you will learn more and not rely on things that cost money and may not help you.

-~-The Cow of Darkness-~-

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How can you say that making your own 3D Client server engine would be "something simple?" I''ve been working on this project for a year now and learning more about world engines is not what I''m intrested in. What I need is an already developed engine that I can modify to alpha test my game formulas and network servers. Maybe I just didnt understand your explanation but let me clarify, I am not intrested in wasting thousands of hours of dev time developing a cheezy 3D engine when there are already 100s of them out there I can customize.

What I''m looking for specifically is feedback on the torque engine. I do not feel it will suffice for 30+ NPCs in rendering range personally. I am digging into 3D Gamestudio right now and it has promise but so many others did too.

Mark


Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

I didn''t say that that was simple, what I meant was that if you ever want a job or anything, engines like that will probably not be used, so you should work you''re way up. However, they are good for experimenting and getting a feel for development. Have you ever tried using opengl and directplay?

-~-The Cow of Darkness-~-

I guess what it boils down to is that Im not trying to reinvent the wheel =) I''m trying to produce an alpha stage for my game that I''ve been working on for months. I am not a coder and I have zero intrest in pretending I''d ever get a job in the gaming industry as a coder =)

That said I have messed around with direct play and OpenGL but only long enough to realize that if I wanted to do something real with it I''d have to really learn it and thats not something Im intrested in.

Again all I''m after here is a pre-written game engine I can mold into an alpha version of my game for testing various systems and functions of my game design. At the completion of Alpha I will make a "demo" version of the product freely available and re-asses wether or not there is enough substance to the project to persue commercial backing. And lets both be blunt and honest. What are the odds that some industry noob would write a game that would topple Everquest? Exactly, so why pretend I''m writting the next blockbuster when everyone knows I''m not.

I expect to come away from my alpha project with a well tested backend for a game. By backend I''m refering to skill advancement system, combat system, magic system, player development system, skill trades system and 50,000+ pieces of inventory in an SQL database. What I do with it from there, who knows =)

Mark


Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

Well, one engine(actually complete package including language) you could try is jamagic, somewhere on the clickteam.com homepage. It has a demo, so you can try it. I tried it a while ago, and felt a bit limited, but you could probably get a game working with it.

-~-The Cow of Darkness-~-

Looks like I may be a little late but here''s my info on the Torque Engine.

I originally worked with the Torque engine (if you will) on a T2 mod named Warped. I ended up buying the engine when GarageGames opened. It must be the most polished and complete 3D engine you can get for $100. I''ve taken a look at several ''free''/open source engines and in comparison Torque was just so much easier to get rollin'' and tumblin'' into development. Lots of people have complained about the lack of documentation. I''m by no means a genius programmer, much less in 3d engines, and I didn''t have a hard time with it at all.

There are obvious limitations, there''s no vertex/pixel program/shader support out of the box although many teams have gone quite far in developing solutions for this (it''s easy to get a quick implementation but a robust solution takes quite a bit of time).

The terrain is limited to a 256x256 heightmap (tiled infinitely) which really is quite huge. Given it''s not large enough for an MMOG, there have been a few solutions presented. One example is shifting clients from server to server (with multiple servers) when they travel farther than the main heightmap. You can also include multiple heightmaps on a single map and remove the tiling (there''s a working resource for this).

There''s been discussions of implementing MMOGs with Torque. One nice one is to simply run one small part of the world on each server. On a powerful server you could run a couple instances of Torque on the same machine. Simply distribute it among other servers and you''ve got a virtually infinite world. Basically you''d have a master server which contains your database and worldwide parameters (player, item, battle locations). Each game has an open connection to the master server and feeds it information as is needed (ie: you may not need the exact location of every player, you may only need to know what city they''re in). A good solid web admin interface can grant administrators the ability to update the master server from anywhere and let it filter updates through to the game servers.

Torque''s multiplayer networking model is client/server (although the features says it also supports udp). You can read up on the specifics here: http://www.garagegames.com/articles/networking1/

There are a few teams which have gotten Torque talking to SQL servers (specifically I recall seeing a MySQL connection layer) and integrated it with the scripting language.

I haven''t looked enough at 3D GameStudio so I can''t comment but the screenshots look wonderful

Hope that helps you out or anyone who ends up stumbling on this thread in the future.

Luigi Rosso
RealitySlip
http://www.RealitySlip.com

Thanks a million for the feedback Luigi. Nice to hear some real solid facts on Torque from a user. I think they have some real strong arguments for their engine and the netowrk code is there and works well, but the licensing is a little sticky for me. That and the game studio engine is really so drop dead simple to use. (and it stats at half the price for Torque).

Really appreciate the feedback though. My project is really looking for something quick and dirty to get an alpha client running to test our combat/magic/GUI systems on.

I''m pretty sold on GameStudio for the simple fact that Ive wasted 2 months trying to find an open source engine. Worse than that Ive waste dendless nights of pouring over docs for engines trying to learn the ins and outs of them. To me my time alone is worth more than $50/hr so if I wasted an hour that shouldve been too long

Will see how it all turns out but thanks for the info.

Mark

Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

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Original post by Cirrus
Torque''s multiplayer networking model is client/server (although the features says it also supports udp).

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