Pro/Con - Engines, Engines, Engines...
by Ken Jamieson · in General Discussion · 08/16/2001 (12:26 am) · 5 replies
We have a project in house that is ready to move to the "walking tour" stage.
We will need to allow first person perspective walkthroughs of a section of our
environment - mostly to show mood and atmosphere.
We need a fairly sophisticated lighting model, particles would help and water
would be a HUGE help. Transparency a plus. We are NOT building a full game at
this stage, simply allowing our potential investor to walk through some of our
setting, and using this demo as something to show other interested parties. We
anticipate that we will use a high end engine for final development (LithTech,
V12 or Croteam
As I see it... we have a few choices:
1) Buy Serious Sam and "mod" it with the
included editor and tools. We really like the serious editor from what we have
seen of it but there are a number of complaints over at their website. We have
no clue of the scripting.
2) Buy Unreal Tournament and use
IT'S included tools. We don't know what the scripting abilities here are like
but it does allow for simple trigger/motion items. This will be good for us to
start with. The community behind modding UT looks incredible.
3) Buy Tribes 2, and work
with modding/scripting it. It looks like it is fairly complete, but we know
little about it as well. Looking at the mission editor it certainly doesn't look
like it is as easy to work with as SS or UT.
We will need to allow first person perspective walkthroughs of a section of our
environment - mostly to show mood and atmosphere.
We need a fairly sophisticated lighting model, particles would help and water
would be a HUGE help. Transparency a plus. We are NOT building a full game at
this stage, simply allowing our potential investor to walk through some of our
setting, and using this demo as something to show other interested parties. We
anticipate that we will use a high end engine for final development (LithTech,
V12 or Croteam
As I see it... we have a few choices:
1) Buy Serious Sam and "mod" it with the
included editor and tools. We really like the serious editor from what we have
seen of it but there are a number of complaints over at their website. We have
no clue of the scripting.
2) Buy Unreal Tournament and use
IT'S included tools. We don't know what the scripting abilities here are like
but it does allow for simple trigger/motion items. This will be good for us to
start with. The community behind modding UT looks incredible.
3) Buy Tribes 2, and work
with modding/scripting it. It looks like it is fairly complete, but we know
little about it as well. Looking at the mission editor it certainly doesn't look
like it is as easy to work with as SS or UT.
4) Hook up with the V12 engine. This
is basically the Tribes2 engine with all the content stripped out. While this
might be a good choice later on, for simply slapping together a fast walk
through it seems this has a lot of disadvantages.
Are we missing anything? It really seams like the winner here is UT but we
want to get opinions... remember, this is just a walk through.
#2
2) UT has excellent tools and its scipting language is terrific. The lighting in UT is very sweet and you can see this in real-time in the level editor. The level editor can take a little time to learn but a few days of working on it and you should be good to go. UT's level editor is easy to use when dealing with complex scenes.
3) You're beter off buying the v12. The T2 tools are notoriously difficult to work with and while the v12's tools are pretty much the same at this point there are a lot of people working to improve them.
4) Like I said above...using the v12 now could be a lttle painful but that is rapidly changing. However, The interior lighting for strucutres just plain stinks so you are going to need to rewrite a lot of that if you want pretty interiors. Also, till someone improves upon the map2dif tool you are going to be stuck with fairly simple geometry. You will also be stuck with using Worldcraft which is extremely easy to learn but really starts to show its weaknesses when the scene becomes complex. In the long run the v12 is going to be great but it does have its short comings at this point in time. However, you do get the source for the engine and all of the tools so you could work towards improving them yourselves =)
08/16/2001 (6:58 am)
1) I don't realy know much about the Serious Sam Engine so I can't judge.2) UT has excellent tools and its scipting language is terrific. The lighting in UT is very sweet and you can see this in real-time in the level editor. The level editor can take a little time to learn but a few days of working on it and you should be good to go. UT's level editor is easy to use when dealing with complex scenes.
3) You're beter off buying the v12. The T2 tools are notoriously difficult to work with and while the v12's tools are pretty much the same at this point there are a lot of people working to improve them.
4) Like I said above...using the v12 now could be a lttle painful but that is rapidly changing. However, The interior lighting for strucutres just plain stinks so you are going to need to rewrite a lot of that if you want pretty interiors. Also, till someone improves upon the map2dif tool you are going to be stuck with fairly simple geometry. You will also be stuck with using Worldcraft which is extremely easy to learn but really starts to show its weaknesses when the scene becomes complex. In the long run the v12 is going to be great but it does have its short comings at this point in time. However, you do get the source for the engine and all of the tools so you could work towards improving them yourselves =)
#3
08/16/2001 (8:39 am)
Tribes 2 editors crash quite a bit. Especially the GUI editor. I think you are getting a much better product with v12, of course I have a bit of a bias in that respect.
#4
In thinking it over I think we are going to use UT to do our demo. We are on a short timeline (4 weeks) and need only interiors for this portion of the demo.
The interactive lighting in the UT editor is a great bonus in it's favor.
In the long run, we are planning on purchasing a V12 license in the next week or so for some of our projects and evaluating Lithtech for others.
I think in the end it will depend on how much money we can get for development of a project.
We are very excited about V12, but as we are not going to be doing C++ coding till much later in the pipe (I am a long time C++ guy ... but our gameworld needs are pretty standard right now) our main focus is ont he editing tools.
Please keep the thoughts comming :)
08/16/2001 (10:31 am)
Thanks for the replies so far. You guys are far and away the clearest heads it seems :)In thinking it over I think we are going to use UT to do our demo. We are on a short timeline (4 weeks) and need only interiors for this portion of the demo.
The interactive lighting in the UT editor is a great bonus in it's favor.
In the long run, we are planning on purchasing a V12 license in the next week or so for some of our projects and evaluating Lithtech for others.
I think in the end it will depend on how much money we can get for development of a project.
We are very excited about V12, but as we are not going to be doing C++ coding till much later in the pipe (I am a long time C++ guy ... but our gameworld needs are pretty standard right now) our main focus is ont he editing tools.
Please keep the thoughts comming :)
#5
I have reasonable knowledge of mapping and modding UT and SS, and lots of gaming time in T2...
For what you are doing, I would recommend using UT and UnrealEd 2. I have used it extensively (see www.lilchips.com/unreal for some of my maps). The editor is great, but note that there are limitations on levels, mostly in designing to fit into the BSP system (poly count, layout, and HOMs).
Modding and scripts are nice, you can do a lot with it. The only drawback is knowing what areas of the engine are "included" but not implemented.
One person mentioned elsewhere that UT is good for indoors T2 for outdoors, this is incorrect, UT is as good on large outdoor or mixed scenes as well. You just have to know the limitations of the BSP system.
SS has some great features: curved surfaces, environment mapping, nice renderers, etc. See it's tech demo in the game for the cool features.
However, its editor is *real* slow and not very intuitive.
Also, in order to obtain the huge outdoor areas, it usually uses flat terrain to keep polys low if there are plenty of buildings. If you have played it, there are some maps in the game that do utilize a T2-like fractal terrain look.
It is cool, but I liked the feel of Unreal/UT better.
T2 is a great game, so therefore the V12 will be great for that genre.
The feel of T2 is considerably different than the others.
The distance fogging adds a tremendous amount of "mood" to the outdoor areas.
However, it does not have the lighting abilities of UT.
My recommendation if you have a dealine -- find a good UT mapper and texture artist.
However, if the investor signs up and you then decide to use the V12 engine, let them know ahead of time that the mood of the maps will be considerably different than what they were looking at in UT.
Alternately, if you go with the V12, use the editor in T2 and create a map there.
Also note that all three of these engines are designed for first-person multiplayer shooters. If your product isn't in this genre, you will be getting code that is unnecessary -- this is my dilemma and why I have chosen to start coding an engine in-house that closer meets my game genre.
David
08/18/2001 (11:48 am)
Hi,I have reasonable knowledge of mapping and modding UT and SS, and lots of gaming time in T2...
For what you are doing, I would recommend using UT and UnrealEd 2. I have used it extensively (see www.lilchips.com/unreal for some of my maps). The editor is great, but note that there are limitations on levels, mostly in designing to fit into the BSP system (poly count, layout, and HOMs).
Modding and scripts are nice, you can do a lot with it. The only drawback is knowing what areas of the engine are "included" but not implemented.
One person mentioned elsewhere that UT is good for indoors T2 for outdoors, this is incorrect, UT is as good on large outdoor or mixed scenes as well. You just have to know the limitations of the BSP system.
SS has some great features: curved surfaces, environment mapping, nice renderers, etc. See it's tech demo in the game for the cool features.
However, its editor is *real* slow and not very intuitive.
Also, in order to obtain the huge outdoor areas, it usually uses flat terrain to keep polys low if there are plenty of buildings. If you have played it, there are some maps in the game that do utilize a T2-like fractal terrain look.
It is cool, but I liked the feel of Unreal/UT better.
T2 is a great game, so therefore the V12 will be great for that genre.
The feel of T2 is considerably different than the others.
The distance fogging adds a tremendous amount of "mood" to the outdoor areas.
However, it does not have the lighting abilities of UT.
My recommendation if you have a dealine -- find a good UT mapper and texture artist.
However, if the investor signs up and you then decide to use the V12 engine, let them know ahead of time that the mood of the maps will be considerably different than what they were looking at in UT.
Alternately, if you go with the V12, use the editor in T2 and create a map there.
Also note that all three of these engines are designed for first-person multiplayer shooters. If your product isn't in this genre, you will be getting code that is unnecessary -- this is my dilemma and why I have chosen to start coding an engine in-house that closer meets my game genre.
David
Torque Owner Shawn