V12 - lame engine?!!!

#1 Because the documentation details all the functions in the code. It's generated by a code doc tool called Doxygen (did I spell that right?).

So, if they published that, you'd have the whole engine.

Go buy Tribes. Or wait a couple weeks till the demo is released.

Or suck it up and spend 100 bucks and see for yourself now.

#2 I'm just a simple man...

But I can gaurantee you that the V12 source is by no means "lame"... I'm not a Computer Science major, nor have I ever really been able to look at the source for anything as complex as a complete working game engine (with physics, collision, particle systems, resource/memory management, networking, and so on) before. After only a week I feel that I have a fairly good grasp over what I've looked at... It's also the core code from the Tribes 2 engine, which wasn't just pretty... I know plenty of people that were addicted to Tribes, so you know it can make games people will buy, if used right

If you're a programmer type, it's more than worth it to buy the V12 source just to learn from it if nothing else... that's the cost of 1 or 2 books on the subject and let's face it, most books on the subject aren't that good... Not nearly as educational as seeing working code and being able to poke and prod at it to see what happens

If you're making a game the only reason I can see to not use V12 is if you've already put $100,000 on the table to use someone elses game engine or if your positive your game will be the NextBigThing(tm) and you're paranoid about GG.com cutting into your profits (though someone is going to be cutting into your profits, other companies just do it more discretely)

Buying the V12 source was probably the best $100 of daddy's money I've spent in a long time (though I would've paid for it myself if I had to, it's more than worth it)

Also, regarding why the engine's documentation isn't public... it's because the current documentation on the garagegames site was created using a program called Doxygen, which lists every class/function/variable etc etc only leaving out the internals of each function (which might be there too and I haven't found it.. there's a lot of stuff in those docs :) ) If the documentation were available publically that'd be a good chunk of the source code available free of charge.. which is a bad thing when you're trying to protect your intellectual property and not go broke

Buy it and enjoy it, I did...

-nohbdy

#3 You don't have to buy the engine. We are not trying to trick anybody. There is performance proof of what the engine can do in Tribes 2. There will be many more games if you want to wait a while.

Again, we are not trying to trick you, but this is the method we have chosen to give access to the doco, and we feel it is legitimate. If you have a difference of opinion, you are welcome to go elsewhere. Maybe you can go download the documentation to the Quake 3 engine before you buy it:)

Jeff Tunnell GG

#4 My team and I are starting work on a racing game called "Nitee Racing". More or less its a street racing game, like the old dos classic of Street Rod, and Street Rod 2, with touches of the GranTurismo games. What we have learned so far is that V12 is a very powerful engine for the money we paid for it. None of us are very skilled in programming, but we feel learning from guess and check is a great way to get experiance, and the doc's really arn't that bad (extreemly better than the Tribes 2 SDK thats for sure, although Im sure we could use a lot of this in our Tribes 2 projects). Thier are going to be many great games that are going to be designed using this engine, and its deffinatly worth the investment... The only other investment Ive made that has proven to be perfect was my RX7.

#5 The ONLY thing lame about the engine is this post :)