TSE ready for project?

#1 Depends what game you're making.

#2 Well it's a gladiator game playing in ancient rome... there should be fast and "tactical" fights in the arenas... also with bows for special gladiator classes. We would like to have sticky projectiles...

#3 We're using TSE for an era based FPS. The issues we've had so far are:

- The lack of an in-game terrain editor at this point has caused some problems.
- No dynamic lighting
- No shadows
- The waterblock looks great but all of the functionality from it has been removed. If your porting from TGE expect to write your own code for this. Adding swimming and boats are doable but it requires you to write some of your own code.
- Many of the TGE resources will need some porting from OpenGL to GFX. Most of this isn't doable with a direct port, you'll have to get your hands dirty. It's not that hard but you have to be aware of it.
- Decals aren't functional
- We've had some problems exporting to TSE compatible DIFs
- No splashes
- No footstep sounds
- Some bizarre errors we can't figure out. For example our flag models for capture the flag work fine in TGE, yet when we toss them into TSE, the moment your collision box collides with a flag the engine locks up. If we make the collision box tiny so you don't collide with it, the engine no longer crashes.
- Lack of working precipitation.
- Jittering often happens when you first connect as a client, it is transient and goes away.

That having been said, we've worked around most of the problems. A lot of that stuff is game specific.

#4 Christian: It sounds like you can start development on your game in TSE's current state, as it doesn't seem like dynamic lighting, shadows, and editable terrain would be a shot stopper. I suggest building an arena or two and develop your core player movement and fighting systems. More than likely, by the time you have the battle system(s) to a point that you're happy with, TSE will be out of EA.

J.C.: Tom Spilman has percipitation working in TSE.
You can download it here.

#5 Wow that sounds like it's really too underdeveloped currently. Thanks for this answer... but I have another question.. if we work on the engine and change some things like adding melee code and whatever... let's say TSE is reaching milestone 3 during our development, will it be really hard to patch the engine? I'm no coder, just artist so I don't know how difficult it is sorry^^

#6 @Josh

thanks for the reply, thats what I wanted to know. We are currently getting models, weapons and arenas done. Good to know that we can also start with our core gameplay now. :) Thanks for the answers!

Sincerely,
Chris

#7 If all you want to do is add melee code, then no, it won't be that hard at all to port to milestone 3 when it arrives. That's one of the parts I love with TGE/TSE.

#8 Well there will be some other things but not big ones! I've got another question about the bounding boxes... are they in tse better than tge? they were in tge quite big, because of that the projectiles sticked into the air and not into the enemy model... if it's not changed... any chance of getting better bounding boxes or whatever in future?

#9 You can adjust the size of the bounding box in the Player's datablock.

#10 Yes but the arrows would still stick in the air beside the head... the best would be that the model itself would be the bounding box... don't know how to explain it right what I mean, but maybe you understand it. thanks.

#11 Awesome Josh. Thanks a bunch.

#12 There was a resource a long time ago for adding hitboxes(collision box for each body part) to Player shapes. I'm not sure how good it works, or if you should even use it, but it is possible. If you're going this route, I suggest writing custom code for it, as you're going to be customizing the Player class at some point.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1663