TGEA v1.1? Questions...

#41 You are right, many things work really good in TGEA. But not at the level for a 1.0 release unless your 1.0 release are measured in "The game creators 1.0 releases" (massively bugged and feature cut with promisses that take 3 years to implement like their terrain system).

- Light and shadow system: not really there. DTS -> DTS works nice. Atlas2 is cut, static shapes are cut as well. static shadow cast onto atlas2 is gone as well. The list of stuff that does not work on atlas2 although it is advertised as ultra cool high end replacement for legacy is by far too long. Definitely false advertisement at the moment and out of the legal point of view would already grant refund within EU if one wants to. (just to make clear we are not talking of little funny things that are of no interest)

- Angle dependancy problems with nearly any shader (shadow, water shore problems *not zbuffer but massive fluctuations at wider view distances than 1000* and atlas2 mipmapping to name the worst I came over). Those problems at least to me out of experience with scientific calculation stuff etc look like float instability problems and should be fixable by replacing that end with orthogonal vector space usage instead of doing it the "easy way".

- There seems to be even a hardware manufacturer bound performance problem against NVIDIA.
Can't say much about that, don't have ATI to compare it at a fair level, but assuming that the TGEA team works on the X360 part as well, it would make sense that it is opted for their way of handling it.

- Missing updates. For two weeks or the like employees are talking of 1.01 (not even 1.1!) and its still not released. 6 weeks since release. Sure might be only off a week but doing fixes even posted by users takes 7 weeks? I know that TGEA is a monster of an engine. But after 3 years I assume that they know how it works and do not have to crawl through XY code blocks to find the point where something is done like those of us who post the fixes.


Perhaps we should be taken as serious costumers once again, as it seems like the indie costumers got put on secondary or even tertiary priority since the start of XNA stuff and "doing hired work for commercial costumers" which they offer as well as service. I don't have a problem with the fact that they do such stuff as it gives them an even larger audience.
But I think that there should be teams doing one thing and teams doing other thing. Not sharing or splitting the same team. (don't know if this is correct. But due to the time needed even for 1.01, I assume its like that.)


PS: On the ogre comparision: Show me one thing OGRE can not do that TGEA can and that TGEA got new and did not just 1:1 use from TGE. Because TGE stuff definitely is not part of that comparision as we already payed for that technology before with additional fee for the currently bogus rendering and terrain upgrade called TGEA. And the things you need are nice. But you are aware that not GG did them. You know, stuff like shape replicator and the like which are user converted resources.
Would be really interesting to see what kind of performance you would get by using TGE as engine core and OGRE as rendering, instead of using the Modernization Kit. (which is another way to get current gen technology + Torque Technology)

#42 Wow, this thread kinda blew up lol... I didn't intend it to go like this, but I thought I would share a bit of an update on our situation and feelings about TGEA....

Basically TGEA won't provide us a good working environment and tools due to the aformentioned 'promised' features, bugs, and general 'mess' that is TGEA. Personally I think that GG has diversified too much with too many projects, and simply don't have the manpower to follow through...

It's a shame, but we are moving on, and have hence organised a deal with Trinigy to develop our game on their Vision engine. Yes its in a completely different league to TGEA, and TGEA did help us establish exactly what our project requirements are, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that TGEA just isn't ready, and won't be for another 6-12 months. I'm not trying to sound too anti-TGEA, as I think it has a lot of potential, its simply that we are personally taking our Game Project seriously and don't have the time or energy to fix bugs or implement missing features ourselves.

Theres a few things that make good products and business/customer relations:

Under Promise and Over Deliver
Respectful Communication
Prompt and Professional Support

Unfortunately GG seems to be lacking in a few of these. Don't take this the wrong way GG, but perhaps you should re-evaluate your customer relations, company philosophy and number of 'in-development' projects. I can understand the need to go with XNA, and I guess the Great Games Experiment is a 'neat' idea, but it seems to me that there is not enough people within GG to maintain high standards across the multiple projects: TGB, TGE, TGEA, XNA, Constructor, Great Games Experiment and I'm sure theres a number of other projects on the go...

I do feel bad for typing all this, and definately don't make a habit of it, but its mainly due to the fact that GG apparently shows little consideration for the fact that we (paying customers) have invested a lot of time and money into working with this product, only to feel like we have been brushed aside.

Anyway. I wish the best of luck to everyone who will be sticking it out with TGEA as we move onto bigger and better things, and I will see you on the flipside....

addiktive
Andy Wiltshire
Producer
www.legendrpg.com

#43 @Smith:

You have the answers on the 2 posts above.

@addkitive

I suggested GG to re-evaluate their customer relations long ago. Unfortunately, they are not professional enough to do that. Some of them are good ppl taken in isolation, but collectively as "GG" they suck at:
delivering, public relations, respect of the licensee .

Blowing up TGEA 1.0 and releasing the engine like they did is lame even for a indie team operating on a 2000 US$ budget coding a mod , not a company which sells a product.

@Lundmark

Well, OpenGL was promised. They where the one which said in their advertising milestone 4 will contain it, not I. Then some ppl at GG tried to cover this and said it wasn't even there, but they where comfromted with saved pages by some licensees.


GG cant deliver quality in 3D. Thats clear to me. I told them almost 2 years ago that dynamic lighting will
get them a lot of problems. How do they solve it ? By going 1.0 with a dynamic lighting engine which is of no good and doesnt work with all objects, nor is advanced in any way. Too bad, for them.

I suggest them to buy a C4 license and learn how to write interaction shaders, and how to optimize a dynamic lighting system. Ohhh , no ... I recall now ... some GG employees even insinuated that C4 stolen code from Torque engines ... so ... there is nothing to learn , Torque rendering systems are better :P

@Stephen Zepp,

Stephen, I have a soft spot for you in my hearth, but when you ask if you I finished any game, the only thing I can think of is to ask: did GG finished any 3D engine EVER ? We all know you finished a game,
instead of delivering to your licensees for 3 years TGEA 1.0.

#44 @Marc and Dan: As a renderer Ogre, and several other engines are solid (C4 as Dan mentions has a very nice renderer, though it still doesn't handle terrain yet and the materials system is a bit cryptic). But integrating that into a working engine is a lot of work for little gain. Unless you just don't wat to spend the money on TGEA, there isn't much reason to reinvent the wheel and integrate everything in yourself to a pure renderer. Feel free to do it all yourself, but I'd rather pay the price of admission and work on creating what I want to create instead of the engine itself. It's funny to me to see people complain about something like the lack of certain features in TGEA, then in the same breath when asked to show a comparable engine in the price range only refer to a pure rendering engine, which would require god knows how may times more work than it would to simply fix what it is they need fixed in TGEA.

@Addiktive: I noticed that you guys license Trinigy. I'm guessing that's a bit out of the budget of most Indie teams. If a team has a big budget, there are plenty of engines available. For small budget teams, torque gives you the best bang for the buck by a wide margin.

#45

Quote:
Well, OpenGL was promised. They where the one which said in their advertising milestone 4 will contain it, not I. Then some ppl at GG tried to cover this and said it wasn't even there, but they where comfromted with saved pages by some licensees.

Are you talking about the milestone list which was at the product page? Then yes, it said OpenGL. It also said Atlas Editors, Dynamic Lighting and Shadows. A milestone list can change, and it was a mistake for them to put it up and I know that they know that now - but it is too late. They learned alot during TGEA, trust me.

You know I agree with you. It is just that one has to understand when it does not help complaining anymore (and I think you got to that point considering that you want a refund) and when to give up. I gave up long ago and went ahead with what I had instead.

#46 @Stefan

You are right , of course. Youll get no argument from me to what you just said above.

take care mate

#47 I tend to agree that TGEA 'could' provide the 'best bang for buck', but at this stage its more like 'best bang your head against the wall for buck' :)

Trinigy is actually quite affordable if you are serious about making games. We have a good large dedicated team and the drive to succeed, so we ensure that we get the funding required for a quality engine. I think if you are a dev team under 10 people then something like TGEA is prolly best (although be prepared to spend a lot of time searching through old docs and implementing your own bug fixes and missing features). If you have more then 10 people, then look at funding incentives and schemes to build up enough funds to license a 'serious' engine.

We are pretty new to the whole industry, but we are serious about what we are doing, and simply felt that we needed to take the project to the 'next level' and spend more time actually creating the game rather then messing with an engine that should be 'good to go'.

Our team is primarily Artist based rather then Coders, so we needed an engine suitable.

Anyway, TGEA could potentially be a good solution for most indie's, and again I wish everyone the best of luck... Feel free to pop over to our forums and say hi...

addiktive

#48 I agree, TGEA could potentially be a great engine.
The material system clearly shows that.

If the rest would be even only at 60-70% of that, TGEA would be a far better and more reliable product.
But it sadly isn't at the moment.
I surely will not turn away from GG, because what Melv and the others do at the TGB end always recatches me (the recent 1.5 beta with addition of behaviors definitely struck me :-) )

#49 I have to disagree with you addiktive. I've done contract work on several TGEA jobs, and I think TGEA is ready for consumption now. There are some problems but they are things that can be easily worked around for the most part, or things that would be nice, but are they really worth a huge price jump nice? Not for indie projects IMO.

In your case, Trinigy is probably the right engine. If you are artist heavy, then TGEA may not be the right case. There are lots of polish features missing, that are not hard to add, but for whatever reason are not in stock, and the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. When your buying a $300 engine though, you have to let some things slide IMO. If your licensing NetImmerse or one of the other mid-tier engines (meaning less than the real heavy hitters like Unreal Engine) the jump in price from $300 to $10,000-$25,000 is pretty huge. It's affordable with funding, but for an indie project which is often created on peoples off time maximizing profits is important and most teams don't have that type of money available. But obviously with that extra funding a development team has a lot more assets in place to build documentation, to improve features. While a good argument could be made that part of the reason that TGEA's development has been slow is because GarageGames has stretched themselves very thin with many products, another part of that reason is because they don't have a smaller budget to work with to begin with. Yet when people spend the $300 (or for years the $100 for TGE) they expect the same level of support and completeness. IMO that is an unrealistic expectation. IMO purchasing TGEA is like buying a house that is a fixer upper. It's a nice house, but it needs some work.

#50 Quote of the day: IMO purchasing TGEA is like buying a house that is a fixer upper. It's a nice house, but it needs some work.

Except in this case that house is advertised as a 'complete' game making solution...

I didn't have any false expectations of what TGEA was capable of, but the fact of the matter is that they haven't delivered what 'was' advertised.

I'm not here to stir the bees nest, I simply want a resolution to my email request and Ill move on... Again good luck with working with TGEA, and if you are comfortable spending more time on getting the engine to work and adding in advertised features then actually producing your game than more power to you...

addiktive

#51 @Smith:

I dont expect any level of completeness, but I expect that advertised features to be present and working.

Dan

#52 If we're not going to see what is planned for the future anymore, is there a place for me to see what bugs have been fixed.

Can anyone point me to this please.

#53 There was never a place where one could see what bugs where fixed. Not even real release notes. they where on the line "more than xxx bugs where fixed" but nobody ever know what was fixed and what not. Extremely unprofessional , if you ask me.

#54 Hey guys,

I think this thread has peaked in its usefulness and am locking it. Please feel free to continue the positive parts of this discussion (things like: what's the right engine for me, sincere inquiries into capabilities/stability of TGEA, general technical questions, suggestions for improving the product) elsewhere.

We're always looking to improve our tools, documentation, and features, but you can only lambast GG, GG employees, and GG community members so much before it stops being productive and rapidly becomes annoying. I would suggest the time it takes for this is on the order of minutes, not years. :)

Regards,
Ben Garney

PS - Dan, I hope you caught the links that were posted and then removed just now. The poster referenced several employee .plans with changelogs, many of the forum threads where GG employees have announced and done follow-up support on TGEA releases, and some other good resources for people interested in TGEA changes. It's not on a silver platter but we do put the information out there.