When will the 1.02 out?

#81 Motion Blur?? :O Where?

Edit:
Thats not included with TGEA so why is it being shown off like it is?

#82 Well, technically that was a GDC video. It had nothng to do with TGEA's future releases.

EDIT: Though, frankly I'm a bit annoyed that the community never got to see that demo. I'm really interested on how they did the sky transition so seamlessly.

#83 Unreadable text is not included like in that video! i want that! nOw!

#84 I gotta agree with Eric. TGEA features list and videos are a bit misleading. Yes, we can make shaders and materials, but new people get the impression that all of that is part of the package and "ready".

Now GG might argue that we can do all of this stuff with the product, but yet we don't have documentation that really tells us how to do it. Everything is either a guess or miss, which for me, has wasted much of my time.

The bugs and the broken items that are advertised in the product is something I can deal with. I don't have any problem with that. But, what I do have a problem is when GG decided that *we* are no longer entitled to receive anymore information or release info about TGEA. All of this because a couple people gave them grief about it in the past.

I'm just like most people that have TGEA, I am trying to launch a couple games and give it a go. But my timeline is messy because I have no idea what's going on with TGEA. Being left in the dark is the most difficult thing to go through.

Some of us get the feeling that GG has ignored TGEA customers by focusing on other products, and new expansion products for the Wii. Maybe this isn't true, but when we don't have any information or "possible" release schedules we can't meet our own timelines. We are waiting for many things to get fixed.

It's been difficult to tell my boss, "Well they should be fixing it soon..." but then it turns into months and no information. I also have to tell my customers that too.

This doesn't mean that I dislike GG, or TGEA. I love the product and admire GG. But leaving us in the dark with no info is bad. We don't have anything to look forward to and we are running out of things to say to our management and customers.

#85 Stephen,

Last I remember hearing about ATLAS is that it took up a whole lot of memory and still needed to be optimized. That was some time ago, and it's possible it slipped by without my noticing.

Thanks for the tip on the glow/full screen shader. TGEA certainly can be closer than we thought.

#86

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Last I remember hearing about ATLAS is that it took up a whole lot of memory and still needed to be optimized. That was some time ago, and it's possible it slipped by without my noticing.

Optimization for what is the critical question here. If you want smaller memory footprints, you have to give up speed of runtime rendering/loading, for example.

Atlas and Atlas2 are optimized for run time performance and visible distance capability--and it shines there. It gives up some close up detail for this speed optimization, and it requires quite a bit of pre-run processing for this optimization (which further makes real time editing a very non-trivial problem set).

@Adam:

Quote:
Edit:
Thats not included with TGEA so why is it being shown off like it is?

I'm honestly not sure how to answer this at all. I guess the closest I can come is "the video also shows off use of a video capture tool to make a video, why isn't that included in TGEA?".

Not trying to be rude here, just trying to find out where you are coming from with the question. It's a demo that was prepared for GDC a year ago, and includes examples of what can be done with the engine. If you buy Unreal, or Gamebryo, or CryEngine, they aren't going to include their demo materials created for conventions either....

#87

Quote:
I'm honestly not sure how to answer this at all. I guess the closest I can come is "the video also shows off use of a video capture tool to make a video, why isn't that included in TGEA?".

Oh, come on now. He's talking about the motion blur, shader model 3 examples, the custom rendering code for Legions, etc. Personally, I'm a bit interested in how you did the motion blur.

I realize it was just a GDC demo, but don't people deserve some examples to follow on? I would love a tutorial on how to render a scene with multiple render targets or even just general GFX documentation.

#88

Quote:
Oh, come on now. He's talking about the motion blur, shader model 3 examples, the custom rendering code for Legions, etc. Personally, I'm a bit interested in how you did the motion blur.

Google Search for Motion Blur

It's a shader man...no offense intended, but that search provides more than 77 thousand web links to motion blur related information.

#89 Hey Stephen,

Best I can tell that requires some engine changes, right? It's not done via script, as far as I can tell.

That's where many of us artists probably got lost. The main reason I own a license was to get access to the forums. :)

#90 Stephen, I've done extensive shader work throughout the year and find this a little insulting. I was hoping you could elaborate on the fullscreen effect. At any rate, I don't want to provoke this topic any more, so it's probably best I drop it.

@Eric, yep. Most fullscreen effects use multiple render targets(MRTs). That is, applying a certain effect to a specific region of the screen. The glow buffer uses MRTs extensively, so that would be a good place to start.

#91

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Stephen, I've done extensive shader work throughout the year and find this a little insulting.

I realize you have, which is why I just can't figure out how that statement and the following one can be in the same post.

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@Eric, yep. Most fullscreen effects use multiple render targets(MRTs). That is, applying a certain effect to a specific region of the screen. The glow buffer uses MRTs extensively, so that would be a good place to start.

#92 Am I incorrect? I'll admit, I know very little about render targets and have had next to no experience with them. I've been under the impression that it was an onscreen area.

#93 Nope, you are absolutely right--just replace the glow buffer effect with a motion blur effect, and you have motion blur full screen :)

#94 Well I'm really enjoying the engine. And I admit that I struggle sometimes. Luckily for my game I'm not using ATLAS, so I really have nothing to complain about.

Anybody would like to see more updates I guess, but as mentioned previously it's not stopping you from developing your game, although I feel that it sometimes it forces me to do things (like marketing, however small) differently.

One request I do have though is fixing the Transparency, Shadow problems in the next release.

A nice thing would be adding more shaders for people to use. I know "we can do it ourselves", but us single person teams dont always have the time to invest in reading/learning EVERY single aspect.

*Hint* Shader Pack anyone? :)

#95 To say let's get back to the Topic.... Really when will the TGEA 1.02 will be out?
It's been quite a while since we first heard about the possible release date.
Although it was approximated, don't you think it's about time?

Just wondering when it will be out, and crossing my fingers hope that can fix our bugs too!!!

They have mentioned that it's a bunch of bug fix didn't they?

#96 I've been using TGEA for a couple of years, and my take on it is that as it stands right now... it can be used to ship a game. There are some areas that can be improved, and there's some problems that would cause it to not be viable without a bit of work in certain game types. For other type of games though it's fine. Someone above said that TGEA hasn't had anything new in two years... that's so untrue you wouldn't believe. Aside from the glaring areas such as lighting and shadows which weren't around two years ago, there have been tons of other changes, from blended terrains, to batched rendering and in stamping out some serious problems that existed before. IMO two years ago TGEA was not capable of shipping anything but a couple style of games. I think at this point you can ship most game types with it. It's not perfect but it works.

That having been said there are a couple issues that I have with it. The fact that atlas terrain isn't at all affected by the sunlight and doesn't case it's own shadows to me is a big one. It is less of an issue if your working on an FPS or something where the setting doesn't change, if your doing an RPG though for example, your going to have to do a lot of work to make it viable. Another bug that currently exists that will be the bane of any RPG is that the full screen mode appears to lose focus if you click around the bottom or right hand edges. This bug has been around for years, I had to rig up our menus in previous projects to not have anything that required clicking in those areas. In FPS games that doesn't matter much, only on your menus. If your doing an RPG though and have draggable menus, forget about it. It's an easily verified bug, click the bottom right hand corner of your screen and watch it kick you into windows. It works just the same if you click on the bottom edges or the right edges. In a traditional RPG style UI your going to have your menu buttons or action bars on the bottom portion of the screen generally. As is, that's not doable.

So it's not an engine without problems. In addition to the ones listed there, there are other issues that are things that certain games would benefit from which used to work in TGE and don't work in TGEA, these features aren't usually documented as not working. So when people move over from TGE they often have the idea that they are just going to have to recompile some DIFs, write some materials and go. Then they realize that footsteps and decals don't work out of the box. There is no material mapping on the terrain for footstep sounds. No splashes or water explosions, etc. And their reaction is to be angry that TGEA isn't finished. The reality is that most of those features are game specific, not every game needs them. And most of them aren't all that hard to get integrated. I'd say that you would get similar experiences with any other engine out there in the low cost market. I license most of them to play with, though I mostly have stuck with Torque, it's my personal preference. I thnk it's the best overall package. But as a programmer, you need to be prepared to get your hands dirty.

I don't have a problem with that. Although I do agree with a lot of people when they say that TGEA has been put on the backburner for other products. I personally, don't like the fact that GG has been stretched so thin on various projects that it takes 4-5 months for minor updates to happen. Some of the problems with TGEA are things that would take a mere hours to fix. There are posts on things like bullethole decals, fxshapereplicator, footprints, etc that IMO should be merged into the stock engines and would avoid a lot of the complaints. There are other things that people have fixed such as splashes, etc that they'd almost certainly give permission to go into head. And you'd certainly hope that in the years of development we could actually have an atlas which is affected by sunlight at the very least, and which preferably would cast shadows or to have a full screen game where you can't click through your screen to windows on accident. When I look at those problems having existed for years and not being corrected, it brings up questions to me about GG's commitment to TGEA.

#97 There are two major problems you forgot:

alt - tab / ctrl - alt - del context issues on XP and Vista

Windows Bar (XP and Vista) shimmering through issue

#98 Hey guys. I believe this has all been stated before but let me state it again just in case.

TGEA 1.02 is a minor upgrade. It includes some fixes that were made in TGE 1.5+ and a few more fixes. We've been folding in a fix here and there from the forums over the last several weeks too. We never intended to announce the update until it was actually ready for release (it was "announced" through a misunderstanding).

The reason for the delay is that we have a QA bottleneck (excellent qa people, just not enough and too many products). Since TGEA 1.02 is a minor update, it has been pushed to the end of the queue a few times. It will come out when it comes out.

In the meantime, as discussed ad nauseum above, TGEA is still a functioning engine. You don't need an update to make your game. Don't be an "update collector", just get 'er done.

[Stupid attempt at humor removed]. Seriously, I don't mean to invalidate the idea that you want more features and a better engine. We're working on it. TGEA 1.02 will not be a substantially better experience. But addressing all the issues raised above, in one way or another, is definitely something we talk about all the time and are working on.

#99 @Clark - you guys should've never made it an "Official 1.0" version then. Many things are broken. TGE works out of the box, TGEA does NOT work out of the box as advertised.

#100 @Andy - maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't change a word of what I said above.