Hey GG, how about a vehicle collision fix??

#61 There really isn't anything comparable in the same price range. I license a ton of engines out of curiosity, and use them as tax write offs. There are better rendering engines, there are cheaper options, but when it comes to the overall package that you can get from TGE or TGEA, there really isn't any alternatives. People love to tout C4 (which I have a license for, and is a fine rendering engine, but it has no real terrain solution, shoddy networking, many missing subsystems), or OGRE (which is a great open source engine, I'm a fan of OGRE, but while it's a good redering engine your going to build everythign else on your own or use another library). Those engines are good at what they do, but if your going for a bang for your buck or an easier solution, which many indie teams are, then I don't think there is really anything close.

There are a lot of people who love to complain. They think they deserve more for their money, or are unhappy because something they want isn't available, or maybe never will be in Torque. In some cases those are legitimate complaints, TGEA's development cycle took much longer than most people expected it to take, and during much of that process it really wasn't suitable to develop most types of games. But in a lot of other cases, you just have angry users who were unable to get what they wanted done finished, expected things to be easier, and in the end they are looking for someone to blame other than themselves. That's my opinion on it at least. You can go through just about any engine in the sub-$1000 market and when you delve into it, guess what? It has problems. It has a lot of things that it can't do without some work. Take C4 which Tim plugged earlier, I think it's one of the better rendering engines out there. It's been promising terrain for over least a year, and still doesn't have it. It's material system is a total PITA to work with. The price was raised to $200, to an uproar. Another guy who is often on here griping about Torque (Dan Partelly) rose hell and moved to C4, only to be banned from the C4 forums for his griping there. The grass isn't always greener on the othr side. And this is not in any way a knock on C4. I own a license and think they've done a great job over there. But when don't have unlimited resources, you can't please everybody. And when you don't please everybody, there will inevitably be some angry and vocal customers.

#62 There is no simple solution Lee, no matter what they tell you. You can tweak some values to make it better, but it won't be perfect. There's a few threads which go into great detail on why it happens, but you have to know what you're doing to be able to make a difference. (Baraff or whatever it is they base their calculations on)

#63 I disagree with you there is better out there. I like Torque but it does have some long term problems that need to be fix. If they dont fix them I dont blame people for get upset. To me that the problem with companies that put a product out that have problems than make excuse for not fixing them. If you going include it and feature it should work. As long as people accept things the way they are nothing is going to get fix. I have been look at old thread it seem now that people get put off with excuse more quickly now than in the pass.

#64 Not that it matters but for the sake of keeping facts straight, Dan was not banned from the C4 forums - he left voluntarily - his user name shows up as banned as per his request. Furthermore, C4 has an excellent material system. I take it PITA is an acronym for "Pain In The Arse" however I fail to see how a graphical user interface that allows one to assign, tweak, combine, blend and animate materials including diffuse, normal, horizon, gloss, emission and opacity maps, with settings for reflection, refraction, scale, offset and microfacet shading - that takes into account lighting and provides a uniform result to all shaders, as a pain in the arse to use. Add to that ST3C compression, mip mapping, anisotropic and trilinear filtering, anti aliasing, parallax mapping and ambient occlusion.

The price went up to $200, yes, but there was no uproar. Can you provide a link or proof of this uproar? No, because it never happened. What's your C4 license number by the way? Considering that the license price includes free updates for life and guarantees all the source code and tools at no additional charge I hardly see how you're justified in complaining.

Terrain is coming in the next major release and has taken a back seat to more important features, as per the C4 user base's request. Additionally, it will include a powerful foliage system and all the tools (and source code for the tools) to create, edit and place terrain in a world (at no extra cost). The foliage won't just be a bill boarded solution either, instead a mesh will be used and a tool included to create a billboard from that mesh - the engine handling when to use each item in accordance with distance and performance settings. Road and river tools are also on the roadmap. Finally, C4 is a game engine, not a rendering engine. It has systems for sound, input, scripting and networking amongst other things.

I agree with you on two things though; the grass isn't always greener on the other side and C4's networking performance is far from brilliant across an internet connection (although to be fair it's not yet finished). It's up to the individual to decide what solution works best for them.

#65 @J.C. Thanks for the feedback. For what it's worth, I'm not angry at all, but merely annoyed on principle. And annoyed with the GG guys unusually unprofessional responses.

I mean really...telling someone who purchased a licensed labeled "commercial" that it isn't intended for commercial use...and then another employee comes along and knocks someone for knocking the art pipeline saying it's intended for "maximum commercial production team flexibility", in bold no less. Make up your mind how you're going to take shots at your customers, please, and be consistent with it, would you?

I DO realize the engine is dirt cheap. I was merely searching, originally, for a competent response to why this basic issue has been allowed to linger so long. Something like "something much better is coming at some point, so it just doesn't make sense to fix it" or even "we just can't justify the resource commitment" would have been perfectly acceptable. I would have been shocked to get "you know what, you're right, we'll look into it next week", but that would have been acceptable, too.

#66 Simply put, it isn't an easy problem to solve.

This means it would require a considerable amount of our internal resources to properly fix it and we are already spred pretty thin.

Even evaluating the fixes from the community can take a lot of time since they effect very low level systems and we have to be very careful about what we change. We have rolled some of those fixes in (I know because I personally did so for TGE 1.5.0).

As discussed in a few other places, there *is* a better solution coming at some point in the future. Clark Fagot has done some fantastic work with vehicle physics in the framework of his component system and you can see some of the results of that in Marble Blast Ultra. However, this solution isn't complete and there simply isn't a clean way of getting it into Torque as it stands. On top of that, until the recent introduction of paid upgrades, there also was no way to monetize Clark's time on it outside of using it for a game (an opportunity that hasn't yet presented itself).

Will there be better vehicle physics in Torque eventually? Yes! We will be implementing them for our own games and they will make it into Torque in due time. When will that be? We honestly don't have an answer for that. It is too far away for us to even give an estimate without causing a lot of anxiety in the community.

#67 @Lee: That comparison you make between what I said about the dts pipeline, and what Jeff Tunnell said about the racing starter kit is completely and totally out of context, and comparing apples and oranges.

The starter.racing is an example regarding how to implement a dune-buggy style basic racing game, not extremely high speed multi-interaction vehicle physics. As Jeff mentions, it's not designed to be used in a commercial level game that involves a requirement for highly accurate, high speed collisions between vehicles.

The dts pipeline was designed to be most appropriate for dozens or artists working together on the same assets, during commercial production work (Tribes, and further enhanced and tweaked for other published and non-published games).

#68 I have got to give Matt Fairfax credit for his honest words. Thanks alot for your input. I feel alot better. Thanks. I must say well said Matt.

#69 @Tim,
I'm a C4 owner and the only thing keeping me from using it is the lack of a Linux port. They make that sucker cross-platform and I'm all over it.

#70 PC, Mac, PS3 - it's almost cross-platform!

#71 Matt +1: for his honest answer. Quite refreshing.

Stephen -1: for his continued head-in-the-sand denial of problems with torque that are obvious to everyone else. Evidently, even the employee in the cubical next to him.

#72 @Tim,

I actually didn't realize that it ran on Mac. I guess i should download the latest and look it over. To be honest, I bought the thing right before they raised the price and really haven't examined it. If it runs on windows and mac, it shouldn't be too difficult to get it running on Linux.

I just need to find my duct tape and baling wire.

#73 @Tim: Dan may have an account, but his forums access has been removed.

http://www.terathon.com/c4engine/forums/viewtopic.php?t=57

Look at his name, and read the big BANNED undereath of it. I find it hard to believe that he requested that was added to his name, and that the ops decided hey Dan has been so good to us let's add a new usergroup just for him called Banned. And while we're at it let's ignore the original point of bringing that up, that he has raised hell here, and pitched that product. Then he went there and raised hell there. The grass isn't always greener on the other side. Regarding the price raise your asking me to provide links to forums that didn't even exist at the time. The C4 forums only go back to April 29th of last year. But you make it sound like a conspiracy. They doubled the price, people got mad, there was speculation of a yearly support fee for new users. Obviously it's going to raise some eyebrows. And for the record I support the price raise, just as I did the price raise of Torque. More funding helps ensure that the product keeps moving forward, and in the end I think it's a bargain.

Have you tried writing shaders with C4? And you find that easier than creating them with TGEA? That is what I was referring to by materials. The stock effects are very nice in C4, I love the parallax mapping and shadows, both are top notch. But I've found it difficult to extend upon. Mind you I haven't had any time to play with it or TGEA in over three months, been tied up with work, so haven't tried any new features of either in that time if any are available. The scenegraph is nice though also.

I've heard terrain has been coming to C4 since TGEA was in Milestone 2 or 3. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting on it. And who knows how good it will be when it is done. What we have had in the past year and a half with C4 was a major material system upgrade, some tool upgrades, and a lot of special effect and demo upgrades. Your touting that they have networking, but have you done anything with it? If your dealing with a simple game then it's not a big deal, but it is not optimized and efficient network code by any means. Now your touting a foliage system that doesn't exist. And for the record the terrain and foliage upgrades are NOT coming in the next release, they are scheduled for the next phase. The terrain system is coming some time in the Fireball phase... the next release (and possibly more after) are part of the Destroyer phase. It's a ways off still.

C4 is a very good rendering engine. It's not perfect. I own them both and I prefer to use TGEA. Others may prefer C4, but if you aren't giving people a refund on their C4 purchases, then you owe it to them to be honest when trying to pitch the product, lest they waste their time as you did with Torque. IMO the C4 route is a good choice if your dealing with mostly indoor environments and are prepared to integrate custom networking and physics solutions with it, as well as possibly a scripting environment, depending on your needs. As with any engine though, your going to have to be prepared to get your hands dirty. It makes no sense to me that people complain about a feature that is causing them problems that might only be used by 1-5% of developers but then they are prepared to move to an engine which has more missing features that are required by a much higher number of developers. Torque's strength IMO is that it has a huge community with many resources already available, and very active forums. That and the fact that it has oodles of features that most competing engines don't. The weakness of Torque would be that some of those features are outdated.

#74 Dan was removed from the forums as per his request, it's no secret. Ask Eric or better yet, ask Dan. I know he has been physically banned, as I said this was per his request - the reason he came to this decision was that he wasn't happy with his posts being censored or removed and therefore said he'd rather have no forum access at all. No-one got mad with the new pricing structure, $200 is still cheaper than TGEA, Unigine, Jupiter, TV3D 6.5 etc - and updates are free for life. Plus there was ample notice given. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but if you really are a C4 licensee all this information is available in the private forums. By the way, both these events happened within the current forum board.

Yes, I have written several shaders for C4 - although I haven't had much need to. I agree, TGEA has stronger custom shader support however I can't get past the inferior lighting and shadowing in TGEA.

Yes, my game will involve a significant networking requirement and yes I am working with C4's network code on a daily basis. I'm also using a community contributed PhysX port, which utilizes PhysX hardware.

Terrain is the next major feature being implemented in C4, so I don't understand your cafuckle.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression you're not a C4 licensee. I draw this conclusion for the following reasons:

- You provide inaccurate information that is clearly available within the private forums, of which only licensees have access to.
- The issues you raise are outdated and look like they stem from old posts on the public forums.
- I can't find anyone within the C4 member list with the same or similar username, email address or location as you.

#75 I think in this thread is discussed a false problem: I'll demostrate this. Let's suppose Im the best progrmmer of the world !! I chose torque to make a game in the category A (generic category) . When I start I notice that to make that kind of game A I nedd to add 30 % of the features that torque does't have !! It's not a problem because Im th best programmer of the world and I easily integrate all the features I need. Then I finish succesfully and because Im also altruistic I share the 30 % of my work as resources to the community. Than arrives another progrmmer not so good, and choses torque to make his game in the category B. When he starts he notices that there are a lot of resources and thake advantage form the work of the best programmer of the world !! BUT !!! It realizes soon that the game cathegory B needs another 10 % feathures that torque and category A games don't have !!! Than (frustrated by this) it start's to criticize torque and the best programmer of the world BECAUSE these features are not present and that for exemple in another engine are present.

Moral of the fable --> It doese't matter the engine you choose or the tool you use to make a result. Because if you are good you are able to make it starting from anywhere. It's not a matter of tools but a matter of talent !!!! Don't forgeht the story of Manfred Trenz's Turrican 2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turrican_2 using a lot less tools than today we have .

#76 No Andrea.... It's not always about skill. It's about buying product as that does not work the way it is intended to. Skilled people can fix it... Good for them.

The problem was that GG did not acknowledge the fact that something was broken that needed to be fixed. They rather said, it was not intended for commercial use so they not going to fix. We get it as a bonus.

Dont see Microsoft releasing a product and saying... hmmm... Wordpad is a bonus... We know the button to make things bold crashes your Harddrive, but since it's an extra... we're not fixing it.

Matt's answer for me was the right answer :)

Me not getting into the DTS and Other stuff since they work fine for me.

#77 So now your calling me a liar? I don't have the time or inclination to get into a flame war with a C4 Fanboy, but before you call someone a liar you better check your facts. Does everything have to be a conspiracy, or are we expected to take you at face value while you call everyone else a liar? I've owned a C4 license for quite some time...

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But hey if that isn't good enough for you, feel free to contact the developer and inquire about my license. Licensed under the name Christina Nething with the same email address I use here. Now hopefully we can move past the liar liar bit and behave like adults instead of angry children.

I log in to the download site, snag a new copy every few months. Peek at it, play with it. Then do it again a few months later. It is unable to do the things that I need at the moment, there isn't any reason to follow it much further than I do.

You know it's funny Tim. I remember when you went all anti-GG. I remember the incident your referring to, and maybe you have a reason to be upset, but now you have your own agenda against GG, and your giving biased observations as if they were facts. Your like a bitter ex-spouse. You complain that features are too slow at GG, but then you refer to terrain as coming soon for C4, man do you realize how long we've been hearing that? And it's not until the next phase. That is a fact. I don't have a problem with your opinion, your entitled to it. But people may thinking of spending their hard earned money on a product and they deserve to know a fair evaluation of it. I've received two emails from people regarding this thread, asking my opinion on C4. I try to respond fairly. It's not right for what I'm doing, but for certain projects it is a better choice. I don't sit there and try to persuade them that the networking is on par with Torque's, because it is far from it. But then I also don't try to tell anyone that Torque's lighting and shadows are on par with C4's, because it's not.

#78 Sorry, but after Benjamin Bradley, a Garage Games employee (possibly ex employee) decided to pose on the C4 Forums under a false alias (and I'm not lying about that!) I find it hard to believe anyone I encounter on the internet.

I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your post.

#79 J.C.: I find your terrain argument against C4 amusing, considering we were promised that we would be able to cut holes and tweak atlas terrain in the 'next patch.' That was two years ago. Even when that comes along, unless the single float precision issue with positional information is dealt with, the "huge unlimited terrains" are somewhat worthless. I doubt GG has the resources to fix that either, so what does that portend for TGEA?

I you want to make an argument against Lee or others moving to C4 that's reasonable. However, I suggest you not do it by using arguments that also hold water against torque.

#80 @Jacobin: I never even brought up atlas in that discussion. The fact of the matter though is that atlas is functional, you can do things with atlas. With regards to C4's terrain, the engine is good right now at indoor rendering. It is not so good for outdoor rendering unless it is a very small area. When they add terrain that all could very well change, but as is, to wait on terrain in C4 would be probably about the same as waiting on in-game editing capabilities for Atlas, which will probably never happen IMO. Atlas is capable of delivering some good looking and high performance outdoor scenes, however.

If you go back to my original post you will see, that I was simply trying to make some comparisons to the other top indie engines. I license most of the engines out there, use very few. IMO my top 3 would be TGEA (because I think it's the most complete all around), C4 (because I like their renderer and stock effects), and OGRE (because it's free and even a chimp could use it). The point though was that if you take a look at any of these engines your going to find problems, your going to find things that you want and they don't have. With all of the engines. Your going to find things where you are going to have to do some coding to workaround. It's not unique to Torque. There are only so many hours that can be spent on the engine within your budget. In the case of this problem here, I'm sure it's a fix that would be greatly embraced by people making the type of game that would benefit from it. But if you poll the people who are not, they might rather have those man hours being invested in other areas. In the case of C4, they don't have the manpower that GG has, it's great that the engine has progressed as far as it has and continues to progress. But it can't do everything.

I'm not knocking any of these engines. But if you license any of them you also need to be prepared to do some work upgrading features that you might need.