TorqueX equals an incomplete TGEA

#41 True, but their are plenty of bugs, missing features, and examples of hackish code even with TGEA at 1.02 which is well past the "Early Adopter" phase. An engines hitting 1.0 in almost anyones book means that it is feature complete, stable, and ready for use in a production environment out of the box. With TGEA that is not the case.

Now I accept the occasional engine bug, that's part of development, but TGEA is infested with more than just a few minor annoyances. Even with the 1.02 code drop we still have multiple page long lists of bugs and abnormalities with the engine which don't even cover missing features. All of which we have sent to GG before and they have done seemingly nothing to address.

I was reading the Tribalwar forums a while ago and Tim Aste's was talking about how GG was going to switch from engine development to game development soon. A fact that has since been confirmed to me by some other GG higher ups. Now that sounds all fine and dandy and developing products on their own engine does mean they will finally have to confront some of these bugs that we have been seeing for so long. However, now that they are switching gears my biggest fear is that we wont be seeing updates as often as engine coders will be pulled off general TGEA development (and GG's other engine lines) to help add in features and work on the games they are making. Which generally means we wont see those improvements until at the earliest they get done or nearly done with the engine side of Legions or whatever else they are working on; but more than likely until after they release their game(s) and they switch gears again.

I'm all for GG making games, I just wish they would finish out their engine first so the rest of us who are stuck waiting on GG to fix there mess and give us what was promised when we first signed up can release. Right now our coders are spending about 80% time fixing GG's mess and 20% time coding in new features that we need for the game, and every new code drop restarts this bug fixing process on our end due to lack of proper QA testing on GG's part before code drop releases. I don't care how much we paid for the engine, any way you look at it so far its been a bad investment on our part. Mainly due to the apparent lack of interest on GG's part to finish out what we paid for. Instead of completing a product over three years in the works and is already looking outdated they insist on starting new projects every few weeks.

GG its time to take your Ritlan, stop starting new projects, and FINISH WHAT WE PAID FOR.

#42 Amen, this is exactly what Epic is getting sued over right now.

Finsh TGEA!

#43 GG states in there documents that there isn't a set time frame for releasing updates. They could decide to release the next update in 5 years from now if they wanted too.

Jesse McKinney you got what you paid for its stated that it is sold as is. I think GG is being very generous by giving free updates. My personal opinion GG should charge for updates, because they put alot hard work into the Game Engines and product they produce. My theory is if GG charged for updates they would be able to afford more help and then their engines would surpass Epics engine as well as the Cry engine.

I think GG takes alot of pride in the things they do, and they don't want to send out garbage.

#44 These are not update we are after, they are fixes for a product they they sold to us broke as well as features that are missing. Which to this day they still are peddling missing features, bugs, and all. I am speaking specifically about after the 1.0 release, not the early adopter phase which we accepted would be a WIP and delta with accordingly.

Also, I have not got what I paid for. I paid for a stable engine to develop my product on. What I have gotten is nothing but headaches as things that were and still are being advertised as features magically don't work or are not implemented (even with 1.02) and the engine still has a huge laundry list of bugs. Also GG does on occasion charge for major updates such as TGE 1.5, but that has no relevance on what we are discussing in this thread. Which is bug fixes and the implementation of missing features that we already supposedly paid for when we forked over $250 bucks a seat for the engine.

Now with over 60 people working at GG now (double from last year) you would think they would be able to use a few of those people to fix the engine. But nope, those people are now working on "Unannounced Projects to be announced at IGC ". Which boils down to more A.D.D stuff that i really don't care about. This alone goes to show our money is not being spent on what we paid for but instead on whatever A.D.D. project Garage Games can think up next.

All I want is what I paid for, which is GG to deliver what was promised to all of us. A stable, feature complete, reliable platform for us to develop the games we want on. This to date has not been the case and from what it sounds like from talking to a few upper level management people at GG wont be happening anytime soon.

It is truly ashamed that over the years GarageGames has started to become to corporate monster that the company was founded on to fend off when Sierra swallowed up Dynamix. I like most people that originated from the Tribes community respected Garage Games as both the good guys, and a company that would never sell out. However, that dream has since been crushed. My respect for them is seriously dwindling and I am afraid that this TGEA mess will be the final nail in the coffin. From reading this thread, I am not the only one that feels this way.

#45 I know there is some problems, but they never said there wasn't. Every engine has bug and GG I'm sure they are hard at work. I know you can produce a game with it (Marble Bast and Dreamlords) were made in TGEA.
My game is currently being made in TGEA and will hopefully be ready for release in February.

GG did produce what they've promised.

#46 Which has been proven several times over.

#47 Hehe r u serious?

I think in principle GG is a good thing but I think that they are personly just more interested in making games and the problem lies in the fact that they have make commitments to customers that use their products. Especially latley supporting those customers seems to be less and less of a priority for them.

Then when people bitch they get all offended and are like see this is why we don't tell you guys anything.

You don't see any problem with this pattern of behavior morrie?

And no there is no way GG will ever have an engine that rivals Epics or Cryteks. They are not focused enough. they are to busy trying to do to many hairbrained things like GGE.

GG products are only used becasue for the money there is just not much else out there. But they are in no way shape or form what they are sold as. I would just like to see them drop the attitude and level with people. But evedently they have gotten to the point where they think that they have to project an image of being incapable of doing anything wrong. There are to many people that are I assume supposed to be marketing experts working there now, so everything is denying, secrecy, and ignoring problems like they don't exist.

All you have to do is read the forums to know that this approch has not worked but of course they are gonna ignore that as well.

The point is and jesse is right. that 2 seasoned programmers working fulltime could have done what was on the 1.02 changlist in the alloted time. So what are the other 58 developers working on? Personally I just wanted some shadows on the damn Atlas terrain. After that I could care less. As far as I'm concerned get the really obvois things like that done and I will be a happy camper. But when I'm sitting here with a product that is incomplete. "doesn't even have the features in the list they are using to sell new customers. and then I hear oh we are gonna start working on our own games. Yeah you are damn right we are getting irritated


TGE was more or less finished by the time that they got it. since then ntohing has gotten finished other than Marble Blast Ultra.

don't get me wrong GG is the only real option for the money but the TGEA is far from what is advertised. but if epic or id ever started and indie program with a reduced license fee for say a couple grand that would be it. GG would have nothing but some school kids here with their allowance.

anyway I'm done here

#48 Actually there is a serious difference in the engines GG is developing.

On the "worst case end" there is TGEA, which is now out for 6 months, got 2 bug fix patches and is still 2-5 patches behind "offering what was advertised" which means another 6-8 months unless a money refund wave is hitting the decision makers that put TGEA lower on the priority list (and sadly, all asking for a refund are entitled to according international laws on advertisement. Sure there is still a "relative point of view" but not working atlas2 terrains and inexisting documentations 6 months after release are major problem with a 3D development engine)


On the "good case end", there is TGB on the other hand.
Sure it got a little less attention lately (which is seen in the 1.5 update frequency and the incomplete docs compared to 1.1.3), but at least the stuff we, the costumers and user, post on the bug boards, gets fixed in time, and by time I mean weeks, not aeons like on TGEA.


If I weren't part of a project still believing in TGEA, I would definitely have gotten back my money (already considered that once and was told by the support that a new staff member has been hired to do the documentations. that was shortly after TGEA 1.0.1) by now.
6 months and 2 merge fixes ... thats definitely not enough priority considering the state TGEA is in, which is worse than DarkBasic from TGC ever was and I always thought thats the worst 3d engine ever sold to costumers looking for shader support ...

#49 Ehh true. I just wish they would focus and finish something. I'm not saying that every bug should be fixed by now but things like the shadows in atlas should ahve been fixed before 1.0.

As for documentation..... well that frankly has ALWAYS been somewhat of a joke. You basicly have to gleen what you can from resources and the mess that is the TDN and then use a lot of trial and error. Usually you end up with someone in the community explaining it to you becasue they have have already been though it.

in GGs defense I think that we do sometime forget that TGEA has only really been out for a few months. Us EA folk tend to forget that.

That being said GG take you ridilin and finish TGEA. I know you can do this you guys, it is not like you don't have they talent. If TGX is a bigger deal and you wanna throw everything towards that. Fine, give us a discount on it and put all of your resources into it and finish it. But for God's sake, stop leaving us twisting in the wind here.

Stop starting new projects when you have unfinished ones.

#50 You make some valid points James, and I am not a type of person who is inclined to accept what he is given verses what was promised. I agree there remains some basic items for some reason that are missing, borked, or otherwise inoperable at this time.

Having said this (and I do expect GG to lend their attention to them in weeks not months), TGEA remains a viable engine for use. I, as I'm sure many of us have, examined several other "indie" engines out there floating around and TGEA seems to do better than holding its own among them as a whole... and I stress as a whole.

Morrie stated - "or even the C4 engine doesn't give updates till they are ready to release the upgrades."

No, but they do list features planned for future releases quite clearly.

Stephen Zepp stated - "Once again, the very fact that this initial post exists shows that no matter which way we go, we are going to have unhappy people--so we go with what causes the least amount of issues overall."

Thats not very accurate in reference to the argument. This post seems to have been fueled from the current norm of silence is golden, though I agree, that you will have unhappy people regardless. A person is intelligent, a crowd is not or how ever the saying goes. The sense of anonymity sometimes loosens peoples comments.

I personally only have an issue with the lack of communication. Nothing that a forum poster has said in the past be it positive or negative lends weight to the argument that keeping clients in the dark is a good idea. Thats like saying.. person A robbed me so I'm going to punish person b, c d ... etc... it makes no sense. Let's not ignore the few who badmouth things.. lets punish everyone.. all the teams working on projects who don't know whats going on, who can't focus on specific issues because nobody knows what GG is doing, because they currently have a "I'm taking my marbles and going home" mentality.

GG has the right to work on as many projects as they wish. They can give updates as often, or as far apart as they wish. Not backing your clients with needed information for development is never a good thing. And it seems, that the majority of the people badmouthing GG recently stems directly from a lack of communication.

I have found the GG staff very helpful, hard working people who are frequently involved in community issues. I respect them as well as GG as a whole.. but I do not respect the policy of silence.

#51 Exactly,

You have a product that is out and that is really big problems and missing features and all we hear about is these tons of wonderful projects that you are working on that are not fixing out issuses. How could you guys honestly expect us not to be a little PO'ed. I mean seriously come on guys throw us a bone here. From where we are sitting al we see is how you are working on everything BUT fixing our issues.

Please focus on fixing these issues and getting all of the features working and then say that is it personly I could care less if OpengGL and mac linux support ever come around. That is such a small nich it is not worth the effort. Get TGEA for windows working 100 percent you I promise you wont hear another word of bitching from me.

#52 @James - I'm curious if you send the same complaints over on Microsoft's forums? There isn't a single version of Windows, Word, Excel, Outlook, Exchange Server, Biztalk, Visual Studio, and so on that doesn't charge you an arm and a leg for the newest version.

Did their old version come 100% bug free? If you can claim that, then you have reached a new level of MS fanboyism (fanboyism word copyright Jonathon Stevens 2007 =P) The point is, nothing is bug free, ever except maybe a 'hello world' program. Every complex bit of software has bugs. People have released TGEA, TGE, TorqueX, and TGB games, therefore they all can and are being used to develop games, which is what they promise.

You need to think long and hard about your expectations of GG in comparison to every other product on your computer and if you feel the same as you do now, then there's just no hope for you. Either way, this thread has long lost it's usefulness.

#53 John, read up a little bit further you probably missed a bit of the conversation.

What we are currently frustrated about isn't that bugs exist. We accept that. What we are frustrated about is that so many exist and so many missing features still remain and yet GG keeps starting new projects instead of spending time fixing the ones they already have in development such as TGEA. Yes TGEA can be used to some degree and on some projects as is. However, for projects like mine it simply cant do what we were told it could because Garage Games has not spent the time needed, to implement the features we need and were promised; Or for that matter done through enough QC checking to eliminate some of the most obvious bugs even with the engine supposedly past its 1.0 Feature Complete and ready to use milestone.

In doubling there staff they techincally should double there response time in dealing with these bugs and finishing off the TGEA feature list. Instead things are moving as slow as ever, due mainly to the many new projects GG has started. Not only that but they continue to start even more projects on a seemingly monthly basis instead of using those new employees to fix what we purchased and were promised to be able to use this product for.

I would strongly encourage you to read up a few more posts as there are some interesting points of view from both sides of the argument presented. Also this thread has not lost its usefulness, it continues to be constructive and stays on topic. I really hope GG is watching this thread and takes note that a lot of the current TGEA owners (not all though!) are getting fed up with there current strategy and that changes might be in order before their community and revenue abandons them or seeks intervention to get what was paid for.

#54 It has little to do with reading up on things, Jesse. Like any community there will always exist individuals who will defend what they like. It doesn't matter if the critisicm is constructive nor valid - as long as you are unhappy with something you are considered to be wrong and expecting too much by some.

I agree with some of your points, but I also understand GarageGames stance on this. They are, after all, a company which needs to make decisions that makes it stay profitable. I'm sure Ben, Brian and whoever else working on TGEA would love to make it the best engine out there but if they can't work on it all the time then they have to prioritize what goes in.

There were features on the milestone list that were never met. Some things are still missing and/or broken. But many of these things you can fix yourself, or hire someone to. These issues might also be resolved by GarageGames, or you might be able to avoid them.

May I ask what in particular you find missing?

#55 Buying a product doesn't entitle you to private company knowledge. If you have a problem with a product, that is fine. But demanding to see schedules or time-lines or milestones, or whatever is ridiculous. We just don't want to share that kind of information anymore. Does that make us evil? I don't think so. In fact, it's probably good policy. It has given us grief before, so we won't do it again. The only reason some of you demand it now, is because we did it in the past. A mistake we will not repeat.

Also, some of you have noticed we have grown quite a bit in the last year. But that still doesn't mean we can just snap our fingers and magically fix bugs. Things take time. There is a process to things; finding and fixing bugs, running fixes through QA, and product marketing to consider, just to name a few.

And yes, we may have a bunch of different projects going on here at GarageGames. Some you know about, some you don't. But in the past, and what will continue to be the case in the future, all the projects we've done have benefited our core line of engines in some way. So no, they weren't just some random thing we decided to do because we have ADD. Even the games we have done have benefited the engines over the long term. Even TorqueX, an engine based on a completely different language than the rest of our engine products brings benefits back to our core engine products.

#56 I don't think that people are asking for private company knowledge, upcomming things are a totally different thing than already advertised stuff for 6 months thats still not present now and are still advertised.
Its mainly that, what end users are asking for and that should be handled definitely on a higher priority than it is right now.
I know that bug hunting and fixing in a system of the size and complexity of TGEA is no simple thing, otherwise more here would be able to post fixes or find the root of their problems. But I assume many here aren't working fulltime on TGEA as well.



On the QA part: I'm sorry to say so but right now I'm forced to ask myself what they actually did to the 1.0.2 release.

map2dif does not compile because TGEA lib project is not 1.0.2 compliant, which clearly shows that there is a massive difference between what we are told and what is internally done, at least right now.
No one can give me any usefull explanation why a simple "project - batch build - select all - build" error was not trackable, as even a beginner most likely must have struggled over that.


Its hard to believe and trust in a QA that spits out that kind of quality which is that error prone

#57 Buying a product doesn't entitle you to private company knowledge. If you have a problem with a product, that is fine. But demanding to see schedules or time-lines or milestones, or whatever is ridiculous. We just don't want to share that kind of information anymore. Does that make us evil?

Evil?... no. But not only is it terrible business practice, it is exactly what fosters the reputation GG is starting to get all over the web. I am not saying GG should be telling it's customers everything; that would be stupid. But we are not here buying groceries to be dismissed after the transaction either lol. GG had/has a vision of building a good engine. We bought into that vision along the way, which benefits ourselves, as well as GG. We are talking about the difference of being partners along the way, or GG see's us as nothing more than a perspective sale.

#58 That is exactly my point there seems to be a focus on only getting new business by any means possible. while existing customers needs are almost completly ignored.

#59 @ stefan

Quote:May I ask what in particular you find missing?

uhh how about no freaking shadows on the atlas terrain for interiors or statics. I would say that is a pretty damn big issue!

I'm not sure what vesion atlas 2 came into the mix. I think ms4 but it may have been sooner but that mean that for at least 4 releases now this issue has just been danced around like it doesn't exist. Anyone care to count how many people have been hired and how many new projects have been started since?.....

Some thing this big should have at least 1-2 people putting in 40 hour weeks at until it is fixed. There is no excuse for something like this.

@ Jonathon Stevens:
first off, Yeah GG does charge for upgrades I had to pay for 1.5
second off if I personly came accross a bug in a MS product that kept me from being able to use it for my needs yes I would. But personally I have never come across a serious bug. Not that they are not there but for the most part the are only found by people that are anti MS that are diggin for them. I leave windows update and and most are patched when I didn't even know that they existed.

and yeah if TGEA 2 came out I would consider paying for it. under 2 conditions First: TGEA would have to finished and feature complete having everything that was paid for. I'm thow more money down the hole. Second: TGEA 2 would have to already be at 1.0 and feature complete and have a significat increase in either performance or features. If those conditions were met sure I would pay for TGEA 2 crap I would be willing to pay more than what I'm paying now if it worked as advertised. If everything worked right I would easily pay double.

#60 That's not even funny.