Rumors about TGEA and v1.2

#1 I doubt that's the case. It's probably just something filling the black void of information coming from GG, resulting from their inability to deliver on promises in the past. In fact recently a GG employee did say that TGEA 1.2 is in QA.

With it having taken so long maybe we'll see some of this 'great things are in the pipe we can't talk about' stuff that keeps being mentioned.

#2 We'll see what there is to see when we see it. Anything else is asking for stress.

#3 As the Director of Engine development here at GarageGames (since aournd April or so) let me put the rumors to rest. Engine development proceeds. TGEA 1.02 is, in fact, in qa. It's a bit held up because of new TGB and TorqueX releases (and was held up by TGE 1.5.2). It isn't a huge feature release. It fixes a few bugs and adds constructor support. We don't have an exact release date on it.

In the meantime we are working to improve all our engine products over the coming year. That includes TGE, TGB, TGEA, and TorqueX.

#4 Ya right, Legends died, I'm sure... ;)

#5 @Clark - Thanks for the reply. It's good to know that this was once again, another "rumor".

#6 @Chris - LEGIONS? LOL!

#7 @Clark,
Will there be any correction to the worrying cpu problems with dual core processor support?
half my cpu is flatline at the top,the other at the bottom.

#8 @Jojimbo

The duel-core processor support is something that would be beyond the reach of any update plans; it simply would cause too much architectural changes to be made easily. Most of the processing of torque is done in a single thread, with separate threads for things like Atlas.

It would be best to think about using the other core (more threads) for add on code that you develop - such as an AI system, where computationally heavy things can be done separately, not impeding the main processing of the engine. Turn that frown, upside down!

#9 That still doesn't mean they're NOT working on Legions... :)

#10 But Gavin,all I have is Legacy map,a few trees,one character and a bit of water,and the cpu is FLATLINE with no wavy lines etc on one side,just flatout.What can I do to lessen the load,any practical suggestions?
I'll get my atlas terrain in and see what happens,Adolf Maniac made a post about this,I knew TGEA was heaving,but when I opened my task manager I thought "wow" that's not right.

#11 Take a look at this www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=61926 experiments in parallel processing; including my notes from porting it to TGEA...

#12 @Andy: Legions MY BAD LOL totally different game.

#13

Quote:
But Gavin,all I have is Legacy map,a few trees,one character and a bit of water,and the cpu is FLATLINE with no wavy lines etc on one side,just flatout.What can I do to lessen the load,any practical suggestions?
I'll get my atlas terrain in and see what happens,Adolf Maniac made a post about this,I knew TGEA was heaving,but when I opened my task manager I thought "wow" that's not right.

Why isn't it right?

Most gamers play with full screen, meaning it's their primary app.
Most gamers want the best performance they can possibly have.
Stock Torque (and many games in general) use as much cpu as they can when they are in focus to drive both processing and rendering as fast as they can go within engine constraints (physics ticks won't be called faster than the tick rate/millisecond, but Torque will happily kick out as much virtual frame rate as your cpu and gpu can handle.

#14 Stephen, I think he means that 1 of his 2 CPU's isn't being used at all. At least, that's what I thought?

#15 It could be--but that was addressed, and his follow-up suggested he thought it shouldn't be using 100%.

What I was trying to point out is not that it is requiring 100% of a powerful machine, it's simply using whatever is available to it.

#16 @Stephen - but it's not using whatever is available. For example, if I load TGE on my Dual Core and view the properties under "Performance", one Core is pinging at 100%, the other is a flat-line at 0%.

I also have a server that runs TGE, which I one day hope TGE will support and use "whatever" is truly available. Again, one CPU is pinging at 100% which activity, the other CPU in the properties window is idling flat.

That is a "huge" resource not to use. I guess the bottom line is, TGE is a very old engine that isn't up with the times or with today's standard. Most computers today are Dual Core.

HOWEVER, under TGEA, my server is using both CPUs in that one isn't pinging at 100% and the other isn't flat-lined. Both are being used (not dual-core, but 2 CPUs). So, something must've been done between the TGE and TGEA versions to make this possible.

#17 Both TGE and TGEA use this call to set the process affinity (disabling multicore/HT):

SetProcessAffinityMask( GetCurrentProcess(), 1 );

#18 @Andy: there are a lot of misunderstandings in your post, so please don't take this the wrong way, but I'll try to correct them in turn:

Quote:
@Stephen - but it's not using whatever is available. For example, if I load TGE on my Dual Core and view the properties under "Performance", one Core is pinging at 100%, the other is a flat-line at 0%.

That's the nature of how threaded processes work in many/most processing systems. One CPU per thread.

Quote:
I also have a server that runs TGE, which I one day hope TGE will support and use "whatever" is truly available. Again, one CPU is pinging at 100% which activity, the other CPU in the properties window is idling flat.

TGE is, by intent, designed to work on as many systems as possible, to allow your games to be able to reach the widest audience possible. For example, TGE 1.5.2 can work on computers made 8+ years ago with video cards made 5+ years ago, which is actually an extremely signifigant portion of the total market for both indies and commercial studios.

The resource development cost vs value to the intended end market is not nearly worth the development time to re-engineer TGE to be multi-threaded in any major way. John Carmack wrote a white paper on the net advantages vs problems of multi-threading game engines a while back, and it's extremely informative, especially since his conclusions are that for the most part, it's really not all that worth it.

Quote:
That is a "huge" resource not to use. I guess the bottom line is, TGE is a very old engine that isn't up with the times or with today's standard. Most computers today are Dual Core.

No offense intended, but there is a very incorrect assumption here on your part. "Most computers today are Dual Core" should be stated as "Most Computers being sold today are dual core".

Since the purpose of TGE is to provide an engine that can successfully reach computers made 5 years ago, the ratio of existing computers in homes vs computers being purchased is signifigantly in favor of those already purchased.

Quote:
HOWEVER, under TGEA, my server is using both CPUs in that one isn't pinging at 100% and the other isn't flat-lined. Both are being used (not dual-core, but 2 CPUs). So, something must've been done between the TGE and TGEA versions to make this possible.

Absolutely. TGE-A is the engine targetted at those developers willing to sacrifice backwards hardware compatibility for new hardware optimization. TGE-A also requires shader capable video cards, a more efficient/faster set of memory (lots more data in general requires better paths to move the data), and in general is a product that is designed for modern hardware, but sacrifices backwards compatibility.

Since the differences between the two engines are intentional product decisions, there is little to no reason for us as an engine provider to back port features to TGE from TGE-A that limit TGE's capability to work on older hardware.

I would turn this around: if you want to use modern hardware and architecture, then you should be using TGE-A, not TGE. Otherwise, if you feel as if you want to remove the ability for your game/project to run on older hardware, you can do things like use the TGE "Modernization Kit", or learn multi-threading concepts and theory and use the underlying thread-safe class objects to implement systems that benefit from additional cores.

#19 @Stephen - thanks for your post. I think the misunderstanding in my post is basically server vs. client. You noted John Carmack's whitepaper, I'll have to look that up. But realistically, I wasn't talking about client-based apps as I'm pretty sure that's what he meant. I'm talking server.

TGE-A seems to handle the load evenly with balance. Even if I wanted to run TGE as a server 5 years ago, I would still want it to use both CPUs, and not just one. That's the point I am making. Dual CPUs have been around a lot longer than 5 years.

#20 @Andy - actually, you wouldn't want a server to use both cpu's. A single game server doesn't peg a single cpu, so no point trying to multi-thread that. Instead, you want to have 10-20 game servers on a multi-cpu system. That will peg both cpu's just like you'd expect.