So far so good... or not?
by Andrea Barolo · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 06/23/2008 (11:40 am) · 2 replies
Dear community and most of all dear developers, after all this time TGEA has been updated in a way that it (quite) works, but there are still some structural concept at the base that keeps the engine from becoming the BEST engine out there.
The reason of why I'm writing this post is this: My team is working on a big game project using TGE/TGEA since 2 yeras now. WE have the management part almost completed and had (almost) no problems in this area: everything is 2d. Now we have come to point where we start to rely on the 3d engine and here the problems arise: In our oroject (it's not a MMORPG) we need the engine to visualize on screen villages and cities of various dimensions in different times of the day.
The problems inside torque technology I'm now facing to obtain this game world are two: Precalculated light: I've tried in the mission editor to construct a village of about 20 houses (difs). But before the mission starts the time to calculate the lightmap is horribly long (ten minutes on a Core 2 duo e6700). So a realtime solution it's not feasible because we would not have lightmaps. If we split the game in auto-generated missions the time to calculate lighting would be too long for the player to wait.
The other problem is we have really not big world, atlas got no lightmap so it's not a soultion, and legacy terrain is small (also megaterrain is not so big).
The last thing should be overcome is volume culling. If I make a city and in the editor activate the wireframe rendering for interiors i see that occluded houses are rendered also if they are not visible.
(UE3 uses a smart trick for this, don't know if it would be easy to add).
After all this moaning... I don't want to change engine, I think that GG made a big work on what's inside the engine now, the only problem is that it's not production ready for every kind of game.
What I think you GG boys should do is to trace a roadmap for anyone to see. I hate to be here waiting hoping that in the next release my problem will be fixed. Trace a roadmap, a bullet list of the feature you are working on and that are planned in order of importance (for you) so we can decide if it's better for us to stick with TGEA or not. I think you are great persons and I really don't want to believe in what people says about you (the fact that you don't say anything to not lose customers). But please give us a sign. (sorry for bad english)
The reason of why I'm writing this post is this: My team is working on a big game project using TGE/TGEA since 2 yeras now. WE have the management part almost completed and had (almost) no problems in this area: everything is 2d. Now we have come to point where we start to rely on the 3d engine and here the problems arise: In our oroject (it's not a MMORPG) we need the engine to visualize on screen villages and cities of various dimensions in different times of the day.
The problems inside torque technology I'm now facing to obtain this game world are two: Precalculated light: I've tried in the mission editor to construct a village of about 20 houses (difs). But before the mission starts the time to calculate the lightmap is horribly long (ten minutes on a Core 2 duo e6700). So a realtime solution it's not feasible because we would not have lightmaps. If we split the game in auto-generated missions the time to calculate lighting would be too long for the player to wait.
The other problem is we have really not big world, atlas got no lightmap so it's not a soultion, and legacy terrain is small (also megaterrain is not so big).
The last thing should be overcome is volume culling. If I make a city and in the editor activate the wireframe rendering for interiors i see that occluded houses are rendered also if they are not visible.
(UE3 uses a smart trick for this, don't know if it would be easy to add).
After all this moaning... I don't want to change engine, I think that GG made a big work on what's inside the engine now, the only problem is that it's not production ready for every kind of game.
What I think you GG boys should do is to trace a roadmap for anyone to see. I hate to be here waiting hoping that in the next release my problem will be fixed. Trace a roadmap, a bullet list of the feature you are working on and that are planned in order of importance (for you) so we can decide if it's better for us to stick with TGEA or not. I think you are great persons and I really don't want to believe in what people says about you (the fact that you don't say anything to not lose customers). But please give us a sign. (sorry for bad english)
About the author
#2
Have you got some suggestion?
Matt Firefax said that lightmaps doesn't work on atlas and it's not a point in GG high priority list. So who do I have to believe to?
Another question. For what I know, atlas terrains have to be edited on an external editor. This is not very practical, since I don't have a real control on how the final locations would be like with other assets. How do you would solve these problems?
I really think that the editor is one of the most important part of a game engine: if you don't have direct visual control on what you are doing, the results will be not visually appealing.
As a suggestion for developers I would like to suggest them to watch the videos on Hero Engine's site. Torque editor would be awesome with a little bit more features, and I don't think is sooo distant from hero engine's editor. But could be that I'm wrong.
06/24/2008 (1:59 am)
I would like to discuss this point more deeply. I don't think I can make a whole city dynamically lighted, the processing power needed would be too much. What do other engines do to achieve realtime Day/Night cycles?Have you got some suggestion?
Matt Firefax said that lightmaps doesn't work on atlas and it's not a point in GG high priority list. So who do I have to believe to?
Another question. For what I know, atlas terrains have to be edited on an external editor. This is not very practical, since I don't have a real control on how the final locations would be like with other assets. How do you would solve these problems?
I really think that the editor is one of the most important part of a game engine: if you don't have direct visual control on what you are doing, the results will be not visually appealing.
As a suggestion for developers I would like to suggest them to watch the videos on Hero Engine's site. Torque editor would be awesome with a little bit more features, and I don't think is sooo distant from hero engine's editor. But could be that I'm wrong.
Torque 3D Owner Mark Dynna
At that point you could switch to Atlas (which actually does accept a light map if you create it using the Blended method, by the way) for your terrain needs and possible solve your size problem.