Mod Team .. looking to transition to TGEA .. should we seek psychiatric help instead?
by Eamonn Glass · in General Discussion · 02/14/2009 (9:48 pm) · 15 replies
Hi Folks,
I've been one of the leads for a BF2 mod called Project Reality. For a couple of years now we've been very succesful on the BF2 platform and have done extensive modificaitons to the way BF2 was designed to achieve our evolving game design goals. We've developed a large community (we have 26,000 registered community members, a good portion of them active and we estimate that the active player base is about 40,000 unique regular players). We've won a few awards and this year might have a shot at winning the ModDB Mod of the Year competition which would reward us with a TGEA license.
For more info on Project Reality you can visit the website at realitymod.com
We have some very talented folks on the team. The team is distributed throughout the world and numbers about 50 in size, though the core team is about 8 to 12 people. The project has evolved (intentionally) to now be in a state where community members are creating content. We just released our first community faction and I'd say we'll see 3 to 4 more released with the mod in the next 6 to 9 months. Keep in mind these community factions are a huge undertaking.. it's an amazing thing to see them come together. There is a huge amount of content in the mod... after a recent optomisation and clean up the mod sits at about 3.5 gigabytes of content (which sits on top of the ~ 1.5gb of BF2 content). We have access to re-use most of the content and have source files for it as well.
For the past couple of years we've been evaluating engines and platforms to either make a full blown indie game or transition the mod to another platform. It's not just a co-incidence that the TGEA prize is very meaningful to us .. the engine seems like a very good fit for our goals and we've been keeping an eye on progress.
A wee bit about me.. I've been gaming since the days of the Coleco Vision consoles - we had the first one on the block! I'm 41 years old and have had a (mostly) succesful career in the software industry for over 15 years. I am a self employed consultant and I currently manage a health care software project with a budget of about $16 million dollars for the initial application development (over the 10 year life of the contract the project has a value of nearly $100 million).
I'm seeking some advice from folks here....
The scope of what we want to create as an Indie game is very large. We'd like to create something that was part BF2, part ArmA, and mostly Project Reality. We'd like to evolve a psuedo persistent model, creating a sort of "instanced on demand virtual battlefield". We'd also layer a persistent character model into that. We'd like the visuals to be AAA quality and ultimately - over time - would be looking to lack nothing in terms of features and capabilities over AAA titles.
We wouldn't try and achieve that for a first release. I'm talking about a comprehensive design vision that we work towards over a period of years, starting with a complete design and evolving it as we go. However we'd certainly look to release something early and build on that.
As for economic models... I don't think a project of this scope has any chance of being commercially viable. The size of the team required is simply too large when stacked up agaisnt the size of the market. Even if all 40,000 current players bought the game at $20 we'd still only see a gross of $800,000. So I view this more as a means of a hobby that might pay some money and, for some folks, it might be the same thing or might be a nice piece to have in their portfolio.
The biggest issue I think we'll encounter is programmer resources. We'd need to find C++ guys who are in the same mindset .. but those might be hard to come by. We do have a couple of programmers now, but I think we'd ultimately need 3 or 4 to achieve our goals in a reasonable tiem frame.
I guess I'm asking for opinions from the more experienced folks here...
.. is this feasible?
.. is it feasible on T3D?
.. any sage advice?
Thanks for reading.
Eamonn aka eggman
I've been one of the leads for a BF2 mod called Project Reality. For a couple of years now we've been very succesful on the BF2 platform and have done extensive modificaitons to the way BF2 was designed to achieve our evolving game design goals. We've developed a large community (we have 26,000 registered community members, a good portion of them active and we estimate that the active player base is about 40,000 unique regular players). We've won a few awards and this year might have a shot at winning the ModDB Mod of the Year competition which would reward us with a TGEA license.
For more info on Project Reality you can visit the website at realitymod.com
We have some very talented folks on the team. The team is distributed throughout the world and numbers about 50 in size, though the core team is about 8 to 12 people. The project has evolved (intentionally) to now be in a state where community members are creating content. We just released our first community faction and I'd say we'll see 3 to 4 more released with the mod in the next 6 to 9 months. Keep in mind these community factions are a huge undertaking.. it's an amazing thing to see them come together. There is a huge amount of content in the mod... after a recent optomisation and clean up the mod sits at about 3.5 gigabytes of content (which sits on top of the ~ 1.5gb of BF2 content). We have access to re-use most of the content and have source files for it as well.
For the past couple of years we've been evaluating engines and platforms to either make a full blown indie game or transition the mod to another platform. It's not just a co-incidence that the TGEA prize is very meaningful to us .. the engine seems like a very good fit for our goals and we've been keeping an eye on progress.
A wee bit about me.. I've been gaming since the days of the Coleco Vision consoles - we had the first one on the block! I'm 41 years old and have had a (mostly) succesful career in the software industry for over 15 years. I am a self employed consultant and I currently manage a health care software project with a budget of about $16 million dollars for the initial application development (over the 10 year life of the contract the project has a value of nearly $100 million).
I'm seeking some advice from folks here....
The scope of what we want to create as an Indie game is very large. We'd like to create something that was part BF2, part ArmA, and mostly Project Reality. We'd like to evolve a psuedo persistent model, creating a sort of "instanced on demand virtual battlefield". We'd also layer a persistent character model into that. We'd like the visuals to be AAA quality and ultimately - over time - would be looking to lack nothing in terms of features and capabilities over AAA titles.
We wouldn't try and achieve that for a first release. I'm talking about a comprehensive design vision that we work towards over a period of years, starting with a complete design and evolving it as we go. However we'd certainly look to release something early and build on that.
As for economic models... I don't think a project of this scope has any chance of being commercially viable. The size of the team required is simply too large when stacked up agaisnt the size of the market. Even if all 40,000 current players bought the game at $20 we'd still only see a gross of $800,000. So I view this more as a means of a hobby that might pay some money and, for some folks, it might be the same thing or might be a nice piece to have in their portfolio.
The biggest issue I think we'll encounter is programmer resources. We'd need to find C++ guys who are in the same mindset .. but those might be hard to come by. We do have a couple of programmers now, but I think we'd ultimately need 3 or 4 to achieve our goals in a reasonable tiem frame.
I guess I'm asking for opinions from the more experienced folks here...
.. is this feasible?
.. is it feasible on T3D?
.. any sage advice?
Thanks for reading.
Eamonn aka eggman
About the author
#2
02/14/2009 (11:44 pm)
Eamonn, this is definitely the place to ask this question. I'm excited to see what comes out of the ModDB competition and wish you guys the best of luck. As for moving to TGEA, I think this would be a very smart move for your team if you have AAA performance ambitions. You'll certainly want to bring a good coder on board at some point. Perhaps more than one, but you guys should be able to get quite a ways on your own and with the help of this community and the community resources. Feel free to email me directly if you have any questions that don't get answered here. 
#3
02/15/2009 (1:41 am)
Torque in one of it's guises (TGEA or Torque 3D when it's released) are sure going to be one of your best bets for creating this, as Brett mentions getting coders on board early is the main thing - it takes a while to learn the in's & out's of the engine so the sooner they can start delving under the hood the faster they'll hit the ground running.
#4
I've looked at my post and it's obnoxiously long, but I don't know how I can reduce it and still ask the question - in context - without it being another "Making an MMO to kill WoW" post.
An obvious concern is that we're a mod team, not an indie studio. I am not too worried about that, I believe we can manage through that. I really do believe there are folks who are C++ programmers who are passionate tactical gamers who would contribute, even knowing the economic model. Might not be easy to find, but we had the same challenges finding other skill sets.
The bigger concern is that what we're proposing is a very ambitous project for any studio on any engine....
- 130+ players concurrently
- 8km x 8km maps
- 1500m view range
- foliage drawn to 1500m
- realistic ballistics
- etc...
==
We're thinking that we'll do an initial test of the TGEA 1.8.1 engine. The test would be a network load test where we distribute something like the Stronghold demo and a couple of missions and see if we can load up a server with 100 to 150 people and assess performance / lag / capacity.
The mission would be a large map (say 8km x 8km) with 1500m view distance. We'll have a couple of smaller ones as well to check out issues. The main concern for us is that we feel the project will not be worth the effort if we can't get 130+ players into the mission at the same time (and still have good visuals and performance). This is one of the reasons Torque is appealing is the underlying netcode is said to be excellent.
==
@Brett: not sure how to email you, I'll see where this thread goes.
02/15/2009 (9:58 am)
I understand T3D is not available, but the timlines we're looking at would mean we'd prototype on TGEA and migrate to T3D when available.I've looked at my post and it's obnoxiously long, but I don't know how I can reduce it and still ask the question - in context - without it being another "Making an MMO to kill WoW" post.
An obvious concern is that we're a mod team, not an indie studio. I am not too worried about that, I believe we can manage through that. I really do believe there are folks who are C++ programmers who are passionate tactical gamers who would contribute, even knowing the economic model. Might not be easy to find, but we had the same challenges finding other skill sets.
The bigger concern is that what we're proposing is a very ambitous project for any studio on any engine....
- 130+ players concurrently
- 8km x 8km maps
- 1500m view range
- foliage drawn to 1500m
- realistic ballistics
- etc...
==
We're thinking that we'll do an initial test of the TGEA 1.8.1 engine. The test would be a network load test where we distribute something like the Stronghold demo and a couple of missions and see if we can load up a server with 100 to 150 people and assess performance / lag / capacity.
The mission would be a large map (say 8km x 8km) with 1500m view distance. We'll have a couple of smaller ones as well to check out issues. The main concern for us is that we feel the project will not be worth the effort if we can't get 130+ players into the mission at the same time (and still have good visuals and performance). This is one of the reasons Torque is appealing is the underlying netcode is said to be excellent.
==
@Brett: not sure how to email you, I'll see where this thread goes.
#5
As for getting 130+ players into a mission, you may need to do some optimisations, but give it a try first and see. 1.8.1 is awesome in it's performance.
Your porting series would be great as well. tge -> tgea -> t3d would work well as most of your code would work with quite a bit fewer new changes being made.
The docs that come with tgea 1.8.1 are great. The porting guide is really good too, but there are a few "gotcha's" that it has missed. From the porting I've done from tge to tgea, the gotcha's will get you, but the help here is awesome. I would say go for it. It will be well worth your effort.
To email Brett, just click his name above. His email addy is in his profile.
Edit to add: psychiatric help may help as well.
02/15/2009 (10:34 am)
What you are looking to do with tgea 1.8.1 is a good thing. There are a ton of code changes you'll need to make with respect to the rendering side, but you should be ok there. Your initial post is fine. It's an interesting read and explains exactly what you are looking to do. I wouldn't worry about the length.As for getting 130+ players into a mission, you may need to do some optimisations, but give it a try first and see. 1.8.1 is awesome in it's performance.
Your porting series would be great as well. tge -> tgea -> t3d would work well as most of your code would work with quite a bit fewer new changes being made.
The docs that come with tgea 1.8.1 are great. The porting guide is really good too, but there are a few "gotcha's" that it has missed. From the porting I've done from tge to tgea, the gotcha's will get you, but the help here is awesome. I would say go for it. It will be well worth your effort.
To email Brett, just click his name above. His email addy is in his profile.
Edit to add: psychiatric help may help as well.
#6
I'm not sure if Torque has any built in limits on connections per server, and if it does, than I know they can be removed. I know you can run a server well with with 64 players on a Torque map, I haven't seen many tests to judge over that though, sorry. There were a some MMO's (at least 1) made with Torque, however, though most, if not all had significant changes to the engine's networking (which is obvious with an MMO using an fps engine).
Performance:
With good LOD this shouldn't be much of a problem, just don't expect them to all be within 6 feet of one player, running their max-detail and shooting at him :P
Definitely possible in TGEA, but do you think this is possible with players? I mean foliage extending past 100 feet lagged me in TES: Oblivion (I was running on a slightly dated comp, but still...). Unless by foliage you don't mean the types of small rocks, blades of grass, etc... Torque can supply with an fxFoliageReplicator, but larger objects, such as boulders, trees, etc... Than yes, I can say that is also possible right out of the box with an fxShapeReplicator. In fact, check out this video tutorial to see how easily it can be done.
Hope this answers some questions, as well as raising a few more maybe?
02/15/2009 (10:40 am)
Eamonn, you certainly sound like you know what you're talking about when it comes to this. And it seems like you have good experience in game development, so I doubt you're a newcomer who is highly over-estimating their abilities to design games. I'd say if you think your team can pull this off, than you will be able to. Some answers to your questions:- 130+ players concurrently
Networking:I'm not sure if Torque has any built in limits on connections per server, and if it does, than I know they can be removed. I know you can run a server well with with 64 players on a Torque map, I haven't seen many tests to judge over that though, sorry. There were a some MMO's (at least 1) made with Torque, however, though most, if not all had significant changes to the engine's networking (which is obvious with an MMO using an fps engine).
Performance:
With good LOD this shouldn't be much of a problem, just don't expect them to all be within 6 feet of one player, running their max-detail and shooting at him :P
- 8km x 8km maps
You would likely need Atlas terrains with this and not a different one of Torque's terrain features. But I can say with Atlas you could do this. You could only do 4km x 4km with MegaTerrains. MegaTerrains are a group of 4 terrainBlocks stitched together, each with a default size of 2km x 2km, that can than be shrunk or expanded with loss/gain of detail, in response to the map size change. So...technically you could get that much out of a megaTerrain, but at that point, terrain textures and triangles grow and stretch to a point of ugliness IMO.- 1500m view range
TGEA can support this easily, I'm not sure what the maximum view range is, if any, but I know that if TGE 1.5.2 (the much older version of the engine) supported over 2km, than TGEA can push far more than 1500m.- foliage drawn to 1500m
Definitely possible in TGEA, but do you think this is possible with players? I mean foliage extending past 100 feet lagged me in TES: Oblivion (I was running on a slightly dated comp, but still...). Unless by foliage you don't mean the types of small rocks, blades of grass, etc... Torque can supply with an fxFoliageReplicator, but larger objects, such as boulders, trees, etc... Than yes, I can say that is also possible right out of the box with an fxShapeReplicator. In fact, check out this video tutorial to see how easily it can be done.
- realistic ballistics
Supported out of the box with Torque as well. That's actually one of my favorite things about the engine, that unlike other engines, projectiles are simulated server side as objects themselves, and not simple rayCast's, with a client-side effect to make it look like a bullet.Hope this answers some questions, as well as raising a few more maybe?
Quote: as Brett mentions getting coders on board early is the main thing - it takes a while to learn the in's & out's of the engineI agree with Andy Rollins on this, it will take a bit of time for a coder to fully understand how Torque works internally.
#7
As for everything else you describe overall, it sounds sort of how CoD4 is set up for networking: On-Demand maps played by persisted characters. I think it's a great idea. Maybe if you scale the graphics level back a bit from AAA you can make it more economically viable while still looking good (it's a balancing act). I think from your writing you've got a really good grasp on this and have an excellent chance of pulling it off.
02/15/2009 (11:18 am)
I think the biggest problem to knock down is the AAA graphics. The 130 concurrent players is next up, and can probably be solved with a good server and some network tweaking, but that's just my own 2 cents.As for everything else you describe overall, it sounds sort of how CoD4 is set up for networking: On-Demand maps played by persisted characters. I think it's a great idea. Maybe if you scale the graphics level back a bit from AAA you can make it more economically viable while still looking good (it's a balancing act). I think from your writing you've got a really good grasp on this and have an excellent chance of pulling it off.
#8
wrt the technical issues.. for our team simply re-creating what we can do today is not enough. We want to see 130+ players because in order to use modern weapon systems you need a large map size. In order to keep things "exciting" on large map sizes our experience has shown that 64 players is not enough.
We were able to extend (aka hack) the BF2 engine to support 4km x 4km maps. But we are limited to 64 players and can't work around that. The design of our game play modes focuses players, we only typically have 2 concurrent objectives at once. But in a combined arms simulation environment when you have that large a map size, it starts to feel a bit empty and as a result unreaslistic when each team only has 32 players.
wrt Terrains and such in TGEA/T3D... I was really enthused to read about Atlas. But quite concerned to see it being removed for T3D. While I know there were some design & tool limitations with Atlas, the technical capabilities sounded very exciting. We wouldn't use any Atlas stuff for proof of concept testing because it is being deprecated. It sounds like with TGEA we are limited to 4km x 4km map sizes before fidelity starts to drop off unacceptably. This is where I want to understand the T3D directions for large terrains because we definitely want to see larger maps than that. Using modern ground attack aircraft in a "psuedo realistic" context (which we'd eventually plan to incorporate) requires more than 16 sq km of terrain, ideally 64 or even 128 sq km maps would be a possibility.
wrt foliage rendering ranges.. this is fairly critical for us. And it's a tough nut to crack! A major problem is that I might be hiding in tall grass 800m from you. Most engines will draw that grass to something like 100m around ME. However, you look through your binoculars from 800m away and you see me crawling through a field with no grass rendered. This obviously creates a really bad problem from a tactical gameplay perspective. We've figured out some ways to work around that with the BF2 engine, but that took 4 years to figure out (and it's still experimental). We'd want to understand solutions to that problem at the technical design stage of a game project.
wrt AAA visuals... well... it seems to me that over the next couple of years we're going to see some tremendous advances in game graphics - as has been the case over the past couple of years. My general impression of the Torque stuff is that *technically* it has a lot of capability to *theoretically* look outstanding. But to get there will require a lot of fantastic work by artists and (for performance perspectives) ensure we use the LoD system to our best advantage.
When I look at ArmA 2 and OFP 2, etc... the visuals in the trailers are pretty outstanding. It'll be interesting to see what they actually end up looking like upon release. When I look at a lot of the TGE/A stuff, some of the 1st person stuff - be it MMO or FPS - seems very dated visually. The demo that comes with TGEA doesn't really inspire a lot of oohs and aaahs. Gears of Torque looked cool, but then why is that not part of the TGEA demo? I realize that the price of the Torque products needs to be considered when making comparisons to game titles that have $15 - 25 million invested in them, but I see the "AAA" definition of capabilities tossed around a lot with the Torque products (and other engines) but I'm not actually seeing any first person shooter titles shipping on these engines that substantiate the claims and capabilities.
Looking at it from the game consumer perspective, if Call of Duty 4/5 and Operation Flashpoint 2 are AAA graphics, I think I could settle for AA if there was enough game play value to compensate and enough features differentiation to distract from the subtle differences from AAA visuals. This gets pretty subjective, but I don't want to produce a game that looks like butt in comparison to what people expect and then say "but we're indie devs, you should lower your expectations" .. I just don't like the sound of that and I don't want to make a game I wouldn't want to play myself.
wrt Programming resources... does it seem potentially realistic to find a C++ coder who would work on a project like this given the economic model (or lack thereof) that I've suggested would be realistic?
Thanks again!
Eamonn aka eggman
02/15/2009 (12:55 pm)
Thanks again for the replies, some really helpful information here.wrt the technical issues.. for our team simply re-creating what we can do today is not enough. We want to see 130+ players because in order to use modern weapon systems you need a large map size. In order to keep things "exciting" on large map sizes our experience has shown that 64 players is not enough.
We were able to extend (aka hack) the BF2 engine to support 4km x 4km maps. But we are limited to 64 players and can't work around that. The design of our game play modes focuses players, we only typically have 2 concurrent objectives at once. But in a combined arms simulation environment when you have that large a map size, it starts to feel a bit empty and as a result unreaslistic when each team only has 32 players.
wrt Terrains and such in TGEA/T3D... I was really enthused to read about Atlas. But quite concerned to see it being removed for T3D. While I know there were some design & tool limitations with Atlas, the technical capabilities sounded very exciting. We wouldn't use any Atlas stuff for proof of concept testing because it is being deprecated. It sounds like with TGEA we are limited to 4km x 4km map sizes before fidelity starts to drop off unacceptably. This is where I want to understand the T3D directions for large terrains because we definitely want to see larger maps than that. Using modern ground attack aircraft in a "psuedo realistic" context (which we'd eventually plan to incorporate) requires more than 16 sq km of terrain, ideally 64 or even 128 sq km maps would be a possibility.
wrt foliage rendering ranges.. this is fairly critical for us. And it's a tough nut to crack! A major problem is that I might be hiding in tall grass 800m from you. Most engines will draw that grass to something like 100m around ME. However, you look through your binoculars from 800m away and you see me crawling through a field with no grass rendered. This obviously creates a really bad problem from a tactical gameplay perspective. We've figured out some ways to work around that with the BF2 engine, but that took 4 years to figure out (and it's still experimental). We'd want to understand solutions to that problem at the technical design stage of a game project.
wrt AAA visuals... well... it seems to me that over the next couple of years we're going to see some tremendous advances in game graphics - as has been the case over the past couple of years. My general impression of the Torque stuff is that *technically* it has a lot of capability to *theoretically* look outstanding. But to get there will require a lot of fantastic work by artists and (for performance perspectives) ensure we use the LoD system to our best advantage.
When I look at ArmA 2 and OFP 2, etc... the visuals in the trailers are pretty outstanding. It'll be interesting to see what they actually end up looking like upon release. When I look at a lot of the TGE/A stuff, some of the 1st person stuff - be it MMO or FPS - seems very dated visually. The demo that comes with TGEA doesn't really inspire a lot of oohs and aaahs. Gears of Torque looked cool, but then why is that not part of the TGEA demo? I realize that the price of the Torque products needs to be considered when making comparisons to game titles that have $15 - 25 million invested in them, but I see the "AAA" definition of capabilities tossed around a lot with the Torque products (and other engines) but I'm not actually seeing any first person shooter titles shipping on these engines that substantiate the claims and capabilities.
Looking at it from the game consumer perspective, if Call of Duty 4/5 and Operation Flashpoint 2 are AAA graphics, I think I could settle for AA if there was enough game play value to compensate and enough features differentiation to distract from the subtle differences from AAA visuals. This gets pretty subjective, but I don't want to produce a game that looks like butt in comparison to what people expect and then say "but we're indie devs, you should lower your expectations" .. I just don't like the sound of that and I don't want to make a game I wouldn't want to play myself.
wrt Programming resources... does it seem potentially realistic to find a C++ coder who would work on a project like this given the economic model (or lack thereof) that I've suggested would be realistic?
Thanks again!
Eamonn aka eggman
#9
Good Luck.
[written as the prev. post was made..so this may seem out of place]
02/15/2009 (1:03 pm)
Reactor engine to torque ? Quote:We'd also layer a persistent character model into that. We'd like the visuals to be AAA quality and ultimately - over time - would be looking to lack nothing in terms of features and capabilities over AAA titles.I hope you have alot of blood, sweat and tears to spare.
Good Luck.
[written as the prev. post was made..so this may seem out of place]
#10
I am not sure I understand the utility of your post. The "reactor engine to torque ?" comment... what is your question?
The Refractor engine used to power the Battlefield franchise from BF42 to BF2142 is now end of life. DICE has replaced it with their Frostbite engine. It was an outstanding engine, but is now almost 10 years old. I've never seen the source of that engine, but architecturally it seems very similar to the Torque stuff (probably because the original designs were from the same era and aimed at similar game play concepts).
The Dunia, Frostbite, Cryengine and similar technologies available today are not feasible for indie developers to consider. So I am wondering if it's feasible to consider achieving similar visial standards on something like T3D.
The "blood, sweat and tears" comment .. er I can't understand if you are being facetious. We've spent literally tens of thousands of man hours - for free - to create Project Reality on BF2. Most of our work is on par or of higher quality than the original assets incuded with the game. A big part of that is because we are NOT a commercially viable entity where there's a budget of man hours against assets.. we work until we think the asset / feature meets our standards. And most of the team members we have today are aligned with that mind set.
Again this venture would not be about quitting day jobs.. I'd pursuse something along the lines of World of Goo if I wanted to make a commercially viable game project (assuming I had the brilliance of those guys). This is about a "dream game" kinda thing, looking to be built by like minded people for collectively similar reasons and motivations; the least of which can be money because I just don't think it can ever be anything more than a passion / hobby that has some potential for augmenting existing incomes, not replacing them.
Eamonn aka eggman
02/15/2009 (1:23 pm)
@eb,I am not sure I understand the utility of your post. The "reactor engine to torque ?" comment... what is your question?
The Refractor engine used to power the Battlefield franchise from BF42 to BF2142 is now end of life. DICE has replaced it with their Frostbite engine. It was an outstanding engine, but is now almost 10 years old. I've never seen the source of that engine, but architecturally it seems very similar to the Torque stuff (probably because the original designs were from the same era and aimed at similar game play concepts).
The Dunia, Frostbite, Cryengine and similar technologies available today are not feasible for indie developers to consider. So I am wondering if it's feasible to consider achieving similar visial standards on something like T3D.
The "blood, sweat and tears" comment .. er I can't understand if you are being facetious. We've spent literally tens of thousands of man hours - for free - to create Project Reality on BF2. Most of our work is on par or of higher quality than the original assets incuded with the game. A big part of that is because we are NOT a commercially viable entity where there's a budget of man hours against assets.. we work until we think the asset / feature meets our standards. And most of the team members we have today are aligned with that mind set.
Again this venture would not be about quitting day jobs.. I'd pursuse something along the lines of World of Goo if I wanted to make a commercially viable game project (assuming I had the brilliance of those guys). This is about a "dream game" kinda thing, looking to be built by like minded people for collectively similar reasons and motivations; the least of which can be money because I just don't think it can ever be anything more than a passion / hobby that has some potential for augmenting existing incomes, not replacing them.
Eamonn aka eggman
#11
Your plan is a solid one. Torque has repeating terrain, so I'm sure there is a way to repeat the foliage replicators with a little code work. I would help you, but I have 400 errors to clean up porting Ben Garneys forest pack to tgea, so I'm a little busy there. (and I'm not that good at coding yet)
Don't give up. There is plenty of help here on the forum when you run into a problem.
02/15/2009 (2:27 pm)
Eamonn,Your plan is a solid one. Torque has repeating terrain, so I'm sure there is a way to repeat the foliage replicators with a little code work. I would help you, but I have 400 errors to clean up porting Ben Garneys forest pack to tgea, so I'm a little busy there. (and I'm not that good at coding yet)
Don't give up. There is plenty of help here on the forum when you run into a problem.
#12
(No sarcasm in either post)
P.S. if you contact GG about information, chat with a developer...you'll want a fellow developer, not the salesman.
02/15/2009 (2:40 pm)
I would be happy to continue this in ICQ after a few days. I am a bit overwhelmed with work to get into a detailed chat at this point.(No sarcasm in either post)
P.S. if you contact GG about information, chat with a developer...you'll want a fellow developer, not the salesman.
#13
02/15/2009 (6:36 pm)
@Eammon and Mike: A better solution than the BenG's Forest Kit is forthcoming. Hang on...you'll be happy :)
#15
@Brett: Are you referring to the Torque Forest Kit from Sickhead Games? Those guys have done some stunning work, so I am really looking forward to that. Or is there some other product or engine feature in development you are referring to?
Thanks to the folks who have chimed in with some very helpful information. I'm obviously hopeful that we do well in the ModDB contest because the list of prize would be an AMAZING bootstrap to our efforts:
* Torque Game Engine Advanced Indie Version (3D engine)
* Torque Game Builder Pro Indie Version (2D engine)
* Torsion (TorqueScript IDE)
* ShowTool Pro (3D visualization tool)
* Constructor (CSG editor)
* Plastic Tweaker (prototyping tool)
* SSAO Kit (ambient occlusion shaders)
* TGB Adventure Kit (2D adventure code/art)
* TGB Platformer Starter Kit (2D platformer code/art)
* AFX Combo Pack for TGEA (code/art/special effects)
I think it's really fantastic that Garage Games and the ModDB guys came up with this set of prizes... normally our team has not had a lot of interest in the cash prizes, but this year's prizes .. combined with our own internal desires to look at doing an Indie game .. we're super excited at the possibilities of wining.
Even if we don't win we'll still likely purchase TGEA and do some very basic validations of "out of the box" performance and functionality. Main thing is seeing if we can get a load test of 100+ players into a hosted TGEA server. But when you are self funded everything helps and the tols over and above the engine license make for an outstanding suite of game dev tools.
Eamonn aka eggman
02/16/2009 (10:30 am)
@eb: I would love to chat sometime. I don't want to eat up your valuable time, but I am willing to take any / all advice and input at this stage. I think I set my email to be publicly displayed so ping me if/when you have the time to chat.@Brett: Are you referring to the Torque Forest Kit from Sickhead Games? Those guys have done some stunning work, so I am really looking forward to that. Or is there some other product or engine feature in development you are referring to?
Thanks to the folks who have chimed in with some very helpful information. I'm obviously hopeful that we do well in the ModDB contest because the list of prize would be an AMAZING bootstrap to our efforts:
* Torque Game Engine Advanced Indie Version (3D engine)
* Torque Game Builder Pro Indie Version (2D engine)
* Torsion (TorqueScript IDE)
* ShowTool Pro (3D visualization tool)
* Constructor (CSG editor)
* Plastic Tweaker (prototyping tool)
* SSAO Kit (ambient occlusion shaders)
* TGB Adventure Kit (2D adventure code/art)
* TGB Platformer Starter Kit (2D platformer code/art)
* AFX Combo Pack for TGEA (code/art/special effects)
I think it's really fantastic that Garage Games and the ModDB guys came up with this set of prizes... normally our team has not had a lot of interest in the cash prizes, but this year's prizes .. combined with our own internal desires to look at doing an Indie game .. we're super excited at the possibilities of wining.
Even if we don't win we'll still likely purchase TGEA and do some very basic validations of "out of the box" performance and functionality. Main thing is seeing if we can get a load test of 100+ players into a hosted TGEA server. But when you are self funded everything helps and the tols over and above the engine license make for an outstanding suite of game dev tools.
Eamonn aka eggman
Torque Owner Shane09