Cryengine Next-Gen and Merging T2D and 3D

#21 such is the fate of all but a very few FOSS projects sadly :/

#22 I am sorry to break your funeral talk here but plenty of people are still making games with Torque 3D and lately a few have actually hit Steam and some are even selling pretty okay.

Oh and that DX 11 thread was last answered the 18th of May where Anis state that he and Luis is working on the project. Also Luis is pretty active in the GitHub Dev branch for Torque 3D MIT so I do not get where you get all this negative energy from. To me it seems that many people are working their **** off to improve the engine.

Last post for me in this thread :o)

#23 ...

...

Ok....

Um... That was straight forward. I don't think T3D will die now, or soon, or completely die off. I mean it won't be modern, and the faster technology takes off, the harder it will be for us to take off. Sure games will be made with it, but they won't be AAA games, and they won't look as modern.

They can look really damn good, but not quite modern.

#24 I think one big thing missing in all this "i want a CryEngine,UE4 killing free open source engine that runs on every single electronic device ever conceived" debate is the actual game play itself. I think people are too concerned about paper stats and d**k measuring "this engine has feature X and is therefore better". I have played plenty of the latest next-gen games and marvelled at their beauty only to be bored within a few hours of playing and never bother playing them again.

Sure we all want the latest and greatest but if people spent more time creating unique and fun to play games, customers will get past the graphics and play it and enjoy it.

#25 I agree with Timmy and Dwarf King. I personally believe that ease of use is the killer feature, not graphics. I have a theory that Unity beat everyone else by being easy to use. Once that happens, you start to get an ecosystem and community. And people will start making stuff for you - for example, PBR implementations are popping up for Unity. The Unity team didn't make it - it's just that someone wanted to implement it, and Unity was the engine of choice to do that in because of its popularity.

Also, take a look at the majority of games being created by coders. They don't have super-nice graphics, simply because those teams don't have the skills/time/effort to do that. But there are some very nice-looking games being made with Unity, because artist-led teams can actually pick the engine up and put their awesome art into it. We have a few of those virtuosus here in the T3D community, but comparatively few, because Torque has always been a coder's engine.

I've started to lose my point. Anyway. Recap. I think usability comes first, and if the engine is usable, then people will be attracted to it despite subpar graphics.

#26

#27 You both have a point, and in reality, that is the truth. But I find that so many people are attracted to games with better graphics. I don't know why, but games like Minecraft are just not played sometimes because of the graphics. Several of my friends don't play it because of graphics, and even PewDiePie doesn't because of the graphics.

There is way more work that should be put into the gameplay, but when AAA titles focus on graphics more people come to it, then find out that the game was bad.

If you don't know already, this is how I came to T3D:

I was brainwashed by all game creating newbs that UDK was the best choice for game-creation. I wanted to try out so I did. Long story short, I had health issues from stress because of UDK. That's right, health issues. I made destructible meshes but PhysX ran like s***, I wanted releastic oceans but there was no C++ code to work with. I asked on the forums and they basically said your screwed. The engine didn't allow ANYTHING, and the limitablity was horrific. Not to mention the lighting. Unreal Engine BAKES LIGHTING AND IT TAKES HOURS! The freaking system was so hard to use. I almost DIED. No tutorials. No real help. Simple. Piece. of. (Never mind I'm not going to say it).

Then, CRYENGINE. Ooh, CRYENGINE. I stopped the first day. No help. No tutorials. Documentation sucked. And it sucked. Period.

I was desperate, I looked at Unity but the liscensing was insane. I almost chose it, but looked for an open alternative. Finally, Torque3D. Seeing the front page, I was so excited that finally an engine that worked and didn't suck was open source. It had all the features that I needed! (I found it on Wikipedia, lol)

I started there and it was great! I thinks its fine, except, the rendering... And that's where people judge and don't play your game.

I don't think your doing a bad job. Heck, I shouldn't even be complaining, but I just love this engine so much I want other people to use it too and for it to become more modern, flexible, and easy. I understand your points completely, but we gotta move on, or were gonna be crushed.

Thank you for all the work, things like, x64, OpenGL, DX11 and all are awesome. It's something I could not do.

#28 The thing you gotta remember raa, these engines are extremely complex and huge pieces of software. You can't just expect to download some SDK and within a day be on your way to building the next greatest AAA title.

#29 I also found out of Torque by coincidence, it randomly was in some news when it went open source and I came across it while searching elsewhere.

People can only chose between things they know and I did not know Torque before, I thought there is only Unrealengine, Sourceengine and Cryengine, did not even know of Unity even though it is very popular, but it does not appear much in the gaming scene, since there is no big good games made with it.

We need more marketing, at least people know our existence.
I tried several times on the committee to get the moddb account for Torque3D back, since it is one of the biggest communities for engines and game developers. But the Torque3D page is from the release 2009 and it is still even listed as commercial, everything is total outdated and nothing has been done on the representation so far.
Some people are posting updates there, but it is very little. I would suggest to just make a new page for Torque3D MIT or next gen or whatever we may call it and if all people who do something with Torque will post regular updates there popularity will greatly increase.
But we did not even manage to organize such little things so far.

I also think there are many more people using Torque3D than you see here in the community, but they don't show much what they are doing. Sometimes you see people popping up with their projects you have never seen before.

#30 @Timmy, Sorry to be contradictory, but you are plain wrong on that score.

Any application, regardless of complexity should be user usable with an hour or so, it is not unreasonable for a user to expect to be able to produce *something* in an afternoons endeavours, even if that something is nothing more than a simple scene.

@Dwarf King, if your outburst was against me i'm sorry you misunderstood me , i was dead against torque being open sourced in the first place, you will never change the fact that FOSS projects fail far more often compared to established commercial projects. And no matter how many times the FOSS supporters utter the words gimp and blender there are very few, very few indeed; successful open source projects.

#31

Quote:I am sorry to break your funeral talk here but plenty of people are still making games with Torque 3D and lately a few have actually hit Steam and some are even selling pretty okay.

That's great and all, but it doesn't change the fact that the community IS getting smaller. And I'm not sure why it would make you storm off when the solution to this would be DISCUSSION to find a solution, not ignoring it and pretending things are perfect.

Quote:I have a theory that Unity beat everyone else by being easy to use.

I agree 100%, I am positive that's what caused it. I tried recently to convince my college to use Torque 3D for their game design program. Had some progress, but ultimately got shut down because they decided to use Unity for it's ease of use and in-engine editor being so great.

But also with that said, they didn't even know a damn thing about T3D. One person heard of it but knew nothing, the other one in charge had no idea what it was. The person who DID hear of it said "Isn't it something like 10 years old now?". So my point there is that Torque doesn't really have much to stand out at the moment. Open source is definitely something, but it doesn't have that grab factor.

Which is why I feel the renderer getting some attention could be a very good thing. Right now, with a lot of effort, you can make pretty good looking scenes with Torque. However, pretty good doesn't grip people very much. Other competing engines tend to outperform. So ultimately when little Jimmy is skimming the engines he wants to learn on, he looks at the screenshots and picks the best looking one to investigate. I wish people were more diligent in picking and don't go just on looks, but it's no secret that it's a bit of a shallow world.

Now with all this said, the work being done with SSDO right now is looking great. And what I mentioned before is I think what needs the attention really is the postFX system. HDR especially can use some work. I may even be able to start exploring that a bit myself. But also I agree that ease of use is ultimately most important and Torque could use a little work there too. But discussion of these things is could and shouldn't be avoided.

#32 So true Jacob, that is really the actual truth.

The solution? Fixing the problem. Yeah that seem easy, because it is. The first thing we need to do is realize what needs updating in Torque3D. To realize that Torque3D, currently cannot compete with other engines. Torque3D, right now is easy, which is good so far. The next step is bringing next-gen features. We are already sort of going that direction, DirectX 11 and OpenGl are fundamental things that should be implemented into the engine a long time ago. But the community is shrinking, and the amount of people helping the engine is diminishing.

Unreal Engine 4 was released. Shortly after, It was running on Linux. Why? Because the community was so powerful and fast, it overran the devs. THE DEVS. Do you know why communities like Blender and GIMP thrive? Because they are things people truly need, are easy to use, powerful, and marketed. Torque3D needs marketing the most, and needs to STAY EASY. I fled UDK because it wasn't easy. I had health issues after a couple months from stress. I came to Torque3D, and it's easy, but not as powerful which has sometimes almost converted me back to Unreal. I have stayed with Torque3D because of it's openness and easiness otherwise I would of left a long time ago.


Simple. When I made the list of upgrades T3D needs to compete, I was serious. Torque3D could become a big community, because there is a hunger for an open engine right now. The idea of a powerful open engine hasn't been addressed yet, and having a big community who all want to help fixes that. It so comes to the point that the community can become so big it overruns a company. Blender is growing bigger and bigger, and someday may overrun Autodesk. They have a long way to go, but open source anythings can be extremely powerful if strategicly used and harnessed. Torque3D can destroy Unreal, but with the community right now there is no chance.

Sure people come and go and a lot of people use T3D and don't post. But I find they tend to leave the engine and go to another engine, commonly Unity because Unity is similar to Torque3D in easiness. So, Torque3D has potential, but we have to realize where it's weak and fix it, and grow the community as rapidly as possible.

For AAA title type games, I think were off track. When I say Torque3D can't handle a AAA title game I mean it doesn't have the ability. I'm not saying any one of us lonely devs could create one, Heck no. Unreal Engine 4 suits Indies and Corporate companys. Thief, Unreal Engine 4. Tappy Chicken, Unreal Engine 4. One is a AAA title, the other a Flappy Bird knock off. The engine reaches high and low, and puts power in the developers hand. And that's what a game engine is. I'm pretty sure if GarageGames was still handeling it they would be upgrading the engine because there is always more to add. You can't just accept the engine because you only see Indies working with it, but the engine holds the amount of power the developer can use. The issue isn't because open source doesn't work, but because it must be big enough to thrive. Unreal Engine 4 therefore can be use for a game like Battlefield 4, or Flappy Bird. It's all up the the developer or the company.

Thanks for reading my rant, my two cents again :).

#33 Many of the things needed are already there, the problem is just how you unite the people to do it. There were several attempts in the community to take it on, but all failed so far, at least we have a new steering committee as a result of the last failed attempt for a community project.

So if you have the great idea how to make it work go ahead.

#34 It's not that easy since I can't just tell everyone what to do like I'm the leader. Honestly, I'm not better then any of you, so it's not my call.

#35 @bloodknight:
We will have to agree to disagree on that one. Placing a few items on a basic map hardly constitutes been well on your way to building a game which was the point i was making. Game engines are very complex as we all know, mastering them in an afternoon is not even remotely possible.

#36 The real problem with T3D is it's way behind UE4, Cryengine and Unity. It is capable of producing top class but one begins so far behind all the other engines. Just playing catch up to a basic level is difficult but then to add necessary polish and unique features is added onto an already complex business in the first place. That always exacerbates development fatigue. With the other engines a lot of the polish is built in e.g. UE4 or cryengine, or can be bought in, e.g. Unity.

Unity is used for prototyping by companies like EA and even Ubisoft because it is so fast, but it isn't AAA so of course they would never use to make a game like Assassin's creed. EA does use it for mobile games though, and Rovio uses it, so it is capable of a lot more.

It's also really pointless carping on about sourcecode because all the innovative gameplay elements people claim having access to this would facilitate I never see happening here, and why? because just to get to the stage where the innovation would start is a big problem in itself. I have no doubt community members could do that but how long would doing it add to development time. That's the real problem now with T3D, you have to add a lot of stuff that is basic in UE4 before anyone would notice the innovations appearing.

Less and less people are posting in these forums because the point about making games is that one wants to actually make a game, one doesn't want to change a game engine to get to the stage where one is allowed to make a commercial game because by the time that is done the other game engines have moved on it's the development equivalent of Zeno's paradox.

Superhot was prototyped in Unity in a 7 day FPS challenge. They built an impressive demo using stuff available on the asset store such as probuilder 2.0 which took them a day to make a full level. They just ran a kickstarter and got funded in a couple of hours.

That is what you're competing with and in it's current state T3D can't compete, more to that point you could not prototype over 7 days a polished demo level like Super Hot that was so impressive and well received.

This is why this community is getting smaller and smaller and will continue to shrink because by the time someone here makes a game equivalent to super hot, someone in Unity will have made 'Totally bloody Incandescent' and your game will get received with a 'meh' and how much work will you have had to put into getting that 'meh'?

#37 I think we've talked enough, now it get to work :D

Quote:Torque3D need a rewrite/modernization/X feature

All we know, i have a 3GB list of cool thing to add to T3D. But first we need to fix 170+ issues/PR on Githug

Quote:Communnity it's small

Yes, it's a big problem. The only we can do it's work on T3D for increase her value and work on advertise. I think we need to prepare a advertise campaing for T3D 3.6.

Quote:I don't have knowledge to help

Is possible that some of those who want to help do not be the expertise to implement PBR, LPV ... But we need help in many other things that maybe you can help. Some ideas:

Documentation

Sure there are many things that have no documentation in T3D, some simple and some more complicated. And we have documentation that has not been updated for a long time and should be reviewed. Everyone can write guides for new users.

Editor redesing

You do not need programming skills to design a better interface for editor/tools. Write documents with new ideas, compare to other engines and use GUI editor for create prototypes.

Help on review of Github issues and Pull Request

Try to reproduce a bug or add aditional information to a issue/PR can save Committe a lot of work.

Work on advertise T3D

Prepare a compaing for T3D 3.6. Find game engines database with outdated information and fixit.

#38 Suggestion: Get to work.

#39 I agree with JED completely, and there are solutions, but one of the first ones is to fix the engine (aka. Upgrade it). It needs upgrades badly, so Physically Based Rendering would be one big part of it. Soo many things really, that we should map out our plan. I propose we get a roadmap for Torque3D and advertise like nuts.

#40 I agree with Luis and Mich. Also, just make games, people. Post about your projects on /r/PlayMyGame or in the friday/saturday/daily threads in /r/gamedev or wherever else.

Having people jump in and submit fixes to outstanding issues would also be very helpful. We have a couple of people who do a great job of this already, but we need more than a couple!

Marketing/advertising is a priority for us, and it started with the new website. The reason I brought up Unity's ease of use is I believe that's the most important point we should be looking at. Not bling. That will come naturally when people want to use the engine because it enables them to make cool stuff, as it did for Unity.

Small gripe here, but I believe T3D could absolutely have been used to make Superhot in 7 days. The only difficult bit would be the time slowing stuff, and from what I've seen in Unity, it wouldn't have had the same issues Torque has in that department. Heck, I could put together a level like Superhot's in a day. Half a day. If I knew how to use the art pipeline, that is :P.

EDIT: Grumpy me says:

Quote:I think the response to these "T3D cannot compete with a million dollar engine" threads needs to be, for now, "no it can't, thanks for pointing that out". It's not really a reasonable accusation to make. If Torque can't do want you want it to, make it do so, or go use a million-dollar engine.

Of course, our goal as the steering committee is to find ways to make it able to compete with these engines, but we obviously can't do it all ourselves.