#41 It depends on how much you know, if you know everything you need to make your game, you just need to repeat what you have done before.
The art pipeline is not the biggest problem, the biggest problem with Torque is, you need to know C++, which is very hard. On other engines you can do much more with the ingame editors and simple scripting, this is why they are faster, but if it comes to coding new features, it is as hard as with Torque, or even more, since other engines are even more complex.

#42 There's oh so much more to making a game than the language, the editors, or scripting. The X factors include having a good design, a lot of patience, dedication, decent art, and the ability to finish. I don't think Torque's biggest problem is "you need to know C++." That's a false statement. A solid, fun, good lucking game can be made all in TorqueScript.

I am all for improvements to the engines. I think that needs to happen, for sure. However, there is nothing about the engine that currently stops anyone from making a great game. This thread is all about making the engine prettier. If your game requires Unreal 4 quality rendering, then yes, you will have to hit the C++. If Unreal 4 quality rendering is the central point of your game's design, your game is going to suck because rendering is more important than fun game play and stability.

#43 @Daniel - Not certain why you're peeved by that. As regards whether you could do Superhot in a day well a day surely isn't that long a time to spend doing something that could then be used (if only screenshots) to illustrate how easy T3D is to use.

@Michael - I agree, there's nothing wrong with the engine. But it's really a team engine and not much good for a lone developer. The Russian guys that brought out the medieval open world game did a fantastic job but there were 5 if I remember and it took about 4 years. T3D can do anything but it takes time and nowadays platforms where games can be sold are diminishing. The longer it takes to develop any game becomes more and more of a problem and the game engines that are winning this race are those that reduce the development cycle.

It's also somewhat disingenuous to claim that gameplay always wins the day, this is true but a crappy looking game will not get people interested enough to play it to discover the great gameplay. So even if one forgets about the polish in terms of shaders etc and all the fancy lighting and effects, at the very least very good artwork is needed or an unusual aspect to the game. I wouldn't say Superhot has great art but it works with the gameplay but the style is still good and that can elevate poor art.

As regards the Torquescript stepping in for C++, people have their doubts. I had a template built for T2D done as behaviours just using the scripting. Only to be told at the end by the guy that scripted it that he had doubts that the randomly generated levels were stable enough, he couldn't be 100% certain there would be no problems in a released version of the game. He stated it would need to be done in c++ to be sure. It's for that reason, plus the lack of support for the final pre-MIT version, I shelved the project after spending quite a bit of money on it.

I started with C++ so it's not really a problem to adapt that particular aspect of the game but as I'm finishing off another game I don't want to be sidetracked at the moment, by the time I can sit down and do it the window of opportunity has likely already passed.

#44

Quote: Only to be told at the end that the guy that scripted it had doubts that the randomly generated levels were stable enough, he couldn't be 100% certain

Sounds anecdotal. Did he provide more information than that? Was it TGB or T2D MIT? There are so many factors. I'm not saying that no one will ever have to dive into C++ for Torque. I'm saying that it's not a requirement for all games. Look, we are derailing this thread a bit. I just wanted to debunk a single statement.

Quote:If one forgets about the realistic look and go for an original art style as many indie developers do, then T3D as is is ideal.

A valid statement, especially when you consider several top games (indie or not). Team Fortress 2, Borderlands, Angry Birds, Where's My Water?, and so on. 2D, 3D, cartoony, surreal, etc.

What I'm ultimately trying to do is keep the focus in this thread intact, while also debunking statements that tie rendering quality in with usability and game play. There are more posts on improving T3D's renderer and effects, which I'm all for. Then the thread plunged into the same discussion that has been going on since Torque went MIT. It's almost formulaic:

1. Torque could use ____ feature.
2. Agreed
3. Torque could use ____ feature(s) more
4. Agreed & Disagreed
5. Torque's real problem is ______
6. Agreed & Disagreed
7. We can organize and prioritize to accomplish ____ or ____
8. Great!
9. Silence
10. Time passes
11. New thread, see #1

And you know what? While maybe 1 or 2 steps vary, this same thing happens with all the other publicly available game engines. You know what the difference is between Torque and the other available engines? They have dedicated, paid teams. They also have funding, sometimes on a large scale, which buys time and more development effort.

So I watch as the Torque Steering Committee does their best to motivate, organize, and prioritize. Each iteration and effort is an improvement, but there's always that common problem. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."

The most difficult part about Torque has nothing to do with features, languages, editors, etc.

#45

Quote: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!

This. THIS. THIS....

THIS

#46 I'm going to bring up something a little off topic, but what if we combine Torque3D and Torque2D? Look at Unity and UE4, they both allow 2D and 3D perspectives, to be honest that would unite the engines and bring more power into one engine. I'm not saying that Torque2D would end and ultimately be developed with Torque3D, just saying build in an editor into Torque3D and merge the two. Then visual scripting, just like Unreal Engine 4. The reason why I'm suggesting this is because, Unreal Engine makes development easier and faster. If engines didn't I would code my own game from the ground up. Because engines were made to help us develop faster and I think Torque2D would be beneficial and make the engine seem more modern too. It would still be easy, just like Unity is designed.


In Unity, 2D and 3D are unified, and it would make Torque3D seem easy too.

As for the discussion, I have to agree with JED. Development time is too long in Torque3D, and in other engines, they purposely make it easier and faster to create games. Not messing around with scripting, fighting shaders, or killing bugs. Have you realized that Unity3D's shaders or .shaders? Not .glsl or .hlsl. Because it doesn't make you fight the shaders to work with GL and D3D. Plus, shader creating is much easier with Unity3D. Go into 3DS Max, make a shader, export it, import it. Done. Plus, there is lots of software that supports Unity3D's shader exporting. I'm not saying to get popular software to export shaders for Torque3D, all I'm saying is the shader system is too hard for newbies, and if it's too hard they will leave.

Making games is HARD. It's simple. But the engine makes it easier to create games! And if you want to keep the legacy, that upgrade the engine, not the game while it's being made. Unity3D users and UE4 users don't have to touch code ever! Because the engine gives the power to the developer so the developer doesn't have to fight the engine. Which is why I support the new Steering Committee because they are upgrading the engine. Recent talk about implementing Physically Based Rendering is awesome, because it ups the graphics fidelity by 100%! And it will attract more users.

All I'm saying is we need to make upgrades a priority, so yeah...

#47 What somebody needs to do is visit every other game engines community website, collate all the enginex is better than enginey posts and post them somewhere in the asshole of the internet (reddit or similar site), then arrange a pact with all other engines to lock retarded dick measuring threads with a link to the oblivion of all web pages.

I know I come and go in this community, but for pretty much every constructive comment of Torque (xyz) needs feature (abc) I guarantee that this has been discussed on the irc channel. I can also guarantee that *most* of these features are being worked on by people in their own spare time, late nights, weekends away from family etc etc.

Perhaps people who horrible words like sucks, garbage, cant compete should compare what these people are actually achieving compared to all the others mentioned here that have huge and well paid development teams working all day every day on improving engines, these huge well paid dev teams also get help from the even bigger and even better paid nvidia dev teams for advanced features.

#48

#49

#50 @Andrew Mac - Well played =)

@Bloodknight - Well said

@Steve - Well...what?

#51 @raa bruub - Unifying T2D and T3D has also been discussed several times. I somehow always find myself in a thread before or after that is mentioned.

Do I think it's a good idea? Yup!

Do I think others want this? Most definitely.

Has it been done before? Yes...TWICE. Once when Melv wrote the first Torque 2D, which was built on TGE. A second time by GG itself, as an internal project working toward a new product. That was a merge of Torque 3D 1.1 and TGB, then much of the 2D side was gutted and replaced with awesome stuff like box2d physics and real-time networking. Because of the merge with T3D, the 2D side all kinds of pretty shaders and lighting. Yeah, that project died before it saw the light of day.

Is it possible to do now? Without a doubt. T2D is easier than ever to use and merge into another engine. Both engines would greatly benefit from it. The Module and Asset system beats the ever living crap out of what T3D uses right now. You wanna talk about improved performance, usability, and editors? Those two systems alone would be a huge improvement. The 2D side is soooo simple and powerful that it could replace the current T3D GUI system all together.

So what's the problem? Well, no one is doing it. That's it. It's that frickin' simple. No one has taken the plunge and there hasn't been a unified discussion or push to unite the steering commitees for the work.

Discuss

#52 I like the idea of a merge of T2D into T3D, I don't think I'd use the 2D component to make a 2D game, but if they were merged together in such a way that one could use the 2D portion for a richer, more flexible system for the user interface, that'd be awesome! We could have much richer HUDs somewhat resembling scaleform-type stuff(I imagine, I haven't fiddled with T2D), and being able to rotate images, like for hit indicators.

#53 @Chris - Using the Sprite and Asset system would get you new controls with things like animated sprites. You would also get easier to build GUIs that do not have super PITA requirements like naming button images with _ post-fixes. Oh...so many benefits.

#54 LETS DO IT!

#55 I agree it should be done too!

#56 I support a merger of T2D and T3D. Things like GuiSpriteCtrl in T3D would be outright amazing. Easily animating the Gui with the Sprites using the animation asset system from T2D would be amazing for T3D! Simple single image .png with multiple frames to animate a gui element? With T2D, that is possible!

Let's not even get started with the CompositeSprite class and how much that could do...

Yes, this needs to be done. I could mention at least a couple uses for the T2D's gui/sprite system in my current T3D project.

P.S. I also hadn't looked too deeply into T3D's 'ambience' type environ settings yet, but...I know using a little innovation and T2D gui/sprite frames, a creative person could easily produce screen overlay effects as well.

#57 Gotta say i totally agree on the merger, it would benefit both projects.

#58 How and when are we going to start? To be honest, T2D is ready as of now because only one editor has been built for it. So we could make the editors once it's merged with Torque3D. The question really is, is now the time? I think it is, but we have a lot of projects on our hands, PBR, OpenGL, Linux, etc. But if anyone has time, I think its implementable (LOL). We should bring this up for both Steering Committees.

#59

Quote:To be honest, T2D is ready as of now because only one editor has been built for it.

This time next week there will be 3 or 4 more.

#60 @Michael Perry - TGB. It is, of course, anecdotal. Quite willing to pass you the project though but that would prove nothing. However, this is what I was told, it could very well be if I put the project together and build it with 40 levels, it could be stable. Let's just say his comment made me have second thoughts about bothering. If I do the project after this one I'm finishing will I be faced with all sorts of hassles to get it stable? I don't want to find out. You can see from my product list that I paid for these engines I didn't come onboard when they went MIT licensed, not to mention the rest of the products I bought of that list of 30 that are of no use with the MIT versions. So it's not that I just want to flippantly throw all that money away.