TGEA 1.8.1 on the Mac: a production perspective

This is not a rant on Mac vs. Windows nor Torque vs any other game development platform. It's more of a review. A review of my experience as an Art Asset Developer using Garagegames product on a Mac.

I should also mention I am not a GG Fanboy. I'm not. Really. So there. I have worked professionally in the design and development space for over 15 years (and 10 Years in Film) and although I may not have always behaved in the most professional manner during my career, I at least understand what it takes to make something. To make it actually run takes a lot of work. A lot of hard work. Work that the clear majority of us will never understand or necessairly appreciate. So I am not a GG fanboy but I am a fan of the people who put a lot of work into making something like TGEA function. Their efforts generally go unsung and under appreciated by those on the outside, hearing only the complaints and hardly ever the kudos.

But let's get on with it before I do start sounding like a fanboy :)

TGEA on a Mac
TGEA is as a friend of mine once said, a really nice piece of kit. Up until recently, I've only worked with TGE 1.5 and to start working TGEA has been to say the least, a real treat. The way that materials are handled in of itself, is worth the price of admission. Polysoup? Love it! But in the end, it really is just a souped up TGE (Not necessarily a bad thing).
There are however a few things that are broken on the Mac version, some of which (but not all) I've posted on the forums. I hope they can be resolved but the official download remains at the time of writing, flawed.




Constructor on a Mac
Constructor is another lovely piece of kit. Free kit to boot. Can you imagine. Free! We begged, we cried and finally - FINALLY! - they released it. Cross platform and for FREE. Amazing.

I hated it.

To begin with.

It had quirky things in it which made me wish to bypass it and go straight to polysoup. No such luck... or should I say, what luck! To get the shadowing casting and look we were after in the current project, I had to use Constructor. And after a week, I was impressed. I learned. After two weeks, I fell in love. What a Honeymoon, you should have seen it... that is until I tried to create portals and zones (no innuendo intended... really). The Honeymoon was over. Nuts.

Did you know that portals don't work consistently on the Mac version? Usually you're fine with 2 or 3 but when they "glitch", there's no work around. How do I know for sure. I exported the exact same file from Mac and a Windows machine. Guess which one worked? Yup, the Windows version work perfectly. Thank God I had access to the Windows version of the program but that's hardly an option for all Mac users.




TGEA and Constructor: Overall
You can imagine my frustration of spending hours trying to resolve an issue with lighting or how a texture was being rendered only to find on the Windows side it looked fine! It worked as advertised! Argh! That will put anyone off from working with TGEA on a Mac! It's not that these things are true showstoppers but just that these little niggly things are still there! And if you don't know they're there, you'll waste valuable time trying to figure out what you are doing wrong... and it ain't YOU!

But I can't lose sight of one thing: 99% (as far as I know) of both TGEA and Constructor work as advertised. That's pretty damn good. But even given that, the hours of frustration only to discover that the problem occurred only on the Mac side of box was just... just... well, you understand.


So in the end, it's a shame that TGEA and Constructor don't work as consistently on the Mac as it appears to do on the Windows side. A shame since many Indie Developers when looking at an engine consider the cross platform aspect of Torque to be a big plus. To discover that these inconsistency exist especially while in the middle of production (as we did) can be very distressing. I suppose if our Tech Lead had access to a Mac box and we had the resources in time and money to devote to it, we could fix these inconsistencies. But We don't and I doubt other Indies have either.

But to be fair, I'm not surprised to see this. Or should I be? Should I be ticked at Garagegames for selling me a Mac product that is not equivalent to the Windows versions? If Adobe released a Mac version of PhotoShop or Illustrator that was inferior to the same product my Windows brethren had access to... Yeah, I think I'd be a little put out!

Hmmm.

But there you have it. A complex thing like a cross platform game engine with NO inconsistencies?! I think GG and their staff did an amazing job just to get the things to run as well as they do really. But there is some real competition out there for the Indie development buck and I'm not just talking about Flash.

The Unity game engine is pretty sweet looking. Built from scratch for the Mac platform, it is now available for Windows. Unity certainly looks sexy and has some lovely features but I suspect not without its own problems. And Lord knows how well the Windows version runs ;)

Although I'll be keeping an eye on Unity, I'm holding out for T3D. GG has invested a lot of time and effort in developing T3D and it encompasses nearly a decade of experience that GG has had with the older Torque engines. I've played with the latest Beta and what I've seen so far is all positive. I like this engine. I think it will compete nicely in the market with the likes of Unity.

Of course it costs more (Unity isn't cheap). So in the end, I wonder will it be worth it and how well it will eventually run on a Mac.

For T3D like TGEA, I won't really know until I develop a project in it. As it so happens, when the current job is done I do have a project that will give me that opportunity. It should be informative.

Until next time