Torque 3D for Oldschool FPP

#1 T3D as it comes with build in first person camera system is ideal for a "Quake" like games. All you will have to do is to create your own art assets and merge them in T3D. Your goal should be DAE for objects, because T3D has build in DAE importer. You can manually create you DTS objects via Torque DTS exporters.

And remember that it almost doesn't matter what game engine you use. The game engine is just a tool. Take a look at T3D's features and decide yourself if it is going to do the job for your project or not. Even if you face difficulties at some point there are a lot of great programmers here that can help.

#2 Great idea, I've thought about doing the same.

Setting up the assets for an older look would be fairly easy as most of it would just be downgraded specs; lower poly, smaller textures, etc.

For map building if you're sticking with the old school look T3D has Sketch Tool so you can block out maps within the editor to get a feel for what you want, then export and import into your 3d modeling tool of choice for further detailing and texturing. It's a bit cumbersome in comparison to something like GtkRadiant/World Hammer but it's better than nothing. You could also create the chunks of maps in your 3d modeler of choice, make sure it scales right and import it in. T3D has zoning to improve performance for indoor levels.

Once you have maps together you could bake high end lightmaps with PureLight.

Pros: Pipeline, a lot of older engines that could achieve the same style have pretty rough pipelines, making it hard to import content. Free and open source, so easier to get people involved.

Cons: System requirements, unless you're fine with T3D minimum requirement specs some purists may balk at it, building maps would be a bit of work if you're going for primarily indoor environments. Not multiplatform.

So it's achievable, the hardest thing I think would be the map creation, getting the scaling, zoning and performance right. My recommendation would be to try to get a map together and going from there.

#3 @Lyubomir
Yeah, i know it seems to be a silly question, cause you can create Quake 1 like game in any 3d Engine. I was more wondering on other aspects.
For example, how much flexible is compilation of game etc. I mean do i need to include all elements of engine? Parts of engine for complicated shaders or complicated physics? Is it easy to exclude them from code? Etc. etc. etc... ;)
I like things to be optimized. Of course it's not essential, but welcomed.
For example making Old School Quake in UDK is 100% possible, but unwise in my opinion. In short UDK is too powerful and complicated. Waste of hdd space and computing power for such an oldschool game.

@Mack
Yeah!! That's what i want to do. I'm gonna sculpt players, enemies, equipment etc. then make retopology and bake everything to one diffuse map. Same thing with levels. Modeling, painting, lights, baking.
I'm wondering is it sane to use mesh animation instead of bone animation this days. Mesh Animation would be more "back to the roots", but more complicated animations would take more memory (ok i figured out an answer by myself ;)).

Thanks for Props & Cons!!

I heard that networking is pretty well written, based on Tribes one.
Is it true?

Thanks!!

#4

Quote:
For example, how much flexible is compilation of game etc. I mean do i need to include all elements of engine? Parts of engine for complicated shaders or complicated physics? Is it easy to exclude them from code? Etc. etc. etc... ;)

Torque 3D pretty compiles all GFX, audio, networking, (basic) rigid physics (for vehicles and interactive objects), etc, modules as part of the application. There are some optional modules such as Fmod for audio, PhsyX or Bullet for more precise physics, and others, that can be added in at your discretion. Your rendering options pretty much give you a choice between Advanced Lighting (a deferred-rendering-like solution) that includes a wide range of postFx, shaders, and real-time lighting/shadowing that can give your game a highly polished modern look, or you can choose to use Basic Lighting which is a simpler rendering and lighting solution that doesn't include all of the postFx features and gives you basic shadowing in the form of stencils -- but keep in mind that all of these options can be toggled on/off or adjusted by the developer. It's the choice of lighting type that will most likely help you define your modern vs retro look. The choice of lighting type is a preference that can toggled within the world editor, however you can set the default lighting type to one of your choice. As far as removing unused modules for optimization purposes that's something you will have to do on your end, Torque doesn't do this out of the box.

Quote:
I heard that networking is pretty well written, based on Tribes one.
Is it true?

Yes.

#5 "So it's achievable, the hardest thing I think would be the map creation, getting the scaling, zoning and performance right. My recommendation would be to try to get a map together and going from there."

that is the point.
if i had a good art team,i myself can do the rest of it for reproducing "Quake "

#6 @Michael
Thanks for answer!!

@ahsan

Quote:if i had a good art team,i myself can do the rest of it for reproducing "Quake "

In my case art is no problem. Programming is a little harder topic, but i'm not a novice :)
I don't think i'll earn milions of dollars with such a game, so maybe we create open collaborative project? Old style FPS, with unconventional weapons and retro graphics.
If there will be interest I'll consider that.

What you think?