Torque/1.5/WhatsNew

#121 @LabRat: LOL

This has been an interesting read, good to see the public image of GarageGames in our community (no matter what it may be).

Again guys, just to re-interate our message: Please be patient with us, we have good reasoning for not making announcements on things before they are ready. The GarageGames community will be the first to know anything, trust me. Maybe we can get some teaser screenshots out to keep you guys calm, but no promises.

We're trying as hard as we can, trust me!

#122 Thanks Timothy for update and looking forward to see the teasers :)

#123 To set the record straight, and to counter Anton's "TSE delay" theory:

As someone who has worked on and is working heavily on TSE I can say that with the exception of during MBU, TSE has been in continual development, and to my knowledge no one was removed from TSE for TorqueX.


This is going to be a little hash but it needs to be said:

You need to work within the limits of your engine - TSE was perfectly capable of shipping titles as early as a year ago (Synapse Gaming has worked on TSE games for some time and has done lots of development with it - there are also a number of very big development houses using it).

If you find that gameplay critical features are missing (though how lighting and shadows qualify as gameplay is beyond me), then you need to reevaluate your game - clearly you're trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

If those features are absolutely necessary then add them. It's the same thing you'll need to do if there are features you need that are not in the finished TSE.

If your project is time critical, don't bank on unfinished technology - it's that simple. Work on your game using the tools available to you today and migrate later as the technology becomes available.


Synapse Gaming is doing very well and it's because we don't wait around for tools and technology, we use what is available and in some instances create our own (though using existing tools and tech frees us up for actual development on our projects).

If you want to get your games done (and we all do), you just need to do it. Time is extremely valuable, don't waste it waiting for the latest tech, when you could be finishing your games. Work with what you have and let the project evolve around your tools.

Edit: SP

#124 In other words, youve got to be smarter than your tools.

#125 Damn. I'm screwed.

#126 Personally I think alot of people here are whining for no reason. Yes I am not made of money, and I am disapointed that I will have to pay for the next update, however. These people have to make money too!!! I meen look at all they have done for us as a game dev community? They could EASY charge us per month to use just the resource section of this site, and I promise half of you would subscribe.


GG is a great company and TGE is a great product, support it and pony up the 100 bucks if the update meens that much to you, as far as bug fixes go. Learn C++ and fix them your self if they are a problem to you and yuo dont want to pay for fixes.


I am going to say it now because I know the GG guys cant...

This is pathitic most of you are grown and your whining like 12 year old girls missing their mommy.


As far as everyone at GG goes

A little clearer and more offical notice would have been nice, but its good to see you guys still trucking along with TGE and not leaving us out in the dark for TSE!

You guys rock!!! Anything I can do to help just send me an email!

Isaac Dutton

#127 You know John, I respect your opinion and all. Your probably right with regards to people jumping to TSE too soon, but most people assume a year or so development time on their title, and at the time it was believed that TSE would be done prior to then. With regards to TSE being ready to ship games a year ago though...

TSE was capable of shipping titles a year ago if your title fell into certain categories. That is the truth. TSE was not ready to ship the majority of game styles without rewriting a whole lot of things. I'll tell you the list of issues that I had personally in working with it:

- Skinned mesh performance was absolutely awful. Real world numbers here. After adding AI to our title I saw my frame rate drop from 70 fps to 15 fps whenever we had 4 bots runing around with me. If I added any more than that it got unplayable. And before anyone suggests it was my AI code... I then ported the client to TGE as a test, I ported over everything. In TGE the frame rate was lower than in TSE without bots. However when I added bots it had double the frame rates of TSE. TGE performed better with 16 bots on the screen than TSE did with 4. So in saying that TSE was ready to ship titles a year ago, but you would have had to rewritten much of the rendering code on your own, and that is after all why you buy an engine in the first place isn't it?
- Performance in general wasn't that great. There were way too many state changes.
- The lighting model up until MS4 has been pretty poor. While it did support sunlight and DIF lighting, it was poor quality. We'd import models in TGE and they'd look great, import them in TSE and there would be ugly lighting artifacts. We'd also have DIFs that refused to run at all in TSE. This includes much of the two in-house packs by Tim Aste.
- Many of the features that torque programmers had been used to did not work in TSE. Decals, splashes, billboards, footsteps, puff emitters, etc were not working (and as of today still are not). This drove a lot of projects to move back to TGE. While sure they could have implemented their own systems, once again that's why people license engines, to focus on making games and not on making technology.
- The waterblock is more or less just a shell on TSE. It is an object that looks nice, but in the port it lost all of it's helper functions. Our project involved boats, and it took a while to get them working. There was also that was causing the waterblock to give incorrect area reporting, which further added to the problem. Additional features such as the iswet and other waterblock checking functions weren't there.
- There were numerous glow, sorting and alpha related issues.
- Players would randomly fall through terrain.
- When clients would join they would randomly jitter all over the place for a few moments, I believe related to terrain.

There were also of course the obvious things that were missing in lighting, shadows, terrain editing, functional replicators, precipitation, and a lot of other things that have either gone in within the past 6 months or will prior to 1.0. Saying that TSE was in continual development with the exception of MBU period is a true statement, but it doesn't reflect that people were working on other projects rather than TSE. There may have been people working on TSE also, but there is only so much manpower to go around.

So while it is true that TSE has shipped titles, I think a more accurate description would be to say that, "TSE was ready to ship titles if you wanted to rewrite most of the rendering code, or to create a certain style of game."

I completely understand GarageGames situation. I am behind their products 100%. I can't wait to get my hands on MS4 and beyond. I'm completely fine with 1.5 costing an upgrade fee. I don't like to make negative posts regarding GarageGames, because I'm a fan of what the company has been able to do. However, I also don't like the misleading blanket statements such the ones above, because they simply are not true and they are an oversimplification of a complex matter.

#128 Thanks for the post J.C.

That is exactly what I have been trying to say all along about the blanket statements and excuses. They always come up and always from the same people.

#129 Very informative and well written J.C.

#130 >We will also be updating the installers on your product pages with the new 1.4.2 installers in the very near future (we are still nailing down a last few things on it). This will include a number of bugfixes to the Linux code as well.

Thanks, we've been waiting for this confirmation. This is an example of information that should get out to the community to avoid confusion. Otherwise, good work GG staff, looking forward to TSE and Constructor.

#131 Those are true statements. The problem is that your project didn't line up with TSE's capabilities at the time you started. Reread your post and apply my comments to what you're reading:

Quote:
If you find that gameplay critical features are missing, then you need to reevaluate your game... Work with what you have and let the project evolve around your tools.

Your key comment is here:

Quote:
TSE was capable of shipping titles a year ago if your title fell into certain categories

Then why were you developing a game outside of those categories? If you needed to create this game then why weren't you using TGE instead?

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass - I'm just pointing out that everyone needs to work with the tools at their disposal. Besides given the amount of time and effort needed to create a solid game (not just a demo) do you think you would have finished enough of the game by now for MS2-3's limited feature set to hold you back? Remember you should be prototyping gameplay early on, not worrying about lighting and shadows (btw: TSE's old lighting model was exactly the same as TGE's - given good art assets the lighting is comparable, not that it makes a difference now).



Stefan,

Making excuses for what? My point is about managing you project properly. I've been told on several occasion that insight into how SG does business in invaluable (specifically by you). Why not try listening to my advice then?

Given any technology finished or otherwise you have several options:

1) Fit the project to the technology
2) Fit the technology to the project
3) Fail

TSE has been doing exceedingly well for developers over the past year, I hoped my advice would help inspire others to cash in too and break the trend of unfinished projects in this community.

#132 The problem in a lot of ways though John was that with TSE it looked at a glance like it was more or less ready, minus performance issues, terrain, lighting/shadows. The thinking of a lot of people was build their project on TSE, work on the gameplay and then worry about the rest later. The problem was that they started realizing how many other issues there were after they had already been in development. I think most people thought by the time that TSE hit MS2 and Atlas went in that it was now at a state where they could begin working with TSE and that by the time they were finished TSE would be ready. They entered into that development with that in mind.

If they had it to do all over again maybe a lot of them would have designed their games to be able to ship with what TSE had to offer at the time, or maybe they would have stuck with TGE for their projects. The problem was that the limitations of TSE at that time weren't really public knowledge. I'd say there are probably a good number of people who learned a lesson about developing a title with an Early Adopter release.

#133 Thats a very good point - I definitely agree with you there. I guess with new products there are obvious pieces missing, where as TSE was based on TGE, so there were expectations as to what works/doesn't, and will/won't be in various versions.

We were able to avoid that (for the most part :) by spending a lot of time researching the engine. For instance I like to use the Game In A Day events to test out new tech and prototype ideas, and I did a number of internal GIDs using TSE. That helped identify areas where we could really get the most out of the engine.

#134 That's why I never show my boss anything until it is done. If it appears to work, he's off selling it and setting ship dates.

#135 @John Kabus

That was not directed towards you, I am sorry that it came off as such.

My point was that some people gather others (and their games) into a big bunch and assume they all work the same and that they are under the same requirements.

We have always been told that TSE can be used for making certain games - while this is true; the same can be said about any engine, even ones without networking or core functionallity. After all, you can just make a single player game. Or a game without skinned shapes, like in MS2-3.

#136 No problem, thanks for clearing that up.

#137 When we went to make Marble Blast Ultra there was a *lot* of "missing" features in TSE. We wanted dynamic stencil shadows, moving platforms, client-side pickup prediction, robust networked sphere on sphere collision, instantaneous full 3D level previewing, full dynamic cubemapping/reflection, smooth lighting on the interiors, Live integration, threaded asset loading, unicode support, and, oh yeah, it had to run on a completely new platform that featured multiple PowerPC processors and a predicated tiling GPU.

We accomplished this in under nine months with less than a half dozen fulltime coders (an indie sized team). Not only that, we also managed to fix dozens of bugs in TSE and do the research for much needed performance enhancements that you guys are getting with MS4 (which is coming as soon as the bugs are ironed out like Brian has mentioned several times). On top of that we had to prototype, test, and develop a whole new multiplayer mode for Marble Blast. Did our familiarity with TSE help? Of course it did =P But any team of compentent programmers with a reasonable amount of experience with Torque (TGE or TSE) could have done the same (and they have).

Skinned mesh performance is bad? So put your graphics programmer on it for a couple of weeks like we did. Brian didn't employ any secret voodoo magic to solve that problem. He profiled for slowdowns. He applied commonly available optimizations and techniques that anyone can lay hands on between Google and their local bookstore. The water doesn't support all the features you need? Port them over from TGE. Any experienced DirectX graphics programmer should be able to port TGE rendering code to TSE in a matter of days. Same for decals, footpuffs, etc.

Making games isn't magic and fairy dust. It is finishing one task after the next. One thing we did at BraveTree and have brought to GG is to look at each task and assess its cost versus its reward. How much is it going to cost your team to add X new piece of shiny tech? What is its reward? Is it necessary for your game? If the cost is too high (months and months of research and development) and it is a key piece for your game then you either need to look into doing a different game or you need to look at ways of reducing the cost (outsourcing to someone more knowledgable for example...which is what Thomas Lund did for his boat game).

If the "costs" of doing your particular game is too high then move onto the next game. Jeff Tunnell has said several times that any successful game developer should have dozens of game ideas all waiting to be made. In time those costs will go down (as you gain experience and technology advances) and you will be able to circle back to that game idea.

How do you analyze those costs? Some of it is just experience, some of it is just being truthful about your capabilities and resources, and some of it is doing research. Research can include everything from reading the latest technical manuals, to diving through the latest TSE code, to talking to other experienced developers (I would have advised against doing a boat game on TSE unless your team had a lot of graphics and physics experience had anyone just asked), and most importantly to just plain prototyping your idea. A box and a mission should have revealed most of those "hidden missing features" in less than a few weeks.

Are teams capable of shipping games on TSE? Yes! Do they need to do research into whether a particular game is appropriate for TSE? Of course! The same holds true to doing a game on TGE or TGB or Unreal. If you look at the list of features we wanted to add to TSE for Marble Blast Ultra you will see that most of those are features that are "missing" from TGE as well. We had to sit down and work through the costs and rewards of each of those and decide if we could do the game how we envisioned. In the end we cut several features in order to hit our deadlines (note that the stencil shadowing is limited to the marble now... we also had to cut several multiplayer game types). We also created a game that we knew would work well with the existing technology. We didn't try for the next CounterStrike or Battlefield 2 or a space shooter or a skiing game because we were limited on time and resources and knew those would "cost" too much.

Deadlines for a technology producer are a dangerous thing. If we don't tell you guys what we are working on so that we don't miss any deadlines, we get rants about lack of progress and of communication. If we tell you what we are working on, then everyone and their aunt Nancy demands to know when it will be available. If we give a firm deadline and have to cut features to make it then people complain about those missing features. If we miss a deadline so that we can ship all the features we/you want (even a soft one like "hopefully next week depending on the bugs") then all we hear about is how we don't fufill on our promises. And if we only ever give is estimated deadlines then people design games around when they think we will be done and curse us when our estimations turn out to be innaccurate. Meanwhile, we are paving totally new ground and technology which makes any realistic estimation nearly impossible. Honestly, we can't win and we will never make everybody happy so we are continuing to do our best =P

#138 I think "No Whining" graphic was out of line. Sure, we'd all love to tell our customers that, but it doesn't mean we should.

I also believe what Matt F. just posted is pretty much spot-on.

It sounds like TSE MS4 will be a major release, which is cool. As for 1.5, I'd rather not have to pay for an update since as an artist I'm really only paying for access to the private forums, but I may well just for that. That they're even discussing having an update that's not free is interesting, as it means they're not just going to abandon TGE once TSE is shipped.

#139 The one thing I can't figure out is... why is everyone bitching at each other about game schedules and whether or not they've produced any games? What in the world does this have to do with the relase of 1.5? Who are you guys to say what impact a major upgrade is going to have on a project you know nothing about. It's pretty apalling at how the community turns on one another at the drop of a hat. Kids I guess...

/hands Matt a cookie for completing Marble Blast

#140 "I think "No Whining" graphic was out of line. Sure, we'd all love to tell our customers that, but it doesn't mean we should. "


Yeah at least let one of the forum members do it instead, just to avoid customer complaints/rudeness etc.

To be honest, you got what you payed for (you could say more, but to avoid arguments on that, I won't), you were satisfied with it and you are fully capable of doing awesome things with it, commerical quality and with pretty much good ease. Why get angry at these people for putting a price on the updates, I'm a newish customer with TGE 1.4 and was happy to here for an update for 1.5, its annoying I have to pay, with little income (In fact I don't have a job at the moment) and so soon after purchasing. But to me that no biggy, angry people just make their job more difficult and more demotivating. If you got what you payed for, then why complain that they ask for money when they offer more. I'm completely satisfied with what I got, for $100, I'm very happy. Considering other engines are more expensive, like TrueVision, thats comes with bad documentation, little tutorial's and resources, and you have to code the whole game from it within C++, VB, C# or Delphi. And you are only limited to Direct X and Windows.

People have the right to complain, but from what I looked at, those were'nt customer complaints in my book.

edit:

Matt some of that is useful advice, I started a game, but it is realistic to me, that it will take a lot of time I don't have to sort out, or just start a differant project thats easier so you can return when you have the knowledge to do the other project (or as you were saying money, but, I lack money anyway, no matter the project :D ), which I think is a good idea.