Tgea Vs Leadwerks 2.0 Engine
by Morrie · in General Discussion · 05/02/2008 (12:40 pm) · 50 replies
Leadwerks Engine 2.0 Features
Rendering
* Unified per-pixel lighting system with dynamic soft shadows; Every object casts and receives shadows.
* Point, spot, and directional lights.
* Masked shadows for tree and plant effects.
* Specular reflection and normal mapping.
* Parallax mapping.
* Fast instanced mesh rendering.
* Dynamic visibility determination, requiring no pre-placed portals or compiling.
* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, and other post-processing effects.
* Fast hardware particle effects.
* Seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor areas.
* Adjustable rendering viewports.
* Support for ambient occlusion maps.
* Render to any graphics context to create Windowed applications and tools.
* Render to texture.
* Lens flare effects.
* Dynamic shader management chooses from thousands of variations and compiles requested shaders on-the-fly.
* Open-ended materials and shader system.
* Use existing shaders or add your own.
* Optimized rendering pathways for Shader Model 4.0, with render fallbacks for older hardware.
* Features can be scaled to accommodate older hardware.
* Load textures from .dds, .png, .tga, .bmp, and .jpg files.
Meshes
* Load .obj, .md3, and .gmf meshes, or create meshes from scratch.
* Support for animated meshes with fast hardware skinning.
* Create box, cylinder, sphere, cone, and plane primitives.
* Support for arbitrary number of LOD versions.
* Fast mesh rendering using GPU instancing, if available.
Terrain
* Huge landscapes with up to 33 million triangles.
* Simulate areas up to 650 square miles.
* Dynamic lighting and self-shadowing terrain allow day/night cycles and weather effects.
* Modify terrain in real time.
* Vegetation layers can simulate millions of plants.
* Alpha-blended tiling terrain.
Animation
* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Blend animations, or mix hard-coded actions or physics with animation.
* Attach weapons or items to animated limbs.
* Attach physics bodies to limbs for animated collision and locational damage.
Physics
* Support for multi-core CPU acceleration.
* Simulate thousands of rigid bodies.
* Create complex machines with ball, hinge, corkscrew, slider, universal, and fixed joints.
* Physics vehicles with any number and configuration of tires.
* Extremely fast solver, with far greater stability than any other physics engine on the market.
* Collisions with polygon meshes, convex hulls, boxes, cylinders, cones, spheres, chamfer cylinders, and capsules, or compound collisions made up of any combination thereof.
* Player controller simulates player movement while participating in complex physics interactions.
* Customizable collision system with support for any number and scheme of collision types and interactions.
* Powered by Newton Archimedes
Rendering
* Unified per-pixel lighting system with dynamic soft shadows; Every object casts and receives shadows.
* Point, spot, and directional lights.
* Masked shadows for tree and plant effects.
* Specular reflection and normal mapping.
* Parallax mapping.
* Fast instanced mesh rendering.
* Dynamic visibility determination, requiring no pre-placed portals or compiling.
* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, and other post-processing effects.
* Fast hardware particle effects.
* Seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor areas.
* Adjustable rendering viewports.
* Support for ambient occlusion maps.
* Render to any graphics context to create Windowed applications and tools.
* Render to texture.
* Lens flare effects.
* Dynamic shader management chooses from thousands of variations and compiles requested shaders on-the-fly.
* Open-ended materials and shader system.
* Use existing shaders or add your own.
* Optimized rendering pathways for Shader Model 4.0, with render fallbacks for older hardware.
* Features can be scaled to accommodate older hardware.
* Load textures from .dds, .png, .tga, .bmp, and .jpg files.
Meshes
* Load .obj, .md3, and .gmf meshes, or create meshes from scratch.
* Support for animated meshes with fast hardware skinning.
* Create box, cylinder, sphere, cone, and plane primitives.
* Support for arbitrary number of LOD versions.
* Fast mesh rendering using GPU instancing, if available.
Terrain
* Huge landscapes with up to 33 million triangles.
* Simulate areas up to 650 square miles.
* Dynamic lighting and self-shadowing terrain allow day/night cycles and weather effects.
* Modify terrain in real time.
* Vegetation layers can simulate millions of plants.
* Alpha-blended tiling terrain.
Animation
* Hardware skinning for fast animation.
* Blend animations, or mix hard-coded actions or physics with animation.
* Attach weapons or items to animated limbs.
* Attach physics bodies to limbs for animated collision and locational damage.
Physics
* Support for multi-core CPU acceleration.
* Simulate thousands of rigid bodies.
* Create complex machines with ball, hinge, corkscrew, slider, universal, and fixed joints.
* Physics vehicles with any number and configuration of tires.
* Extremely fast solver, with far greater stability than any other physics engine on the market.
* Collisions with polygon meshes, convex hulls, boxes, cylinders, cones, spheres, chamfer cylinders, and capsules, or compound collisions made up of any combination thereof.
* Player controller simulates player movement while participating in complex physics interactions.
* Customizable collision system with support for any number and scheme of collision types and interactions.
* Powered by Newton Archimedes
#2
leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Started
yikes...
05/02/2008 (12:52 pm)
Looks to me like Leadwerks is a 3D animation package not a game engine. ... ok i see it says it is a game engine but man that code looks horrible... compare this Getting Started VS TGEA getting started...leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Started
yikes...
#3
Have you used the engine? Just wondering. I've used the beta and thought it was quite an interesting engine. I have liked 3D World Studio in the past and was excited to see it on its way out. The language-work with BlitzMax was quite nice as well. I'm glad that animated meshes are working (and have been now for a while). That was one of the most disappointing things when I was testing it. Beautiful engine with beautiful shadows...no animations.
It doesn't remind me of Unreal 3, though, but maybe it's because I'm not looking at the bullet list that matches many engines. When I think of Unreal 3, I think about content creation and implementation. 3DWS is nice, but I still prefer UnrealEd to it hands down. The bling features, aren't really what make it, IMO. The variable language utility is really one of the key features that make development with it nice (and one of the assets for TrueVision3D as an engine as well). I would recommend downloading the demo/beta and trying it out. If you're a BlitzMax programmer (or any of the languages listed, but BlitzMax support was the most stable according to the forums...at least a short while back).
Morrie, if you're looking for another engine, try it out. Josh is extremely responsive to feedback on his forums and has a great looking product. The Game Creators even picked it up to release on their site as well, even though it doesn't yet have a DB or DarkGDK entry point. I'm sure he'll put on in via the DLL access, though.
I look at and use a lot of engines, am an avid fan of a number of them. If you're going to make a game, I'd suggest you choose an engine, put your head down, and work like the dickens. You can keep tabs on other engines, but no matter how many add-ons (and I'm not really sure how many are really available for most of the engines out there unless you mean content packs) you buy, you need to kick the tires hard and rev up for development. That's the same advice I've given on the Leadwerks (or mostly any other) forum when people discuss engine tech, and the same advice I give here.
I want to see your project succeed. I just don't want you to get caught in a remorse cycle because you see tech advancing. Engine tech will always advance. Unreal 3 is sweet in comparison to Unreal 2. Unity 2.0 rocks in comparison to Unity 1.0 (especially with the much needed addition of a GUI system). GameCore is going to rock BeyondVirtual. Irrlicht just keeps getting better. The level designers putting Sauerbraten through its paces are doing amazing things. I'm sure the Leadwerks engine licensees will be making sweet art in the engine. A7 has had a number of advances. TGEA 1.7 has some excellent advances over 1.3. Cipher's renewed development is hitting big as well. There are a million sweet engine out there, and you need to get your project into the one that fits it and your development style. DevMaster has grown exponentially over the years with engine tech, but I haven't seen the number of games explode to match the engine tech's exponential growth. Why? I don't know. Making games is hard. Making engines is hard, too. I want to see growth in both.
I love seeing the engines. I want to see games, too!
@mb
It is an engine in the sense that TrueVision3D is an engine. It is an engine framework/API that eases development. It is programmer- centric and not nearly as friendly as something like Unity or GameCore. But from ym early beta testing, was a pretty nice jumping off point, especially for Blitz3D and BlitzMax programmers.
EDIT: Added the @ to reference talking to Morrie so that future readers wouldn't get confused. MB posted before I got mine in and didn't want to muddle the conversation.
05/02/2008 (1:10 pm)
@MorrieHave you used the engine? Just wondering. I've used the beta and thought it was quite an interesting engine. I have liked 3D World Studio in the past and was excited to see it on its way out. The language-work with BlitzMax was quite nice as well. I'm glad that animated meshes are working (and have been now for a while). That was one of the most disappointing things when I was testing it. Beautiful engine with beautiful shadows...no animations.
It doesn't remind me of Unreal 3, though, but maybe it's because I'm not looking at the bullet list that matches many engines. When I think of Unreal 3, I think about content creation and implementation. 3DWS is nice, but I still prefer UnrealEd to it hands down. The bling features, aren't really what make it, IMO. The variable language utility is really one of the key features that make development with it nice (and one of the assets for TrueVision3D as an engine as well). I would recommend downloading the demo/beta and trying it out. If you're a BlitzMax programmer (or any of the languages listed, but BlitzMax support was the most stable according to the forums...at least a short while back).
Morrie, if you're looking for another engine, try it out. Josh is extremely responsive to feedback on his forums and has a great looking product. The Game Creators even picked it up to release on their site as well, even though it doesn't yet have a DB or DarkGDK entry point. I'm sure he'll put on in via the DLL access, though.
I look at and use a lot of engines, am an avid fan of a number of them. If you're going to make a game, I'd suggest you choose an engine, put your head down, and work like the dickens. You can keep tabs on other engines, but no matter how many add-ons (and I'm not really sure how many are really available for most of the engines out there unless you mean content packs) you buy, you need to kick the tires hard and rev up for development. That's the same advice I've given on the Leadwerks (or mostly any other) forum when people discuss engine tech, and the same advice I give here.
I want to see your project succeed. I just don't want you to get caught in a remorse cycle because you see tech advancing. Engine tech will always advance. Unreal 3 is sweet in comparison to Unreal 2. Unity 2.0 rocks in comparison to Unity 1.0 (especially with the much needed addition of a GUI system). GameCore is going to rock BeyondVirtual. Irrlicht just keeps getting better. The level designers putting Sauerbraten through its paces are doing amazing things. I'm sure the Leadwerks engine licensees will be making sweet art in the engine. A7 has had a number of advances. TGEA 1.7 has some excellent advances over 1.3. Cipher's renewed development is hitting big as well. There are a million sweet engine out there, and you need to get your project into the one that fits it and your development style. DevMaster has grown exponentially over the years with engine tech, but I haven't seen the number of games explode to match the engine tech's exponential growth. Why? I don't know. Making games is hard. Making engines is hard, too. I want to see growth in both.
I love seeing the engines. I want to see games, too!
@mb
It is an engine in the sense that TrueVision3D is an engine. It is an engine framework/API that eases development. It is programmer- centric and not nearly as friendly as something like Unity or GameCore. But from ym early beta testing, was a pretty nice jumping off point, especially for Blitz3D and BlitzMax programmers.
EDIT: Added the @ to reference talking to Morrie so that future readers wouldn't get confused. MB posted before I got mine in and didn't want to muddle the conversation.
#4
If I were to buy Leadwerks 2.0 engine and actually had enough insight, forethought, imagination, Intelligence and most importantly Time, I could only hope to make use of 100% of the engine.
Since I bought TGE / TGEA, I can only hope to have enough insight, forethought, imagination, intelligence and most importantly Time to use 100% of the engine.
05/02/2008 (5:33 pm)
Somebody once said "A man must know his limits". If I were to buy Leadwerks 2.0 engine and actually had enough insight, forethought, imagination, Intelligence and most importantly Time, I could only hope to make use of 100% of the engine.
Since I bought TGE / TGEA, I can only hope to have enough insight, forethought, imagination, intelligence and most importantly Time to use 100% of the engine.
#5
Blitz3D is easy good for making some quick arcade games to show to friends, it has it's limits as a DirectX 7
engine, and in performance.
I tried to start some projects with TGE/A but the lack physics always stopped me. The C++ source was too messy that I would have tried to add some physics engine support to it. I'm still looking forward that TGE/A gets some updates so that it has all essential features needed for game development.
C4 lacked also of a physics engine, so I'll wait also here that the update comes out. The C++ source of C4 is cleaner than TGE/A, but it's not entity based, so it's a horror to code with.
Ogre3D has also full C++ source and it's entity based. It's not a complete game engine though, so it still needs some programming, but I could spend some more time with this.
Leadwerks is fully entity based, but doesn't have source code. Programming with Leadwerks is the easiest of all engines, and the game source looks basically the same in all languages. It has also all features I need for game development. The only drawback is that it's a high-end engine, and needs also up-to-date graphics cards. So I would still need TGE/A or Ogre3D to make games which work on all graphics cards, but I'm not sure if I even want that. I just want to make photorealistic games at the moment, and slowly people are also getting SM3 and SM4 capable graphics cards needed to run LE2.
05/07/2008 (3:08 pm)
I bought Blitz3D, BlitzMax, TGE+TGEA, C4, Leadwerks, and tried also CS3D, Ogre3D.Blitz3D is easy good for making some quick arcade games to show to friends, it has it's limits as a DirectX 7
engine, and in performance.
I tried to start some projects with TGE/A but the lack physics always stopped me. The C++ source was too messy that I would have tried to add some physics engine support to it. I'm still looking forward that TGE/A gets some updates so that it has all essential features needed for game development.
C4 lacked also of a physics engine, so I'll wait also here that the update comes out. The C++ source of C4 is cleaner than TGE/A, but it's not entity based, so it's a horror to code with.
Ogre3D has also full C++ source and it's entity based. It's not a complete game engine though, so it still needs some programming, but I could spend some more time with this.
Leadwerks is fully entity based, but doesn't have source code. Programming with Leadwerks is the easiest of all engines, and the game source looks basically the same in all languages. It has also all features I need for game development. The only drawback is that it's a high-end engine, and needs also up-to-date graphics cards. So I would still need TGE/A or Ogre3D to make games which work on all graphics cards, but I'm not sure if I even want that. I just want to make photorealistic games at the moment, and slowly people are also getting SM3 and SM4 capable graphics cards needed to run LE2.
#6
05/07/2008 (3:41 pm)
Keep in mind that Torque has unmatched networking for multi-player.
#7
I haven't posted too often on the forums, but this one post really caught my eye, and I thought I just had to put in my views.
Firstly, I've owned TGE for close to 8 months now, so I'm not as passionate about the entire GG community and the engine itself when gaged up with some of the veterans around though I've thoroughly loved the experience anyways.
The point is that TGE is so stable right now that before considering any new engine, one really has to put it through the paces first. There will not be as big a codebase to work from. The second, and probably biggest thing for me is that, when reading on the website, Leadwerks 2.0 provides headers for C/C++ and C#? That means they don't provide you with the source for the engine. IMO that is not a very good thing, especially if you are looking for some flexibility as a programmer. There is no point in investing a few 100$s every single time only to realize that the solution might not work after all. I'm not saying that TGE(A) works for everyone, but atleast the chances of you finding a workaround are much higher with the entire source-code in your hand.
@Morrie
The feature list might sound pretty impressive, but I don't think it comes close to Unreal3. Some of those graphical features are soon becoming standard. Specular reflection and normal mapping is "normal" these days (no pun intended :P)... Its just that Unreal's framework encompasses so much that it leads the pack right now and will take a fair deal of work to surpass.
@Mika
I've worked pretty extensively with OGRE. I'm telling you mate, if you're looking for a graphics engine for pure rendering efficiency, OGRE is your best bet. The material system is really unbelievable. In fact, what most people don't know is that even for a rendering engine, OGRE has a set of (minimal) scripting capabilities resembling standard C. When you get the time, you simply have to take a look at it.
I don't think we can exactly define photorealistic right now. What might be photorealistic today will definitely be overshadowed in a year or so. Will you change your engine every few months to target the latest hardware? IMO I don't think it is possible for independent developers to target latest hardware, both because it would take a longer time for a smaller team to finish up a certain project, and because it would not be advisable to cordon off a large part of the potential market for the finished product.
Another thing I'd like to add to what David said is that - I think it is really wrong to look at a game engine in terms of its graphical features alone, stability should come first. Personally, I think we're here to make enjoyable games. Sure, graphics can get you an added bonus, but look at it as being an addition as opposed to a fundamental requirement. That way, we can get around making games that are a blast to play AND look good on any system.
There you go, thats my 2 cents.
05/07/2008 (6:35 pm)
Okay, a couple of thoughts from me...I haven't posted too often on the forums, but this one post really caught my eye, and I thought I just had to put in my views.
Firstly, I've owned TGE for close to 8 months now, so I'm not as passionate about the entire GG community and the engine itself when gaged up with some of the veterans around though I've thoroughly loved the experience anyways.
The point is that TGE is so stable right now that before considering any new engine, one really has to put it through the paces first. There will not be as big a codebase to work from. The second, and probably biggest thing for me is that, when reading on the website, Leadwerks 2.0 provides headers for C/C++ and C#? That means they don't provide you with the source for the engine. IMO that is not a very good thing, especially if you are looking for some flexibility as a programmer. There is no point in investing a few 100$s every single time only to realize that the solution might not work after all. I'm not saying that TGE(A) works for everyone, but atleast the chances of you finding a workaround are much higher with the entire source-code in your hand.
@Morrie
The feature list might sound pretty impressive, but I don't think it comes close to Unreal3. Some of those graphical features are soon becoming standard. Specular reflection and normal mapping is "normal" these days (no pun intended :P)... Its just that Unreal's framework encompasses so much that it leads the pack right now and will take a fair deal of work to surpass.
@Mika
I've worked pretty extensively with OGRE. I'm telling you mate, if you're looking for a graphics engine for pure rendering efficiency, OGRE is your best bet. The material system is really unbelievable. In fact, what most people don't know is that even for a rendering engine, OGRE has a set of (minimal) scripting capabilities resembling standard C. When you get the time, you simply have to take a look at it.
I don't think we can exactly define photorealistic right now. What might be photorealistic today will definitely be overshadowed in a year or so. Will you change your engine every few months to target the latest hardware? IMO I don't think it is possible for independent developers to target latest hardware, both because it would take a longer time for a smaller team to finish up a certain project, and because it would not be advisable to cordon off a large part of the potential market for the finished product.
Another thing I'd like to add to what David said is that - I think it is really wrong to look at a game engine in terms of its graphical features alone, stability should come first. Personally, I think we're here to make enjoyable games. Sure, graphics can get you an added bonus, but look at it as being an addition as opposed to a fundamental requirement. That way, we can get around making games that are a blast to play AND look good on any system.
There you go, thats my 2 cents.
#9
05/08/2008 (12:37 am)
@Aperture: With "Entity Based" I mean that all objects in the game engine are of one cross-compatible Entity type. For example a Mesh is an Entity, it has a position, orientation, size, etc.. Also a Light is an Entity, it has also position, orientation, size, etc.. You can also say that the Light is a child of the Mesh, then when you move the Mesh, the Light will follow. Entity based systems make game programming hundreds of times easier than scene node based systems, or systems which have no structure at all. Blitz3D has it, Ogre3D has an raw version of it, Leadwerks has it. I haven't programmed much in TGE/A, but how would you code this example in TGE/A (load a model from disk, create a spot light, make the spotlight follow the model, and move the model 10 units in Z+ direction):mymodel = LoadModel("human")
mylight = CreateSpotLight
EntityParent mylight, mymodel
MoveEntity mymodel, vec3(0,0,10)
#10
The point with entity-based systems is that you can keep just enough functionality left in and toss out the rest of it.
@Mika
Is leadwerks entity-based? I didn't know that... that kinda tilts the balance a wee-bit. It does have its own Newton-wrapper from what I've heard, doesn't it?
05/08/2008 (5:01 am)
Well, TGE has a derivative structure, and I'm pretty certain TGEA has the same too (don't own TGEA). The problem with this is that unnecessary functionality is thrown in with complicated and mostly unwanted cross linkages.The point with entity-based systems is that you can keep just enough functionality left in and toss out the rest of it.
@Mika
Is leadwerks entity-based? I didn't know that... that kinda tilts the balance a wee-bit. It does have its own Newton-wrapper from what I've heard, doesn't it?
#11
projectoffsetcom. These guys have worked a long time on this and if some of the videos they have and the technological demonstrations they have done over the years are truly amazing. As long as Unreal Engine 3 is on the list this should be too.
05/08/2008 (10:00 am)
As long as we are comparing Engines and the infamously over priced Unreal Engine 3. I thought I would use my inflated 2 cents and bring up the Offset Project's Engine. Since I am rather new a direct link is irresponsible so if you follow along you will get the drift. www
#12
Leadworks was written mostly in blitzmax with various C++ modules wrapped and is more of a game dev framework than your typical moddable engine.
Were doing something similar using Ogre, but have a editor based loosely on 3ds max, with many of the same shortcuts for instancing and transforming selections.
Leadwerks looks very good to me, as an indie dev I just don't feel comfortable with something thats targeting hardware thats only been out a couple of years.
05/10/2008 (9:58 am)
The biggest problem with Leadwerks engine is that he recently decided to drop older lighting and shadow tech and is concentrating on pixel shader 3.0. This cut out half his source code makes his engine easier to work with, but does mean that your developing for the future.Leadworks was written mostly in blitzmax with various C++ modules wrapped and is more of a game dev framework than your typical moddable engine.
Were doing something similar using Ogre, but have a editor based loosely on 3ds max, with many of the same shortcuts for instancing and transforming selections.
Leadwerks looks very good to me, as an indie dev I just don't feel comfortable with something thats targeting hardware thats only been out a couple of years.
#13
I've seen the project offset engine as well - looks fantastic, it seems those folks have been hard at work for a fair while now. I suppose they even have some backing from Intel, remember seeing an ad linking to their website on an intel webpage.
[off-topic]
@Adrian
Aren't you Evak from the OGRE forums? Your profile pic looks really familiar.
If you aren't, sorry for the mishap.
If you are, hey, the world's a really small place!
05/10/2008 (10:12 am)
[on-topic]I've seen the project offset engine as well - looks fantastic, it seems those folks have been hard at work for a fair while now. I suppose they even have some backing from Intel, remember seeing an ad linking to their website on an intel webpage.
[off-topic]
@Adrian
Aren't you Evak from the OGRE forums? Your profile pic looks really familiar.
If you aren't, sorry for the mishap.
If you are, hey, the world's a really small place!
#14
That's not true (see www.terathon.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4936).
05/13/2008 (1:35 am)
Quote:The C++ source of C4 is cleaner than TGE/A, but it's not entity based, so it's a horror to code with.
That's not true (see www.terathon.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4936).
#15
I commented in that topic, too, but I thought I would throw my $.02 in here, too.
I have never found C4 a horror to code with (or Irrlicht, TrueVision3D, PowerRender, CrystalSpace, Nebula, etc). In fact, as a programmer, I found it quite straight-forward and easy to use. I quite like the engine; and feel the same about Irrlicht, which I am constantly tinkering with.
Many engine comparison topics come down to comparison ruptures. I often see topics here and abroad like "Compare Unity to TGEA" with a bullet list of features that are strikingly similar. It seems like an easy comparison until you begin to look at workflow, expansion, and what a particular project needs to succeed (which most comparison topics never mention or only mention in extremely simple terms like "for a RPG" or "I'm making a RTS, plz help"). And the waters get muddied further because there is often not any standard means of relaying various points (ie. "entity-based" versus "node-based" in this topic and the one on the C4 forums). There is, at best, a ephemeral "best practices" terminology or at least a "things we scrape from Epic and id interviews and postmortems on terminology concerning the AAA engines out there" terminology. I think this last is more common on forums than it is for head-down engine techs.
Just a couple of thoughts. These topics crop up quite often and are extremely difficult to answer in any realistic way without knowing the type of project, programming experience, expectations of artflow, etc.
05/13/2008 (7:05 am)
Good link, Diesel.I commented in that topic, too, but I thought I would throw my $.02 in here, too.
I have never found C4 a horror to code with (or Irrlicht, TrueVision3D, PowerRender, CrystalSpace, Nebula, etc). In fact, as a programmer, I found it quite straight-forward and easy to use. I quite like the engine; and feel the same about Irrlicht, which I am constantly tinkering with.
Many engine comparison topics come down to comparison ruptures. I often see topics here and abroad like "Compare Unity to TGEA" with a bullet list of features that are strikingly similar. It seems like an easy comparison until you begin to look at workflow, expansion, and what a particular project needs to succeed (which most comparison topics never mention or only mention in extremely simple terms like "for a RPG" or "I'm making a RTS, plz help"). And the waters get muddied further because there is often not any standard means of relaying various points (ie. "entity-based" versus "node-based" in this topic and the one on the C4 forums). There is, at best, a ephemeral "best practices" terminology or at least a "things we scrape from Epic and id interviews and postmortems on terminology concerning the AAA engines out there" terminology. I think this last is more common on forums than it is for head-down engine techs.
Just a couple of thoughts. These topics crop up quite often and are extremely difficult to answer in any realistic way without knowing the type of project, programming experience, expectations of artflow, etc.
#16
05/15/2008 (6:44 am)
@Diesel: I know C4 has Nodes, which are similar to Entities in LE2. But from a practical game programmer's perspective LE2 needs much less coding. I've asked earlier in the C4 forums also if I could program C4 like Blitz3D, and their answer was that it would need a lot of changes to the C4 system. There can be lots of theoretical discussion about the topic, but if I can't load a mesh with 1 command, and move it with 1 command, and rotate it with 1 command, then C4 is not the same as LE2 for me.
#17
There's recent showcase thread on the blitzbasic forums that shows the advanced lighting and shadows quite nicely and has some info through the thread. Quite a lot of info dotted around those forums. If you look at Leadwerks post history.
www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77423
05/15/2008 (9:35 am)
The leadwerks engine is written in Blitzmax and tries to duplicate Blitz3D's functions as closely as it can. I havent used it but have seen examples of the source and it does have similar helper functions for things like rotations which makes things like say camera rigging much easier than most other engines.There's recent showcase thread on the blitzbasic forums that shows the advanced lighting and shadows quite nicely and has some info through the thread. Quite a lot of info dotted around those forums. If you look at Leadwerks post history.
www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77423
#18
www.leadwerks.com/ccount/click.php?id=50
06/04/2008 (6:57 pm)
The author of leadwerks wrote a interesting paper about implementing deferred shading in the leadwerks engine. Pretty cool :)www.leadwerks.com/ccount/click.php?id=50
#19
06/05/2008 (7:32 am)
Interesting paper. Reminds me of the conversations Pat was having earlier this week on deferred shading.
#20
I think an even more important aspect is what you are comfortable using. David refers to this when mentioning the workflow and others mentioned this above. If you can't create the world, actors, and put it all together the way you want, what good would it be if you got a gift of the current holy grail, Unreal 3.
Like others have said above, do your research, narrow your candidates to as few as possible, no more than three I would suggest. Create an ugly prototype of a small portion of your goal with each. Try to include any key ideas you have, at least to some degree if possible.
Evaluate your experience and results and choose the tool that you liked working with best combined with giving the best results.
Then as was mentioned above, put on the blinders and get busy.
There is no best or right engine in many cases. These things depend on what and who as mentioned above.
The right and best thing is to plan, plan, plan, create, evaluate, and repeat until you are done.
The only more important thing is have fun.
Wow, that's my word limit for the day.
06/18/2008 (8:13 pm)
I would like to add to what David said above. He mentions that each project has different needs and this point is seldom discussed thoroughly enough in engine comparisons.I think an even more important aspect is what you are comfortable using. David refers to this when mentioning the workflow and others mentioned this above. If you can't create the world, actors, and put it all together the way you want, what good would it be if you got a gift of the current holy grail, Unreal 3.
Like others have said above, do your research, narrow your candidates to as few as possible, no more than three I would suggest. Create an ugly prototype of a small portion of your goal with each. Try to include any key ideas you have, at least to some degree if possible.
Evaluate your experience and results and choose the tool that you liked working with best combined with giving the best results.
Then as was mentioned above, put on the blinders and get busy.
There is no best or right engine in many cases. These things depend on what and who as mentioned above.
The right and best thing is to plan, plan, plan, create, evaluate, and repeat until you are done.
The only more important thing is have fun.
Wow, that's my word limit for the day.
Torque 3D Owner Morrie
* 3D sound positioning, spatialization, and attenuation.
* Load .wav and .ogg audio files.
* EAX audio effects like reverb simulate different acoustic environments.
* Seamless sound looping.
Programming
* DLL version can be used with virtually any programming language.
* Scripted engine requires no external language.
* Programmable in BlitzMax with a BMX module.
* Procedural interface allows full access to all features while maintaining a simple and straightforward API.
* Headers available for C++, C#, VB, and other languages.
* Abstract file system with no pre-defined folder structure.
* Load files from .zip packages directly into memory.
* Automatic caching and instancing of media files.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Leadwerks engine reminds me more of the Unreal 3 engine. I know GG put up a demo of GOW made in TGEA, but I just wish TGEA had the features that are in the Leadwerks engine. The Leadwerks engine really rocks and its one price $150 and while I keep paying for add ons to Make TGEA better, makes me wonder why. Not say its a bad engine or GG does bad work, because they do awesome work. I would just like to some of these things in TGEA.