TGEA demos
by Daniel Buckmaster · in Torque Game Engine · 12/13/2008 (5:17 am) · 4 replies
I guess I should really post this in the TGEA forums, but since I don't own a licence...
I've got the Barricade and Force demos, and despite all the wonderful things I've heard about TGEA, they're making me wonder whether I really want to upgrade from 1.5.2 + MK. The controls in both demos lag ridiculously (Forge more so), and the framerates aren't as high as I'm used to with TGE (of course, the scenes are more complex). I can't decide whether the larger terrain is worth it. I'd love for someone to tell me that I'm not the only one experiencing these issues, and that they're specific to the demos, or have been fixed in 1.8 or something.
I've got the Barricade and Force demos, and despite all the wonderful things I've heard about TGEA, they're making me wonder whether I really want to upgrade from 1.5.2 + MK. The controls in both demos lag ridiculously (Forge more so), and the framerates aren't as high as I'm used to with TGE (of course, the scenes are more complex). I can't decide whether the larger terrain is worth it. I'd love for someone to tell me that I'm not the only one experiencing these issues, and that they're specific to the demos, or have been fixed in 1.8 or something.
About the author
Studying mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Sydney. Game development is probably my most time-consuming hobby!
#2
12/14/2008 (2:13 am)
Thanks for the info... I guess it really does come down to a choice of target audience and game scope. Any ideas why the controls are so laggy? Even when I get really low framerates in TGE, the control still feels tighter than in the Forge :P. It's sort of the same effect as setting $timescale = 0.1, except everything else is running at full speed... 
#3
Not only that we have a large world with many textures so the Video Ram savings are tremendous from being able to use Compressed DDS (Direct-X) textures.
12/14/2008 (5:51 am)
I'm not sure why the demos are so laggy as it was a concern our dev team had before porting everything over from TGE to TGEA but once we've done the work we've found that TGEA is a good 20fps or more faster than TGE+MK ever was so I'm glad we've made the decision to change.Not only that we have a large world with many textures so the Video Ram savings are tremendous from being able to use Compressed DDS (Direct-X) textures.
#4
how we can use DDS textures in TGEA?, some expample code? or is in directx sdk?
12/14/2008 (9:17 am)
Quote:Not only that we have a large world with many textures so the Video Ram savings are tremendous from being able to use Compressed DDS (Direct-X) textures.
how we can use DDS textures in TGEA?, some expample code? or is in directx sdk?
Associate Michael Hall
Distracted...
I had a heavily modified MK adding shaders to a few of my TGE projects and I've had time to compare them now that I've ported them to TGEa and the results are all in favor of TGEa with more than double the framerates in most cases. The Stronghold game from TGEa is the same as the starter.fps from TGE. Comparing the missions from Stronghold with starter.fps (TGE + MK) shows me that TGEa is clearly the winner. With that being said I have found that TGE+MK does seem to run a little better than TGEa on older hardware
And yeah you're not the only one experiencing slowdown issues with Barricade and Forge, but they do run better on newer computers - though the control for Forge is still laggy regardless of what computer I've tried it on.