Talk about Engine vs Engine stuff here.

#1 Pressed the reset button on this thread since it was derailed in the first few posts...Stay on topic, as this thread is going to be very helpful in keeping irrelevant discussions out of our blogs and keeping the forums organized.

#2 Oh, shame... the way people so efficiently hijacked the thread was a joy to watch ;P.

But since we're talking about game engines now, what do people think of Conitec's latest engine - A7 is it now? I own the extra version of A6 but I haven't used it since switching to Torque. From my perspective, there's no contest, but I'd be interested to see what sorts of projects people would prefer A7 for over Torque.

#3 @Daniel: I realize that supporting Windows is a must for any game engine, given its overwhelming majority in the market, but any engine which is Windows-only is a total non starter in my book, regardless of any other feature it may have.

Torque's support for Macs is less than stellar in many ways, but I have to credit GG for at least making the attempt, and for including source code so that we can finish the job ourselves.

#4 (note: I didnt actually see what Michael Perry deleted) It should come as no surprise that it was derailed.. just doing a quick search the other night of one of your competitors turned up a number of anti-Torque threads.. obviously there's people out there that believe, whether rightly or not, that the Torque pedigree is lackluster due to past GG support/actions/claims.

I have no opinion either way, I'm just observing. I wish I had bought C4 when it was only 100 bucks, and I wish I had bought TGEA a long time ago because it would make T3D cheaper for me.

Money is a concern for a bunch of indies. I shelled out money for a new machine a month ago because it was needed..I can afford T3D but I cant justify $800 right now. I think some GGers want T3D because they dont want to be "behind the tech curve" with their peers.

Anyway...I'm not even sure if gamedev is where I want to go in life, so technically I dont even have a horse in this race, so to speak.

I'm not trying to stir the pot or get my post deleted, just voicing my thoughts...

#5 The reason they were deleted is because they had nothing to do with the topic (car engines), which is ironic considering this line of discussion usually derails other blogs/thread =/

At any rate, if it is about engine vs engine, it goes here...even if it is opinion. Posters just need to be prepared to back up their claims, because others will call for them.

#6 This isn't going to keep the topic out of the blogs or elsewhere, since the main reason it's brought up there is to bash Torque, rather than engage in a rational comparison. Which is the main reason I bothered to mention my favorite engine in the first place ;)

Not sure this would be a valid place for this anyway, since it's not exactly neutral ground. Kinda like going to a Chevy forum to compare Ford vs Chevy :p

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That being said, I have something of a comparison. Although it's not a game engine, Ogre3D is a phenomenal rendering engine, and I really wish Torque would steer some of the rendering technology in that direction.

One of the biggest things (for me) is the animation system. Torque's skeletal animation system is a relic that's *mostly* limited to blended keyframe animations. Doing any type of real procedural animations, i.e. inverse or even forward kinematics, is non-trivial and clunky at best, while it's easy as pie in Ogre3D. While it's possible to get some stuff like that working in Torque, it can be a major project, and from my experience it's easier just to roll your own than try to shoehorn it into the existing system.

Some other things that are lovely in Ogre are the texture callbacks for procedural and RTT textures, and the way you can map most of your shader parameters and setup multiple fallback techniques for varying graphics cards in the material scripts. Plus support for most shader languages, including Cg, rather than just HLSL and GLSL... OpenGL for Windows... (While Direct3D is obviously superior on Windows, OpenGL support on Windows helps consolidate the development effort...)

The pluggable scene manager system makes it much easier to break away from the mold and experiment with new types of games.

And such.

#7 Probably won't keep it out of the blogs, but David has a set up a nice scenario for mods:

Post edited by moderator: Please discuss engine vs engine in THIS THREAD

#8 Gotcha. Good call.

#9 TGEA 1.8.1 vs Zen Engine 0.6.0 beta

Eventually I'll take the time to do a run-through on all the differences between Zen Engine and Torque3D, but since I've not had time to fully peruse the T3D source then I'll stick with comparing against TGEA.

Since both engines include source code, obviously you could make either engine do exactly what the other engine can do, so for clarity's sake I'm only going to discuss features that are included "out of the box" so to speak.

As Dave pointed out, not every engine is suitable for every game or every developer. Although I sometimes bash Torque, I still to this day use it for certain game types even though I'm the primary developer for Zen Engine.

There are certain things that TGEA and T3D will always do better than Zen Engine, but there are other places where Zen Engine outshines most other game engines. Keep these differences in mind when you're starting your next big game project.

At this point, Zen Engine is best suited for skilled C++ programmers looking to make their own game engine but don't necessarily want to start from scratch.

Also, since it's in early beta testing, Zen Engine probably is not ready for prime-time use. Don't drop your current game engine if you're expecting to finish your game sometime this year. If you're using TGEA or looking to use T3D, stick with that.

But... later this year if you're looking to start a new game project, definitely keep Zen Engine in your list of engines to evaluate at that time.

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#10
Source Included

Both engines include the source code, but I would like to point out a few differences.

Zen Engine source code is easier to read, better organized and contains a better separation of core engine code vs starter kit code than TGEA.

Because of this, if you're a skilled C++ programmer, you'll find yourself more at home with the Zen Engine source code.

Zen Engine's source code is also better documented including "tribal history" links in the source code. These links provide a link to the IRC chat log where the original developers discuss the designs of the engine as well as any design documents created in the documentation wiki.

Note: This is not a bash on Torque's overall documentation. Mitch is doing a fantastic job on that and the overall Torque documentation is much better than the Zen Engine documentation. I can only hope that Zen Engine's documentation will eventually be as good.

Plugins

While TGEA has a rudimentary plugin system for audio components, Zen Engine takes this quite a bit further. Nearly everything in the game engine is a component implemented as plugins.

The Zen plugin system is one of the best C++ plugin systems I've ever seen and it's being used in a whole lot more projects than just Zen Engine. If you ever need a plugin system for a C++ project (even if it's not game related) then you should check out the Zen Core project.

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#11
Tools

TGEA shines in this area.

For Zen Engine you have to use Blender or 3ds Max for editing levels. If you're creating an outdoor area with a large heightmap for a terrain then neither Blender nor 3ds Max are very useful.

While TGEA gets a "B-" in this area and T3D gets a "B+" in this area, for now Zen Engine gets an "I" for incomplete. If you're making a large outdoor game, I wouldn't recommend Zen Engine until the tools are more complete.

However, if you're making a game that doesn't require a terrain, using Blender or Max with Zen Engine is an excellent way to go, especially if your level designer is comfortable with either of those 3d modeling applications.

Rendering

Zen Engine uses a modified version of Ogre for rendering. The modifications primarily were done to facilitate using the Hydrax and Caelum plugins for impressive water and sky rendering.

Gerald did a good job of posting some features that Ogre has that TGEA does not, so I won't repeat everything he said, but one of the things I really like about Ogre is the way the scene nodes and meshes can be arranged in a hierarchical manner, and animations applied to a parent can also apply to a child. This solves the problem that the slightly hackish "mesh hiding" resource solves for TGEA, except in this case it's solved out of the box with a graceful solution.

The zoned / portal scene manager is also a great feature. This allows Ogre to handle multiple zones and dynamically load / unload them on demand. This gives you occlusion culling that is as good as what BSP style models provide, but without the hassles of having to use brush-based models and static lighting.

As long as you follow some rough guidelines, this also allows you to create vast levels with seamlessly paged zones.

Data Blocks vs Game Object

Another huge difference between TGEA and Zen Engine is the way static data is handled. We all know what a pain TGEA's stock datablock system is to deal with. It's slow and clunky at times, and for very large games with a huge number of datablocks, TGEA's load times can be horrendous.

Zen Engine solves this problem by providing a cached publish / subscribe mechanism for Game Objects so that static data is cached and dynamic data gets updated when it's been changed on the server.

This system provides a mechanism for object persistence so that non-static data fields can be persisted without overwriting the default data. This is perfect for RPG and RTS games (as well as MMO games).

Another great feature of Zen Engine's Game Object system is that it's primarily data driven and includes an easy to use editor.

A disadvantage of this system is it doesn't lend itself very well to player written MODs that can coexist with the original game. TGEA's "mod" system is a whole lot better suited for this.

Scripting

While both TGEA and Zen Engine have scripting languages with third party support for debugging and editing, the third party support is free or inexpensive. It's outside of the scope of this review to compare these tools, but in both cases they're good enough.

An advantage of Zen Engine is you're given a choice of scripting language. Currently Lua and Python are supported.

I know I said I'd only talk about what's included out of the box, but I think it's important here to note that because of the way Zen Engine was designed, it wouldn't take more than a week or two to support any other object oriented or table based scripting language such as JavaScript, AngelScript, Squirrel, Ruby, etc. TGEA's direct use of the Torque Script Engine makes it a whole lot more difficult to switch to a different scripting language.

Lua and Python have significantly larger communities than Torque by at least one order of magnitude, so you're more apt to find bindings for libcurl, wxWidgets, SQLite, etc and you're more likely able to find books, cook books, and more examples.

Networking

Zen Engine does not come with networking out of the box unless you add Zen Worlds.

Zen Worlds is primarily an MMO framework and the networking is specifically tailored for MMO games and virtual worlds.

On the other hand, TGEA's network code is primarily geared towards FPS games.

Since I'm reviewing Zen Engine, and since Zen Worlds is not yet publicly available, I'm going to leave it at that for now.

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#12
Licensing

This is where Zen Engine outshines nearly every other game engine.

It's licensed with the ZLib license, and so you can take it, add a few features to it, repackage it and sell it. There are very few restrictions, the main one being that you cannot misrepresent the origins of the software.

You can redistribute the source code if you want, but you're not required to redistribute it if you don't want.

TGEA licensing has several restrictions tied to the base license. Without special permission (and I don't know how difficult or how expensive it is to get this permission) you cannot make a virtual world or a tool or anything that isn't a game.

You cannot make "starter kits" without the approval of Garage Games. In some cases I think this is good because it reduces the risk of low quality addons, but in some cases where a starter kit is given exclusivity I feel that this limits competition and fosters an environment of reduced innovation.

Pricing

This is another place where Zen Engine shines. It's free.

Community

I would be wrong to leave this comparison out. The IndieZen community is mostly IRC based and has forums that receive only 2 - 3 posts per day, and most of those are in private game-specific forums. An advantage of the IndieZen community is that if you ask a question, quite likely you're going to get an answer by one of the developers that wrote the code in question.

The Garage Games community is very active with a lot of knowledgeable people. You don't always see developers answering questions, but the community more than makes up for it. A disadvantage is sometimes the Garage Games community has some extremely immature people that ruin it for others, but as with this thread, the Garage Games staff and community manager (Dave rocks!) is becoming more pro-active and you see this a lot less often than a few years ago.

Summary

The primary purpose of a solid game engine is to save you time so that you don't have to write your own game engine. In this case, both TGEA and Zen Engine do that very well.

If you rely heavily on tools for creating outdoor levels, or you're not comfortable with diving in and programming in C++, or if you're looking to make a game in the next few months, I highly recommend TGEA.

On the other hand, if you're looking for something a little more flexible, or if you're a C++ programmer looking to make your own custom game engine, I highly recommend you take a look at Zen Engine. It's very well written, it has some fantastic features, and the rendering pipeline can hold its own even against top of the line rendering engines.

At this point, price shouldn't even be taken into consideration. If you can't afford TGEA but you're not a strong C++ programmer or you don't have access to one, don't bother with Zen Engine. Its lower price point does not mean it's easier to use for non-C++ programmers.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am the primary programmer for Zen Engine, but I've also used Torque since 2001. I've tried to be fair in my assessment of both game engines.

Please don't derail this thread. If you have questions, comments or flames about this review that will cause this thread to become off-topic, please post it in a new thread or post it in the IndieZen.org community forums.

#13 I put together a website to try and capture the "my engine is better than your engine" sentiments once and for all. And for those who take the time it does have a provision to keep track of opinions on specific engine versions... which I agree is critical to the discussion. Anyway, I hope you don't see this post as just spam. I really am trying to help the Indie community. Please visit http://IndieGameTools.com and vote for the best engines, editors, IDE, and other development tools. Keep the discussion going here but add votes for your favorites at that link. Thanks.