Torque 3D Demo Question.

#1

Quote:Undercity Demo

Its in there... run the FPS Genre Kit... select the Undercity mission.

Quote:South Pacific Demo

Its not part of the Torque 3D package.

Quote:Wetness & Precipitation Demo

That was never a demo... just a test level Gerhard made. I'm unsure of the status of that feature.

Quote:Gear of Torque Demo

You won't be seeing that anytime soon.

Quote:Depth of Field Demo
Screen space Ambient Occlusion Demo

Those are features in all the demos.

Hit Alt+O and toggle them on from the menu.

Quote:Particle Demo

That isn't a demo... its a feature in the engine. Its working in all the demos.

Quote:Hompage Demo

The browser box thing? I'm not sure where that is.

#2 Thats just the way marketing works. They NEVER say anyplace on that page the demo's from the screen shots and videos are IN the beta.

Building assumptions based from the presented marketing advertisements often constitute as evidence for a legal argument(USA advertising laws, much info at the fingers of a Google search). But as long as you receive what marketing advertisements 'offer in writing', there is truly no case for a legal argument.

#3 @Tom, has beta2 been released with the undercity mission?
cause I dont see no undercity mission in the beta I got.
1; blank room
2; den
3; marble blast ultra
4; warrior camp

thats all I get in the fps genre kit.
am I missing something here?

#4 Note: T3D hasn't been released yet, it is only at Beta 1. Already we are finding unexpected features included, that were unannounced, which to some in themselves are worth the price of admission... patience... ;)

#5 <blunt> To be honest, if you paid $1000 to see some tech demos.. well, there are better and more impressive tech demos out there. </blunt>

#6 @robo..@deepscratch..
There is no demo of the Undercity but you can load the Undercity mesh into any level if you want to check it out. It is in the .DAE format. It's located in the
\Torque 3D 2009 Beta 1\Genre Kits\FPS Genre Kit\game\art\interiors\sewer folder.

Looks pretty cool.

#7 I'm fully expecting a lot of the stuff we've seen to be sold separately as "add-on packs." You thought you got a bargain by buying early...

#8 @Joe: What evidence is there to support that statement? I feel GG have been very honest about what T3D is going to be. Every function exhibited so far in the videos and T3D Blogs are(or will soon be)included in T3D PRO.

The video and screen shots with animated trees(Forest Pack or whatever its going to be called) was/is indeed slightly misleading, and probably should be replaced to alleviate future confusion.

#9 Oh, there is not a lot of evidence of it. It's just what I'm anticipating. Gotta prepare the pocketbook...

I think the videos of Gerhard's work were misleading as well...

#10 There are a couple of unreleased demo levels in Torque 3D, Burg was never finished, even some useless testing levels (which will probably be removed, as it should be), and the data for Undercity is actually an older version of what is there now -- that the mission file isn't there could mean that it is a Work-In-Progress and wasn't ready, no need to be alarmed.

I can honestly say that Beta 2 is shaping up to be quite nice -- there is a whole lot more going into Torque 3D than what has been shown in the videos.

And by the way, the "Gears of Torque Demo" in no way has ever had any association with Torque 3D -- find the blog that shows it and you see that it was created with an earlier version of TGEa -- as in pre-1.7 TGEa! So any one of us could have already done something equivalent to it.

I don't know why people keep getting concerned about Add-on packs since it was clearly stated in the Pacific Demo shown off at GDC that the Forest features and specific toolset are not part of stock Torque 3D. Would you rather have a working engine or assets? People don't seem to mind buying content packs -- I should know I get royalty checks for one :D Beta is a chance to find the problems in the code not to judge the availability of assets. Engine development takes time & effort. Creating art assets takes time & effort. I for one would rather have a stable engine environment to work with and then create my own custom & unique-to-my-game assets. But the people who work on either should still get paid right?

#11 As of right now, I'd have to say I side with you, Michael (at least mostly). Art assets certainly aren't what you buy when you buy a game engine. Although, I certainly hope we have some decent art assets to play around with in the default T3D setup.

I also don't feel we've been mislead by the Torque 3D team in terms of the trees or anything. To be honest, I think they've done more than their fair share of forewarning on that. I keep hearing in the videos " ... pictures of the Forest pack that will be available soon after Torque 3D's launch ..." etc. At this point, I don't see any reason to believe that they're trying to be deceptive and charge for feature they have been touting.

#12 Well said as Michael.

About the "Pacific Demo", I meant to imply it should not be used in marketing screen shots and tutorial videos, of course a clearly stated disclaimer would rectify any reason for confusion. Facts should be as clear as glass so to remove all room for assumptions, and the gripping about add-on packs can fade away.

#13 There are distinct different between screen shot,video and actual demo.
actual demo shows more information about engine - performence, etc...
and good reference.

In order to decide whether to use Torque 3D on my project,
I wanted to actual running demo.

#14 Wetness & Precipitation
Depth of Field Demo
Screen space Ambient Occlusion
soft Particle
Adv lighting... etc..

These are new feature...
GG's marketing screen shot,video seems to perfect,
but to actually run demo a lot of problems(bug,performance) are found.

For example, the blank room demo is too low fps(52 fps(8800GTS) - just one Model),
In my opinion should be at least 300fps
these information were found by running demo

so I want to check new feature completeness through the demo.

#15 @robo: "BETA 1" You do understand what a beta is? Read the STICKY forum posts, there is a list of things being improved, and many things being added. Now is not the time to measure performance.

#16 Err ... yeah ... "BETA" dude ... it means they are still working on it and need to do more stuff on it.

I for one only went to BETA for the discount and the kick-ass shirt. My decision to move any of my projects to T3D will only be made after the Final release ... right now I am still moving ahead using TGEA for my current projects.

So yeah ... just be patient ... I am sure that GG will deliver an awesome final product ... judging from the Beta so far ... it is practically a guarantee ... but I don't work for them (hint - hint) so don't quote me on it. :)

#17 It confuses me more than a little that people expect the art assets shown in demo videos to come with the engine. No one ever said they did. No one ever said T3D was "a great engine plus a lot of cool trees."

If I lay down the insane amount of money it likely costs to get the Crytek.. cri.. that Crysis engine, I don't honestly expect they're throwing in every visual asset from Crysis with it. Maybe they do, who knows, but what I expect is a fully-functional copy of the engine with code and maybe like.. a grass texture, a water texture, and a tree, just so I can start populating a level with placeholder objects.

Obviously, if I want to advertise my engine tech, I'm going to show it to you with the most kickass assets I can cram into it. Hell, I may buy assets I don't legally have the right to redistribute just to make sure it's shiny. The reason? It's hard to demonstrate impressive lighting, shader, etc. tech in a blank white space.

As far as videos not showing bugs... well, I'm probably not going to record the part where it stutters and crashes. You specifically bought in to look at an unfinished version of the engine, that's what you get. You could have just as easily waited for the release, tried out the binary-only demo, and made a judgment from there before spending a cent.

Now, rants aside, if you want to be useful, write up some slightly more detailed reports of what doesn't work the way you expect it to and post those instead of complaints. The purpose of a beta is to find those broken parts so someone can fix them; maybe no one has ever had your exact system config while trying to do the exact thing you were doing with the planets in that particular alignment, solar flares, all that good stuff, so unless you report it, who will?

I think I just saved up 6 months of rants I wanted to write up to various posters and vomited it up here. 5 AM debugging will do that to a person's mind.

#18 The Gears of Torque demo was TGEA 1.4 (I think it was still called TSE back then) and wasn't done by GG: its primary objective was showcase art production.

#19 You know what would solve this all? ^.^
If the guys at slickhead would just make that rechid blog post about the forest kit already, *MOST* of this whining is down to that one kit!!

Put us all out of our misery and put an end to this incesant moaning, and make that blog! even if you have to update it later =]

#20 I think my main complaint (if you can call it that) is that they keep posting blogs about all these guys they brought on to work on T3D, but then we find out that they're not working on T3D, but are working on add-on packs. That is what seems to be misleading to me.

When I see some of Gerhard's work in the beta release, I'll shut up and go to my corner. Might even put my dunce cap back on. =P