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Let's Face Reality and Accomplish Something


Zombine

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I have been around Torque since near the beginning of GarageGames and I simply loved the engine and what it promised. I believed in the technology and was very upset to see how quickly GG lost focus. How many game engines were they trying to develop at one time? Quite frankly, I don't even think Unity is around today beyond a niche product if they would have stayed focus. I think the real turning point was Torque 2.0 (or whatever it was called). It was certainly sad to see it go MIT after I had invested a lot of money into Torque. Now, I have a much different attitude, I'm excited. That being said, there are still a great many things that worry me.


How can an open source project succeed? I think there are many examples of how they can succeed. Blender Foundation is a perfect example of how to do it. I think the major turn for them was the Open Movie projects. What did it do for them? It provided needed capital to develop tools that would be needed for the project and then give those tools back to the community. Blender, IMHO, is an awesome piece of software that provides a tremendous feature set that is capable of being used professionally. Other open source projects that are very success are Krita and GIMP (though less so as of late :( ).


So what am I proposing? Quite simply, a plan.


1) Identify a core team to lead an Open Game project.

2) Identify the game concept and create preliminary design, technical, and art documentation.

3) Approach the Blender Foundation about co-developing the project.

4) Run an INDIEGOGO or Kickstarter campaign to get funding for the project (or even through Blender.org).

5) Commence the project.

6) Market the project and build the community.

7) Establish a long-term core team with a centralized location (if possible).


Who should be in the core team?

This should be made up of experienced community members who can oversee the rest of the team (contractors, less experienced devs, etc). It is vital that people have trust in the team and that they are capable of completing the project.


What kind of game?

Quite frankly, I think this is an easy answer. Make a Tribes-esque game. Many people from the original GG community were die-hard fans of the Tribes series of games and the series still has a following today. I believe that this type of game is also ideal for a smaller project because we can implement the gameplay mechanics and focus on creating just a few fun, polished maps rather than spending a large amount of resources trying to create a game that is way out of scope for our resources. Additionally, the game can be expanded after release by the mod community.


Why approach the Blender Foundation?

Like it or not, we need more credibility. The Blender Foundation will bring much needed credibility and potentially bring the support of the open source community. As a Blender user, I would love to see additional game-development related features funneled into Blender. Much of the art could come via the Blender Foundation as well.


Why a campaign?

Like it or not, many of the developers of Open Source projects have a full-time job. This means less focus on making this happen. Having a budget to pay some people full-time will go along way with making progress.


Why marketing?

Quite simply, people need to know that Torque is alive and development continues. It will also be important to identify the specific engine related features that are being developed with the game to keep the community excited and supportive of the project.


Why establish formal centralization?

I see the biggest advantage for this in the long term. It would be great to have a few full-time people working on this, even if was just 2 or 3 people. It would help the engine progress and they could additionally oversee the development of additional Open Game projects in the future.


Sorry to be so long winded, but I believe that Torque can be a highly successful OpenSource project, but I think we need some focus and a tangible goal.

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I'm already doing this for a long time now, but almost nobody is interested in open source development, so I'm doing it mostly alone. Have you looked at my projects?

 

I think what you are doing looks really good, keep up the good work. I would argue that you aren't really doing what I list above though. I really think getting the organizational support is the key here. I think it is critical to partner with someone like the Blender Foundation to give the project legitimacy.

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I'm doing pretty much what you suggested, with the exception that I will not make another boring tribes clone.

You have some weird concepts about legitimacy and so on, there is no such thing. The problem is everything people do is not good enough for you, you just demand and give nothing. There are people doing amazing work for free on the engine, things like linux port, opengl, physically based rendering, deferred rendering and you talk like there has never been accomplished anything.

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May god forgive me for what i'm about to do...


If you must make an open project, i truly think you should consider joining forces with duion and his project.



Also kickstarter is useless without a solid business plan, and despite kickstarter stating the opposite, it is nothing more than a pre order system, with consumers expecting you to hit deadlines and quality standards

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The advice I've heard about Kickstarter, especially for games, is that it's not a tool to market to a new audience, but to make use of the audience you currently have. I think what we've discovered over the last several failed GG funding campaigns is that we don't have that audience already.


As for the idea itself. First I want to note that what you're describing basically exists. TOL is fairly Tribesy, completely open-source, and has a dedicated team behind it who I'm sure would welcome contributions ( @fr1tz ?). I realise it's not exactly what you had in mind, like one of Blender's open movie projects, but it's already made significant accomplishments, and looks like a pretty awesome game to boot.


The idea of an open game project is floated around once a month in this community, but never goes anywhere. I posit that this is because most of the community is already working on the game they want to make and are passionate about. I know that I wouldn't necessarily throw my hat into the ring to work on a community-designed game, because it wouldn't be the game I wanted to make and spend all my time on.


That said, I generally agree with your approach. We need to snuggle up as close as we can to Blender, both in terms of community and providing support for Blender art in the engine. Honestly I think it's our best shot. Also, this community tends to be more full of programmers than artists, so pairing with a community where the balance is flipped would be a great idea.

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TOL is fairly Tribesy, completely open-source, and has a dedicated team behind it who I'm sure would welcome contributions ( @fr1tz ?).

There have been a few contributions to TOL by other people but it's still basically just me working on the game, and currently I can't dedicate as much time to the project as I'd like.

I agree with @buckmaster about the inherent problems of a community-developed game (especially if it isn't a straight up clone of something that already exists). On the other hand one of the ideas of TOL is that the same client can be used to play potentially wildly different games (for example: if you wanted to make a multiplayer game that's playable using the TOL client, you "just" have to get the required art and client-side scripts into http://content.terminal-overload.org and (if they exist) engine modifications merged into https://github.com/fr1tz/terminal-overload).

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That said, I generally agree with your approach. We need to snuggle up as close as we can to Blender, both in terms of community and providing support for Blender art in the engine. Honestly I think it's our best shot. Also, this community tends to be more full of programmers than artists, so pairing with a community where the balance is flipped would be a great idea.

 

I think its too late for that. Blender is like free photoshop for 3D visualizations, yes, there are alternatives, but with Blender you can get totally trained for a professional job with a zero investment on professional software that cost you thousands, then with that experience you can build a portfolio then land a job, with in-house commercial softs.


Torque3D is trying to fight in a completly different scenario. Here users are indie devs or teams that need to deliver a great, already finished product to archive his own survival. So everything but that a decent engine with a community and a company behind is already discarded. Even worse, since TWO 3D versions of photoshop went FREE and CryE. is 19$ / Month. Not to mention the other zillion open source engine alternatives avaliables as today.


Said it before, and I'm saying it again: With blender you only need to laid the tools and everything else are minor updates here and there (like gimp). In a Game Engine, evey noticeable shifting in rendering technology will FORCE you to deal with large source refractoring that affects on a global scale. And this HARDWARE shifts are happening on a solid 6 months circles because there are quite big guys shipping stuff 4 profits.


The thing that appeals the most about torque are his somewhat matured features and the full source. But don't be fooled, anyone wishing to make it in the industry will never ever choose Torque when you can already develop for free on behemoths like U5 or UE4. (And by the way, start over to learn an engine from the ground up).

The only guys that can found torque most appealing as today in my opinions are coders. Big con: Coders usually don't deliver enough eye-candy :cry: (which sells).


Vulkan, Dx12, HLGL, PBR, theres just too much shit new everyday to implement, and guys like me that are no coders, learning any modern API means a shitload of investment so big, that anything that I cannot reuse over and over and over again is a big fucking nono. Even at the level of scripting (yes, I'm looking you TorqueS).

For this reasons most artist want a plug and play approach, and torque is in a field that im pretty certain it will never archieve the stablity nor the features, not the standarization the other, mainstream engines already have. (And therefore can safely ignore us) UNLESS


UNLESS torque shifts to a modular approach, where Steering Comitee just develop a FRAMEWORK that just pieces together a buch of open source projects. (Torque6 a nice start)

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I never understood this mentality, that you have to do good work and show off just to get hired by someone big and then do something boring that other people dictate you and has nothing to do with what you wanted to do originally.

With Torque or free software in general, there is no need for that, you truly own your tools, you truly own your products and you truly own your company/studio so where is the need to become a slave to someone else? The only reason is that the big companies have the market share and the money on their side.


Everyone complains about the big companies buying the smaller ones, destroying them and destroying the good and original products with it and make boring mainstream products out of it, but at the same time a lot of indie developers just work to get hired by those companies.


If people do not see those logical fallacies there will never be a real solution to all related issues.

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So what am I proposing? Quite simply, a plan.


1) Identify a core team to lead an Open Game project.

2) Identify the game concept and create preliminary design, technical, and art documentation.

3) Approach the Blender Foundation about co-developing the project.

4) Run an INDIEGOGO or Kickstarter campaign to get funding for the project (or even through Blender.org).

5) Commence the project.

6) Market the project and build the community.

7) Establish a long-term core team with a centralized location (if possible).

 

1) Core team is me and Ahsan from this community, there was no real interest or support from any other member of this community so far.

2) I have done this, except art documentation, which has to be done later, when the project is more finished.

3) Blender Foundation is something different and not very involved in game development and likely does not care.

4) Kickstarter does not work, it failed hard multiple times with Torque related projects.

5) It is already running for quite some time now.

6) Tried several marketing attempts, just to realize there is no market and the open source games community is much too small.

7) Not possible so far.



You got any better plan now?

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On the subject of an open source game... I've been thinking about this a lot, because I have my own plan in the fairly near future to combine the work I've been sharing into my own open source game. The thing with open source games, as Dan pointed out and Duion has been noticing, is that it's really really hard to get any substantial number of people to work on them, because there are as many visions for the final result as there are people involved. While the team may have a lot of agreement on features and components, in my experience when it comes down to final content, story, etc it is nearly impossible to get agreement because everyone has their own vision.


As a solution, I'd like to propose that instead of putting all of our eggs into a single game project, we instead take an approach of putting as much work as possible into modularized components that can be released as separate git branches or resource libraries. We've always wanted solid starter kits for different game types, but with everything going to MIT and git it seems like this might start to be achievable. What if we had branches for commonly used features in FPS, RTS, MMO, etc, and as much as possible broke out independent features in sub branches in as granular a way as possible, and then built our open source game(s) by merging the branches we needed?


That way we could share as much of our work as possible without getting stuck on whether we're going to support X's game or Y's game as "the" open source game for the community. It would take a little more work to keep all these branches up to date with the main engine progress, but it would seem worth it if it allowed the work to be useful to and draw input from a lot more community members than just the team working on one game, and maybe we could get some contributions from some of the non-open-source projects out there as well once the ball started rolling.

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My project is very flexible, if it comes to different visions and even, if someone disagrees a lot he can just take it and develop his own version, but it is not recommend in most cases since then people have to start from the beginning again.

And the thing with open source is, that it is always automatically shared, at least if the license is not too painful. Also the old idea of making starter kits for others will not work out, who should use them after that? You will need a big userbase to create all the different features, maintaining them, build their own games with them and lots of other people using them. At the moment we do not even have enough users for developing a single feature, how do you plan to do it with multiple ones?

The times competing in the regular engine market are over, the advantage we have left is the open source part, so I don't think selling starter kits to others will work out, even if they are free, you will also need a lot of people who voluntarily maintain all the branches, otherwise the hurdle for others to get into it will be too big.

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Yeah, it's definitely a lot of work, and it's probably out of reach at this point to try to assemble and maintain full starter kits for all the different game types, that would only work if each had their own community of interested volunteers working on that type of game.


However for myself, I'm already engaged in my multiple branch strategy and plan to continue with everything I can componentize out of my current code.


The problem with _not_ doing it this way is the problem I've experience so many times before and am currently in the midst of with Ecstasy Motion - you end up with such a massive pile of "everything but the kitchen sink" code piled into one project that it becomes useless to anyone else and very hard to maintain in its own right.


For me this got so bad that I pretty much gave up on maintaining EM as is, and instead I'm grabbing everything useful, bit by bit, and dragging each bit into the future with current T3D and physx3. I plan to open source most of the bits, maintaining only enough closed source code to make the actual end product not be something any idiot can just download for free, but still allowing torque devs to have access to 90% of it. (My real target customers are indie film makers, so I don't think I'll lose a lot of sales with this strategy, and hope to gain some positive feedback and maybe road testing of various features etc by doing it this way.)


Meanwhile re: the game I'm also putting together, I do hope to be able to share code and resources with your project, but even though Uebergame is very flexible, I think what I have in mind is different enough that combining the two projects would not be feasible. Hopefully anything useful from mine will be trivial to import into yours via git merge though, if my multi branching scheme is successful.


While I'm at it I guess I'm spilling some beans here so I might as well spill more - and life is busy of course so don't hold me to a deadline - but the game I want to build is going to be an open world sandbox game, sort of Rust combined with Second Life but placed on the actual Earth using my FlightGear world server project, anywhere the player wants to play it.


Re: the competition between engines, definitely open source is our power - it is actually the only reason I'm back here again, I almost totally gave up on Torque back in the day. In the process I got so burned out on having my core business plan completely under the thumb of a private company that I vowed a solemn oath to _never_ again put my work on top of a code base over which I did not have complete ownership. For this current game I want to make, having it be fully open source is a key component of the plan.


Which reminds me of a question I've had for a while: has there been a thread on this site or GG.com that extensively lays out the current competition in terms of open source engines? I'd like to know where we stand there, is there anything yet that is as game ready as Torque, with editors and efficient networking code out of the box? Not looking to switch, mind you, just wondering.

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I noticed a while ago that many people left working with Torque do some kind of sandbox games or addons to the engine. That is the strength of Torque since it is simply not possible with all the other engines, since you are not allowed to redistribute the source-code of the engine, the editors and development tools, you are always forced to use the companies official redistribution platforms and their shops and they will get their share of every product you produce.

But the freedom is also a curse, since everyone can do what he wants it is hard to unite people.

For managing code, I did not have that problem so far, I just have my scripts, datablocks and settings, which are relatively good maintainable, even without version control.

I am mainly producing art assets, so there is not much need for managing it, everyone who wants to use it, can use it.

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I could not find any real alternative open source wise to Torque3D, there is just the old quake based engines, which you have no idea how to do anything, if you are not an expert coder and some rendering engines like Ogre3D but lacking the others tools needed to make a game. Now there is also Godot engine, which looks really simple, but it looks to be more made for small 2D or mobile games.

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Also the old idea of making starter kits for others will not work out, who should use them after that? You will need a big userbase to create all the different features, maintaining them, build their own games with them and lots of other people using them. At the moment we do not even have enough users for developing a single feature, how do you plan to do it with multiple ones?

 

I'm not refuting this statement at all however I must say that having some sort of starter kits or open demos for each major genre would certainly be attractive to newcomers, which we don't seem to have many of lately(perhaps I'm wrong and there are many skilled lurkers around?) As you say, our user-base is small but It would be nice if we could grow it a bit. I realize making a successful game using any engine is difficult, I just think that if people could get through the initial learning curve of Torque, they could see how powerful it really is. It still sort of boggles my mind that there still isn't basic scripted AI in stock Torque that you can just drop in the game and assign simple behavior.


Right now I am crazy busy and I don't even know if I could be useful but my feeling is that I want to help make Torque more accessible to new users. I do think that Torque could attract serious game developers still because of it's openness.

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I do think that Torque could attract serious game developers still because of it's openness.

 

I definitely agree. When you forget the big leagues and consider "the competition" to be only the other open source engines, Torque is a hell of a contender still, esp with things like openGL/linux finally part of the main trunk, and then the full set of editors and being able to just click on "host game" or dedicated server right out of the box. I was one foot into Ogre once, but that was a hell of an impediment when I realized how much other work had to be done that was just sitting there in Torque.


If we could really focus on backing away from shapebase and all the other tribes-oriented code and get the entity component thing and assimp hooked up so people didn't have to deal with our DTS/DSQ toolchain, we could still be a force to be reckoned with.

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If we could really focus on backing away from shapebase and all the other tribes-oriented code and get the entity component thing and assimp hooked up so people didn't have to deal with our DTS/DSQ toolchain, we could still be a force to be reckoned with.

 

On this in particular, I'll simply note that .dae remains a thing, with .dts/dsq being an internally cached format that you can also direct-export to. Mac's work https://github.com/andr3wmac/Torque3D/tree/assimp didn't change that if someone wants to keep running with it. (Though from the last round of testing, .fbx will still remain problematic since blender and max still use two separate versions.)

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