What strengths have T3D?

[Johxz]

For what kind of game T3D is optimized? what strengths have T3D? technically speak... don't say nothing about licence because I will hit you :lol:

some people have the belief is for multiplayer games, like mmo, virtual worlds like second life for the strong "network" side, and others that only work for fps games and nothing else...

If I develop a game with T3D, I have some advantage over others engines.... because...???

this post is for break this barrier or miss conception that some people have in mind when come to torque 3d.

Can help me with an opinion/comment? ;)

[irei1as]

I liked the access to the code while still being full free -don't hit me yet- but that exclusivity kind of changed recently.

I think I have choosen Torque because it's naked. I like the engine hidding nothing... even if that may be counterproductive as more freedom means you lose focus on basics -I come from old RPGMakers and I did nothing on those because I played with scripting too much-.

But if you ignore the juicy core you can still play with the editors easily.

With zero coding you can make a FPS but that's not unique right now, I think.

Less frequent, 3D RPG, racing and RTS need just small pieces of code.

If I'm not mistaken about its engine, there's "AX:EL", a game about plane dogfights.

So, except for a lack of easy sprite work, Torque 3D can make a lot of genres potentially.

Hmm, it's quite hard to sell Torque3D to other people compared to the other juggernaut engines.

[Duion]

The editor is simple and easy to use.

And something about the license, it is not the license itself or that it does not cost you that is the biggest advantage, it is the freedom that results from it.

With other engines you will always depend on the company that made it, they earn royalties of everything you make, like 5% of all and 50% of all you sell in their shop etc. With Torque you can keep 100% and you are your own boss.

But for Torques advantages it needs a community developing it further, otherwise it's advantages will not come to play.

[Gibby]

For what kind of game T3D is optimized?

 

The engine itself isn't particularly optimized for any specific genre, and the new and forthcoming updates will make it even more modular and extensible. Having said that, the Full template and its included scripts is a ready-to-run FPS but if you start with the Empty template there's multiple directions you can take it as a designer. We just don't have any templates for other genres - yet. I just used it to demo a live media streaming hardware/software solution I'm designing and used T3D's networking and Theora capabilites for the player gui and it worked great.

[LukasPJ]

The environmental editors are pretty good.. River and forest editors... Other than that it's really a case of the license. Torque doesn't have any technical advantage over UE4.. If anything it'd be the networking, that's pretty solid.

[doc]

I'm making a game about aircrafts dogfight! ;)

I feel both love and hate for Torque3D for various reasons but IMHO the easy C++ api and the workflow makes it good for single man developers:

Unless you are very good in everything, none will notice if your game has been made in whatever engine.

[Duion]

I hate the forest and river editors and the road editor also, had so many problems with them. Yes they are there and good in theory, but they still have issues that make them hard to use in a real project.

[buckmaster]

The engine itself isn't particularly optimized for any specific genre

I don't know about that - I'm pretty sure it's actually just Tribes 2 with some of the Tribes-specific code removed. Everything about the Player class, and the camera/control setup, is geared towards FPSes, and GG only strengthened that bond by introducing stuff like special first-person image settings. But yeah, we're trying to break out of that paradigm.

[Johxz]

I don't know about that - I'm pretty sure it's actually just Tribes 2 with some of the Tribes-specific code removed. Everything about the Player class, and the camera/control setup, is geared towards FPSes, and GG only strengthened that bond by introducing stuff like special first-person image settings. But yeah, we're trying to break out of that paradigm.

 

basically you are saying is a good engine for games likes battlefield (tribes2)? is a good engine for open worlds with support a lot of players with good networking? :)

I will put an example, see this engine http://www.gritengine.com (I don't know the engine)

"for implementing open world 3D games, such as the those in the GTA series, Saints Row, Crysis, Fallout 3, Just Cause 2, Mafia 2, Burnout, etc."

[Johxz]

Hi

this is based in my own experience if you can comment it would be helpful. Please correct me if I wrong. I did very quickly copy/paste, sorry for the misspelling. We can clean a bit and hope we can use this in the wiki for futures references.

Torque 3D

Dev Platforms: Editor Works on Windows, Mac, Linux

Supported Languages: C++; TorqueScript

Desktop target: Windows, Linux, OSX, SteamOS

Mobile target: Android, iOS (When finish porting to Linux.)

Console Targets: None

VR Targets: Oculus Rift

Controller Support: Razer Hydra, Leap Motion, Xbox 360.

Distributed targets: Web (Unmaintained at the moment)

ADVANTAGE / HAVE

- Free forever, open-source, and permissive/liberal license (MIT License): Suitable for commercial and whatever you need. The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.

- Including full access to source code: T3D gives full access to the C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system. Having easy access to the full source makes it possible for any skilled developer to add features that a project requires. Powerful and flexible. Built in pure C++ so it is easy to use and extend however needed.

- Integrates with popular IDEs: integrates with Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) on Windows, Xcode on Mac, and XXX on Linux. (HELP ME HERE)

- Active community: Helpful and responsive forum. Forums have many active and friendly members that are quick to respond and help out. Even Steering Committee is very active on forums. Great Community support through the Forums and IRC.

- Very optimized: runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards. Runs well on lower end machines. (I use a very weak laptop right now and is run smooth while unity3d for example I can't use without freeze or open "monoDevelop")

- Is 3D, but you can do 2D by faking a flat environment in a 3D universe. (Or you can use Torque2D, see the link http://torque2d.org/)

- Proven track record, many commercial games available, including many on Steam. (See this link http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=126)

- Uses C++ as well scripting language TorqueScript.

- Continually updated by a dedicated and skilled community. Constant development and progress.

- Network: Easy to implement 32, 64 to 128 or more multi-player networking. Torque's approach to networking makes this one of the best performing and easiest to implement multiplayer game engines available.

- Many stock features for a FPS but flexible enough for other Genres.

- Physics Engine: including Nvidia PhysX, Bullet Physics and also offers a simpler built-in physics engine.

- Comprehensive WYSIWYG editor:  Provides a straightforward drag and drop development environment that can be customized to suit individual preferences.

- The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time.

- Comes with a wide editors/tools: Particle Editor, Custom Shaders, GUI editor, Artificial Intelligence, Recast Pathfinding (Navmesh editor), full Collada support (including blender), River Editor, Terrain Editor/generator. The Terrain editor is easy to use and will include features such as hole cutting, noise, smooth, etc. All the tools are in one place such as placing road/paths, vegetation, billboard and there settings are easy to locate and change. Others editors like: Mesh Editor, Path editor, GUI Editor, Script Editor, Environment Editor (volumetric clouds and day night cycle, lightening, ocean settings, wind), Material editor... etc...

DISADVANTAGES / DON'T HAVE Sorry but this is my own perception, I don't want to offend anyone. ;)

- A visual scripting system for non-coders. No coding, uses drag and drop behaviors.

- Documentation is good; lots of examples and sample code but dispersed (Effort are made to bring all together.) Lack of in-depth tutorials: There are plenty of beginner coding tutorials which serve as a basic introduction for a new user to get up to speed, but once having passed that stage there is a real lack of more advanced tutorials/examples/code snippets demonstrating the finer details of the vast and varied API functions.

- Lots of resources to learn from (Effort are made to bring all together.)

- Offers choice of scripting languages (Effort are made to support other)

- Increasing number of bugs.

- Slow roadmap implementation: The developer maintains a growing roadmap of features with no indication to users of time frame and priority of feature implementation.

- Support for Android and iOS (Is on the way)

- Supports in-app purchases

- Not Stable

- Web plug-in for browser deployment: offers web plug-ins that allow deployment of an application to all major browsers. Or WebGL port.

- Direct3D support is behind: Direct3D support not up to par with OpenGL support, only version 9 is supported.

- Currently limited to targeting PC. Mobile targets are planned.

Regards,

John

Edited November 18, 2015 by Johxz

[Timmy]

Comparing it to other engines the only plus i can come up with is the license (which for some people is massive). It is very much geared towards FPS shooters but can obviously be used for other genres with a bit of effort.

[buckmaster]

Verve and GMK were MITed long after activity around them had stopped, and same with Walkabout.

[Timmy]

Verve and GMK went MIT because their authors are no longer working on them and they where nice enough to release it under MIT so other people can still use them/develop them further.

I do totally agree about the rendering though, it does seem the only hope for further features on the rendering front now lie with OpenGL that was re-introduced in 3.7

[Azaezel]

Are GMK and Verve stable? Last word I heard on the matter was they weren't, with GMK needing more than a little once-over to bring it up to spec, since it uses it's own variant on bullet integration that would need conversion, and with Verve having crashes that still needed sorting. AFX has it's own thread: http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43

[J0linar]

time to chime in,

@DwarfKing

regarding GMK and Verve

Verve is not really stable and not all needed docs have been released.

GMK is stable enough to be used and expanded but it comes with some headache.

first of Verve is actually already obsolete, its functions are not anymore special in any way.

The Bad Behaviour Thing could be taken and expanded and do verry well the same job as verve and that without crashing and causing issues.

The thing with GMK is, its all fine but its not sane to be included into T3D Dev Head, the only interesting part about the GMK is its Camera Setup along with the ragdolls and since ChrisCalef has done some great progress with physX ragdolls - we should really look forward to get a proper ragdoll system integrated into T3D (me looks @ ChrisCalef^^).

Anyways, the best way is to go the Bad Behaviour Route and to include that

into T3D and build upon it, expand it.

There is really no point in throwing all and evrything into T3D, believe me i tried it and dont ask me how that went.

however if you want to get your hands dirty at a t3d version that has gmk running (more or less based on t3d dev head)

https://github.com/dragutux/Greed/tree/greed-up

Regarding Afx, from my personal pov, hell yeah lets get it in but honestly in the long run the question should be do we want to paste and glue or build?

[koros]

I like being able to mess with the source and the codebase is, at least for me, a bit more intelligible than the tiny bit of UE4's I've looked at.

Torque's PBR is getting there cuz of Azaezel and others. We've got realtime reflections!

We have dark editor skin! http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/22855

UE4 is nice, I was a subscriber before it went free. Blueprints are nice and the materials do rock. I've yet to spend my "free" $30 in their asset store.

I don't really have an issue with 5%. There are a lot of other entities like the government, Steam, other publishers etc. that can/will take a much bigger chunk.

Unity? Well they have crossplatform sewn up. Played with it for ~2 years.

I'm using OpenFl+Haxe+FlashDevelop for fairly painless mobile so I have no use for Unity 5 and it's "Personal Edition" splash screen.

Unity Pro's $4500, per seat for desktop+mobile is reasonable, but not cheap, for most indies.

Unity source? Sure for lots more money and, perhaps, a revenue share.

Torque3D Strengths

Torque3D is truly free

It's actively developed ( and the current team rocks )

Well documented.

PBR is on the way.

Crossplatform and more on the way.

Dark Editor skin for free :D

Most of the game systems I know I'll use are already there, no need to buy assets.

Built-in Networking is strong (not talking about MMO's and not the Prairie Games Python stuff, but that's proof it can be done )

A strong sense of ownership

Edit

Note the recent "scare" for Unity and Gamemaker users that their middleware might change or vanish due to a sale or possible sale of the company.

The concept of "future proofing" your toolchain has become more important for some. It has for me.

This article focuses on OpenFl+Haxe but makes some good points.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150217/236674/Game_Maker_Security_and_Freedom.php

Cheers