TGE vs TGEA vs Blitz3d

[Chad]

I've been watching updaptes on Torque for awhile, and I think it's time for me to upgrade, or is it?

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/tge/featurecomp/

I can't make up my mind, honestly, which one would be better for my project. As you should know, I'm developing a World War 2 subsim simulation, and as I'm getting further into development, Blitz3d isn't keeping up with the needs I need it to do.

I think it was a great learning tool to learn programming, but I need to update, to a multi-platform, and faster engine.

So what I'm asking, is, should I cut back some features and stay with Blitz3d, or should I upgrade to Torque? If I should switch to Torque, would you suggest TGE or TGEA.

I like the price of TGE but some of the features TGEA offer are too good to pass up for the extra money.

Thanks,
Chad

[Hitman]

I have the feeling that unless your development is really fast, you would be soon finding again the same limits on the new engine when comparing with older ones.

My suggestion would be to make a reasonable choice and stick with it till the end. Otherwise you risk wasting much time in porting what you have done over and over to new engines :damn:

[Chad]

My suggestion would be to make a reasonable choice and stick with it till the end. Otherwise you risk wasting much time in porting what you have done over and over to new engines :damn:

I am hitting a brick wall, and must be experiencing the dilemna our friend Mike "Red Ocktober" is going through.

I did however purchase TGEA and it's definately a good buy. To see my models in a dx9 environment is definately a breath taker :)

[Deamon]

I have the feeling that unless your development is really fast, you would be soon finding again the same limits on the new engine when comparing with older ones. I second that! Maybe not the same limits but other limits and problems that will press you to look for another engine and you will end up like Mike. It seems you already made the first step towards it. :)

When we are talking here about a game engine then you will always be confined to its out of the box functionality. But depending on the engine it might be possible to add new functionality with your own DLL's. I think Blitz allows this. But still you are forced to work within the limitations of this obsolet language which is not real OO.

Also when you swith to something like TGE you will need to learn C++. You will need to learn it if you switch to something bigger unless the engine provides scripting like TGE does iirc but then you are limited to its functionality.

If you want it all you have to assamble your own engines from various libraries like OGRE and others. But this inturns brings extra effort with it and you will need to gain some serious skills.

So every approach has its own drawbacks. You need to consider wisely what you want to achieve and at which costs it comes and whether you are willing to pay this price.

My suggestion would be to make a reasonable choice and stick with it till the end. Otherwise you risk wasting much time in porting what you have done over and over to new engines :damn: I say just the same and can't stress this enough. When you decide to switch to another engine cause it looks promessing on the first look then you will soon start to discover all of its drawbacks, this things you usually discover only when you work with it. But at the beginning you see mostly only the advantages. There is always the tendency to be blue eyed only to get sobered after the confrontation with the practical harsh reality.

Personally I choosed the hard way of extra effort to get total freedome. I realized at the very beginning when I choose a particular game engine I will be doomed to live with its limitations for all the future. Game engines will continue to evolve(when the devs do not go out of bussiness) but the basic rule of being dependend remains. It would be horrobly to realize, in an advanced state of development after several years of work, that I need to port the whole thing to some other engine in order to achieve more specialized features.

This was not acceptable for me given the long term plans I have. So I choosed the hard way of assambling my own engine form various libs and the burden to take a steap learning curve but I have much improved since then and I am glad now that I made this decission, cause I can steadily improve my sim, focusing only on development and never bothering about porting + I have the access to the code of the libs I use this ensures totaly freedome and power. With commercial engines you do not have this benefit. When you get advanced coding skills you can modify the libs to your likings to specialize it even more to your purpose.

However when you choose a particular all in one game engine then you immediately face the problem that such engines are oftem made for a certain genre.

TGE for example isn't made for naval simulators but for RPG type of games. For example afaik TGE don't have a scene node system, so you cannot simple attach one object to another as you can do easily in blitz or ogre. You will have to deal then with quaternion math to make your own functions that deals with that. And this is only one example. Engines being made with a certain genre in mind is maybe the biggest problem. With OGRE I have the advantage to have a common renderer that I can optimize for a specific purpose if necessary. This is of course an extra effort then.

But it must be also said that the limitations of an engine are also sort of relative. A skilled coder will always get much more out of it than an amateur. But at some point you will have to hack around its limitations and this can get dirty with time.

So in a nutshell, when you take an all in one engine then you are limited to its functionality and when you assamble your own from libs then you are limited by your skills.

When you think to port to another engine then you should consult Mike for advice. You can watch him here over the shoulder: http://www.syntaxbomb.com/forums/forums.php

He has extensive experience with all sort of engines and tells a lot about them on this forum. You will surely see that he desperately switched back and forth from one engine to another only to find out that it is too limited as well. This only confirms me that I made the right decission. :)

As I said, for myself I decided to stick to OGRE and co no matter what and I have never regretted this decission. Although sometimes run into problems due to lack of competence. But this problem solves itself with time. Hope this helps. If you every want your sim to be finished you have to stick to something.

So generally you will be always limited by something, no matter what path you choose. Being this limitations engine feature wise or performance wise. So at the end game development comes down to trickery and illusions, in order to save processing power and create certain features that wouldn't be else possible. You can implement a feature in a smart efficient way or an inefficient way or might think that it is not possible at all. Coding lives from creativity more than anything else. You will always enconter problems during implementation and it is up to your creativity to solve it. This is what coding is all about.

[Hitman]

Heinrich's experience shows clearly in his comments :up:

I'd like to add an example here, taken no less than from a commercial sim: SH2 was graphically speaking outdated when it first came out, the reason being its origins dated many years before. Since the development time stretched too wide over the original previsions, the game's appearence suffered a lot. However -and this is the important lesson- its graphics even if outdated would not have disturbed a good gameplay (if there had been any at all, that is) because it was a strategic game. The naval sims can take a hard punch in the graphics part and yet be good and addictive, unlike other genres.

So, choose wisely and stick with it. Even if you stretch development of other areas too much, a subsim game shall not suffer as much as other genres. :up:

[Dust]

whats your goal chad, open source or commercial game?

whats your budget and time frame?