This May Interest A Few Defectors :)

the Beyond Virtual Free Eval Version (Starter Kit) is available for download... http://www.beyondvirtual.com/

hey... for comparison purposes only... nothing wrong with taking a look now, is there :)

--Mike

OK Mike, but how was it for you?

I'm getting a bit demoed out, they all promise The Earth and seldom deliver so much as a plot for a parking lot.

i hear ya dude... meeee too...

:)

i'm not gonna play with it tonight...

gonna log off in a few, take a shower, heat up some Chinese food i just had delivered... pour a glass of red wine, and catch a lil tv before i head off to nana land...

i'll check it out tommorrow...

--Mike

Beyond looks nice but fails at first step. They expect everyone to use US keyboard and... lo and behold... there's plenty of us using other keyboard layouts. Yes. I've been in this business too long not to know the US layout but I just hate it when something like that is imposed on me.

Another one for the bin...

Barney

Gekido's track record is very poor, so I wasn't expecting much here. And sure enough, having registered for a bronze account to get the tutorials, I get a prompt asking me for a silver account password before I can download any of them. The FX editor is the only thing I've played with so far, and seems very poor.

hey gab!..thought you'd died or summit, guess not :p ;)

Heh no, haven't died ( to my knowledge. ) Just haven't been on IRC in a few months. Been horribly busy with work and real life and all that stuff. You know how it goes.

Hehe, I registered, and they sent a broken link to confirm it with!

Not sure I'm even going to install the demo if that's their competence level.

I note they also sneaked an "opt in" on the end of it without explanation. I felt that to be underhanded to be honest.

well... i did make sure i had backed up all essential data from the machine i installed it on...

the registration went smoothly, i downloaded the demos extras pack... ran the 3d walkthrough demo... didn't see much to get excited about, except for the smooth elevator...

left it for two minutes... then i got this...



i'll continue looking at it... but so far...uhhhh, i dunno...

--Mike

I'd leave it Mike, it's clearly had it's chance and blown it.

This is something I won't be buying. I'm going to stick with Engines that are proven to work and have a large userbase.

I'll try the demo though.

Bleh - could go either way, couldn't it? I'll probably take another look in six months or so. See where it's at.

Aim at Red. Shoot at free will :) but I bet he will survive our earthly bullets

hahahahah... heyyyy... careful with those bullets...

actually, i'm just posting all this defection stuff to get Mark to give us another B3D upgrade while we wait for BMax3D to arrive...

shhhhh... keep it under your hat...

--Mike

Without a doubt BV is lacking at the moment. Documentation is spotty and numerous features are either half working or missing completely. But here's the catch... this is only v1.0.

Anyone remember what B3D was like back at v1.0? I'd assume that it wasn't the polished, feature filled (DDS aside) tool that we all know and love today.

I'll be finishing my current B3D project by March. At that time I'll be looking for my next engine (assuming that Max3D won't get released until the day after 'Duke Nukum Forever' hits the street). Right now the top 3 are Truevision 3d, Unity3D and Beyond Virtual. Each has it's plusses & minuses. Oh, on the outside chance that my game sells countless copies then I'll be getting the Reality Engine license instead!

Hopefully by March BV will be stable and I'll be able to put that delicious Lightwave pipeline to great use!

ATi error or nVidia... when you get the error popup???

This has got to be a joke, surely? One of the samples just doesn't run. The walkthrough runs, but it's just awful. Everything flickers. There's nothing on screen apart from a few very low poly walls and horribly low res textures and it's already dropping to circa 40 fps. The stencil shadows are horribly broken, the particle effects are a mess. I mean, even Reality Factory wasn't this bad. I wouldn't use this if it was free.

Red October, If you keep switching from game engine to game engine you'll never get anything done.

yeah lacking describes it well.
I just played with release candidate 2 and still see the same problems.
Normal maps are per vertex?, becuase it works on a ati 7200

It has potential, if it ever becomes what its described as.

Give it a pass for now.

I do like that it will pick up the MTL files exported with LWO files.
and bloom is decent..thats about it..heh

Sam

It looked interesting before I tried their demo...horrendous...

skyfire1, hi!

actually you have the wrong impression, he's not switching around engines, he is only looking at what they offer and sharing it with this community.
He does have his sub game in a couple of engines afaik though, 3impact and blitz mainly i believe.

c'mon now... please don't make me bore you to death with screenshots of what i did today (yesterday) with the sub game in Blitz...

:)

this pretty much sums it up for me as well... i was warned about a few things from a trusted source prior to the demo release... and from what i see, a lot of things still haven't been addressed...

i always thought that the point of releasing something like this was to put out something super bang wiz that would impress the crowd beyond belief... but like stated above, this was so ill executed, the demos so poor... i just don't know what to say...

--Mike

After 24 hours I still can't get the rest of it to even think of trying it out as they even fumbled the bronze registration. Imagine asking a trial user to register to get the instructions and rest of the trial content!

I wrote to them immediately, but nada, zip, not so much as an electronic/digital sausage.

There seems to be no support, despite my writing to them at support using the address they suggested on the original registration page.

Reading between the slightly lacking error messages, it seems they never bothered to initialise the account. I've clicked on every link they sent and they are all broken and do no behave as they suggest they will.

It's just so completely poor in all possible ways so far. It seems practically no effort has been put into making a showcase for themselves. Too bad.

Wow.. this engine really sucked :/

poly... did you enter your email address as the username... and no password... it's a lil confusing the way they got it set up...

--Mike

@Red Ocktober: Wasn't talking about the demo for the actual engine; I never tried that. I was talking about that game demo that was produced with it. Can't seem to find it now...probably because it was so horrible they removed it.

oh... sorry... yeah, the demo level, right...

if i see it i'll post a link...

--Mike

Also, looking here: http://www.beyondvirtual.com/?page=licensing.php

Why do you have to pay $100 more a year just for updates? What a scam, considering how buggy I hear its early release is.

I also don't like how you have to put their splash screen in your game..

Edit: Actually, this is pretty interesting after looking around more than I did the first time. Only thing I really don't like is what I listed above (although the $100 per year is more serious to me).

Red, I tried it all, on page instructions followed, in e-mail intructions ditto, and links clicked as supplied in all cases. Then e-mail request for help ignored.

It's just plain rubbish I guess.

i'm sure you already tried this, but just in case...

go here--> http://www.beyondvirtual.com/

1- look for starter kit free, then go to the login link...
2- enter your email address you put in when registering, no password...
3- in the upper left of the next page, look for example projects, and click the link...
4- look for BVStarterKitExtras.exe link and click...

install...

--Mike

All I get for that is: "Invalid User - Restricted Directory"

This happens at completion of stage 2 above. (it then asked me to login again and round and around we go until I abort that) Finally getting the message I quoted above

Hence I can't get as far as 3 or 4.

The whole thing is a crock for sure, but thanks for the thought bud, it might have worked! ;O)

Anyway if this is anything to go by I am probably better off not letting it loose on my non virtual PC! ;O) It could easily be worse than a virus! ;O)

Eh this engine really does suck horribly...

IKG - I'm with you. mucho sucko

LOL... mucho sucko...

HAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!

--Mike

It's been so grim it turned out pretty amusing really! ;O)

ok... you know i had to do this...

GUESS THE ENGINE...



:)

--Mike

Hmmm.... Tough one :)

I think your work with B3D i better :)

I'd have never have guessed that could happen.

Stange days indeed!

Well done.

The platform is the Commodore 64 by the looks of it.