TGE vs TGEA vs Blitz3d

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

Am I the only one not impressed by Torque?


And especially, am I the only one who disagrees with that statement being targetted at Torque?



Check for other engines that support MacOS and Windows. Linux probobly isn't worth turning down something as its market hasn't proven really worthy yet.

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/list.php?search_id=08dc2b0c0eb74b9e5da79b1471d9aa6d

If that doesn't work, just give this a search:

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/search.php

Cheers

I never liked torque, being primarily an artist it's mostly the lack of effort in the art pipeline tools and missing features.

To my knowledge even TGEA still only does 1 UV channel. Unless they changed DTS in the last 6 months. Which is in my mind a terrible omission.

On the coding front, I know very few coders that like Torque enough to use it, mostly due to bloat and lack of documentation. I think they cleaned up the code now, Even TGEA used to have the old voodoo code referenced throughout and everything was a big mess.

From what I understand their underlying rendering hadn't really changed that much between the two engines. TGEA still has lousy shadows and lighting, and it's BSP nature favores older graphics hardware since it doesn't batch geometry into large chunks optimal for modern GPU's, but send thousands of small chunks that was favorable for old hardware. (like sending too many surfaces to the video card in B3D, only BSP prioritized the redering somewhat so you didn't get quite the same performance hit of B3D so long as you stick with very low poly chunks and simplest collision volumes. But complex geometry still isn't handled well in TGEA the way most modern engines do.

In many ways B3D still offers more freedom than torque in the rendering department simply because B3D has better fixed multitexturing with 2 UV's.

Torque has shaders but only 1 UV channel, so you can't export lightmaps, or AO maps, or other effects that use more than 1 uv channel. Which limits things even with the benefit of shaders.

The other thing is that Torque is kind of set in its ways and is only really well suited to FPS unless you are willing to spend a good year sifting through the bloat and rewriting large chunks of the engine to work how you want them to. There are a lot of community hacks and addons that try and address the engines shortcomings, but compatibility between different versions is poor. So a lot of debugging, tweaking and sometimes rewriting is needed to make them work. Especially when they don't state which verson of torque they were intended for.

Having said that, it's been a good 8 months since I last looked at torque. Garage games don't tend to address core problems with their engine quickly though. They seem to like throwing stuff at their engines that look cool on the surface, and making their engine compatible with as many platforms as possible to increase revenue with expensive per platform, per title licensing. And ignoring fundamental flaws in the core design of their engine.

Thats the message I get from the more experienced coders I know that have looked at it, and my own experience with art pipeline tools. Which are bad enough that I turn down paid work that comes my way from time to time.

I don't believe they actually support linux officially any longer. Their strong points are support for all consoles if you can afford the licensing, and great networking built in.

Prarie Games, one of the more successful torque developers ended up developing a hybrid engine that used Ogre for rendering. They recently (last couple of months) got bought out by Garage Games and the lead coder now works on the TGEA rendering portion of their engine.

Please read comments made by Torque users
http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=3

Torque Game Engine Advanced - INDIE License $295.00 USD
Blitz3D - $100.00 USD

From author's worklog,
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=1&log=1043
Max3D will meet your requirement for your project and support mulitple language including BlitzMax, blitz3D and C++, etc. However, the price is unknown only.

Torque has its strong points but I probably wouldn't use it for a sub sim. The engine is solid for multiplayer action/adventure/shooter titles but unless you want to do a lot of work opening it up for your game I wouldn't use it. There are some game types that it is a godsend for but a sub sim doesn't strike me as one of them. There are about a million and one engine choices out now so it doesn't have to be Torque or Blitz. XNA is very nice if you want to target the PC and Xbox 360. If you want Mac that bad though maybe Torque would work. If you're well versed with C++ you really can do anything with it. I've personally modified just about every part of the engine. It's both a blessing and a curse to have the source code.

Try to use Shiva..thing running on pretty much everything out there(multiplatform), has included whole package (importers, material editors, particle editors, physics, script editor/light easy to use LUA/, AI, and so on)..price also really reasonable and as i said..running on almost everything, and it has really modern features...

I thought shiva looked promising, but I didn't think it ran on that many platforms yet?

PC,MAC,Phones, and consoles support coming..