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Open Source vs Affordable Indie 3D Game Engines?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat May 26, 2007 04:20 PM
from the which-direction-would-you-choose dept.
from the which-direction-would-you-choose dept.
TBBScorpion asks: "Lately I have been investigating 3D game engines. I was mostly paying attention to open source engines like Ogre3d, Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and the like. Then I found out about cheap Indie licenses for commercial game engines like Torque Game Engine ($150), Torque Game Engine Advanced ($295) and the C4 Engine ($200 + free upgrades). I found a list of top commercial and open source game engines at devmaster.net in case anyone is interested (I didn't want to take the time to list all the engines, but there are more good ones that I did not list on this page). Now for my questions. Now, here's my dilemma. Which of the engines are worth investing in? Should I buy an indie license or hold out for open source? Or should I start with an indie engine and switch later if open source catches up?"
"Torque Game Engine 1.5 works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux but lacks modern shader support (except for something about a free modernization kit). I mostly do cross-platform software development so I like this feature.
However, there is Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) which adds shader support, the Atlas terrain paging feature, and a few other nice features, but since is DirectX9 based it is no longer cross-platform. I have also heard rumors about support for the engine to be a little on the lacking side, yet the Torque community seems to be rather large compared to other commercial engines. Are the complaints just from people who don't really know how to program expecting to be able to edit the C++ of the game engine, or are capable people really having trouble? I've heard rumors about stability of TGEA compared to TGE? For those of you who have used TGE or TGEA, would you recommend it over other engines?
The C4 Engine looks nice as well, but seems to be under active development and less mature, but might it potentially be a more modern game engine? Also, it supports Windows XP and Mac OS X, which is better then just Windows.
Here are the features I am hoping for are: a cross-platform engine, if possible; modern shader support; a built-in terrain paging system; and model, material and animation import from Blender 3d.
When it comes to the open source engines like Ogre3D, the main thing that seems to be lacking is the built-in editors, and at least Ogre3D is currently mostly a graphics engine rather then a complete game engine (i.e. physics built-in; does provide wrappers for ODE and other physics engines). My assumption is that is just a matter of time before Ogre3D and other engines catch up with the top Indie commercial engines?
Lastly, I will be using the game engine for not only making games, but for some scientific applications as well. Also, I started using C++ 10 years ago and have been using Python since January 2002, so I'm ready to dive into the engine code."
However, there is Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) which adds shader support, the Atlas terrain paging feature, and a few other nice features, but since is DirectX9 based it is no longer cross-platform. I have also heard rumors about support for the engine to be a little on the lacking side, yet the Torque community seems to be rather large compared to other commercial engines. Are the complaints just from people who don't really know how to program expecting to be able to edit the C++ of the game engine, or are capable people really having trouble? I've heard rumors about stability of TGEA compared to TGE? For those of you who have used TGE or TGEA, would you recommend it over other engines?
The C4 Engine looks nice as well, but seems to be under active development and less mature, but might it potentially be a more modern game engine? Also, it supports Windows XP and Mac OS X, which is better then just Windows.
Here are the features I am hoping for are: a cross-platform engine, if possible; modern shader support; a built-in terrain paging system; and model, material and animation import from Blender 3d.
When it comes to the open source engines like Ogre3D, the main thing that seems to be lacking is the built-in editors, and at least Ogre3D is currently mostly a graphics engine rather then a complete game engine (i.e. physics built-in; does provide wrappers for ODE and other physics engines). My assumption is that is just a matter of time before Ogre3D and other engines catch up with the top Indie commercial engines?
Lastly, I will be using the game engine for not only making games, but for some scientific applications as well. Also, I started using C++ 10 years ago and have been using Python since January 2002, so I'm ready to dive into the engine code."
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If you want to actually get into the engine code (Score:4, Informative)
The engine is simply not geared towards direct interfacing. If you're happy using TorqueScript to do everything, then give it a shot. If, like me, you need to interface with other C++ components, you're in for a tough ride.
Make your own engine! (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's for programmers, not people wanting to play a game. Programmers can compile things. By definition. If you can't jump that hurdle, the whole thing is certain to be useless to you, so why should anybody waste their time trying to support you wasting yours?
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What do you think the engine is for? And there are demos (depending on how lon
Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't even get me started on its Linux "support." Linux is a second-class-citizen in Torque, the engine even stubs out(!) some important things like joysticks.
If your projects are small, I'd recommend homebrewing your own framework. If you're really not into gra
That's what I did... (Score:2)
Just seemed easier to start from scratch. I won't have all the cool stuff torque has, but at least I know what the hell is going on with the stuff i have.
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Don't tell me Q3 can't do single-player. Medal of Honor (spearhead, and breakthrough also), and the Jedi Outcast/Academy, and Elite Force have all used the Q3 engine as their base.
Doom or Quake... (Score:5, Informative)
The original Doom engine has been used in a shit load of games since (including games available for a wide variety of platforms, such as portable music players).
The Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_engine [wikipedia.org] has a lot more information about the Quake III engine, and a lot of handy links at the bottom (such as http://www.icculus.org/quake3/ [icculus.org] "A project to remove bugs, clean up source code and to add more advanced graphical and audio features via SDL and OpenAL, and to act as a clean base package to build other projects on.")
Go get it!
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from their faq:
Q: I'm looking for an engine for our game project. What can XreaL offer?
A: XreaL provides a complete toolchain for game content creation. You will get:
the Quake 3 Arena engine with many renderer tech updates
a customized GtkRadiant level editor for Q3A/Doom3 style hybrid mapping
a customized XMap compiler based off Q3Map1
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You can have a viable commercial game released on an open source engine. You just have slightly less prot
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others will then be able to use the code you wrote but it won't make your game available to download for free.
jMonkeyEngine (Score:4, Informative)
Runs on OSX, Win, and Linux. Advanced Shader Support. Open.
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Re:jMonkeyEngine (Score:4, Interesting)
http://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html [bytonic.de]
Parent
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Nice hobby project though.
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One thing to bear in mind:
I highly doubt the jmonkeyengine actually does the heavy 3D lifting in java itself. It probably uses Java3D which is a wrapper to native OpenGL calls. So the bits that need the most speed are still native, but the rest of your core game logic etc. is in Java.
The performance overhead of using Java3D is pretty negligible compared to accessing OpenGL from C/C++.
Of course, writing a game in Java has other problems. It's much more trivial to extract the original source from compil
Re:jMonkeyEngine (Score:4, Insightful)
You also need to do a hell of a lot more in a game engine than just call OpenGL rendering calls, which would be fine if all you need was to render the same static frame again and again. In any game you will also need to do lot of CPU intensive tasks like intersection testing, physics simulations, skinning and other types of animations, AI and similar with real time performance and in addition to you game logic. OpenGL will not do this for you (yes, I know there is work being done, moving much of this to hardware, but that is not an option until everyone runs DX10 or later compatible GPU's many years down the line).
All this is of course possible with Java but it is not optimal and sub-optimal simply wont cut it in the game industry.
jmonkeyengine is a nice piece of work for small games and hobby projects. But it is a long way from being competitive in the serious gaming industry. But by all means, if this is just a hobby for you I'm sure it is more than good enough.
To put it in other words, "Bang Howdy" is a cute game but it is not exactly Halflife2.
Parent
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Obvious trolling, but I'll bite anyway
I probably do know a lot more than you do since I program 3D real time graphics for a living, not games but we do much of the same stuff. Btw: I do not own a playstation (or Xbox for that matter), although I would have to admit my main PC is excellent for running the latest games
1. ODE and OPCODE are excellent open source libraries not written in Java, I've used both on a regular basis. If your going to do everything using native libraries
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It seems that most consumers have this "Playstation 3 syndrome." I enjoy The Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org], but that doesn't mean that it could sell copies like God of War. Given that the topic regards game development, perhaps for deployment, PS3 syndrome may be something that he has to deal with.
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3D on LUA (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to downplay the benefits of programming in C++, I think it is better to focus game development using scripting language rather than for C++. When I started writing games on the Apple II+ I wrote everything in 6502 assembly but with lores B&W graphics. Today the successful game developer no longer has that
Is an engine by any other name still an engine? (Score:4, Informative)
It in some part depends on specifically you want to do with the engine. For example, physics stuff can be handled with ODE, Newton, Novadex, or others. There are even Ogre bindings to use these (Gangsta wrapper abstracts this process, though there does exist OgreODE and OgreNewt as well). You'll also find, basically all open source projects end up using OPCODE for collision detection, though you might not want to use it directly (there is also a wrapper for Ogre and OPCODE).
I ended up writing my own code for interfacing with ODE, since I desired collision detection, but not physics. Since the code you can find is open sourced (a good amount is free use without any restrictions -- I believe this is true for anything posted or related to Ogre).
Not having an editor is somewhat problematic, though there does exist world/terrain editors out there -- both free and for pay (some are reasonably priced). For basic 3d modeling there is of course Blender, which can also do scenes, though it does have a fairly large learning curve. If you search around Ogre's web page, it actually provides a ton of links to the other resources out there.
For input management, the new version of Ogre comes with OIS (open input system), which is cross-platform. And you can use OpenAL for sound. So all the components are there, but you do have to assemble them. I like this strategy, as each component has its own dedicated group of people who worry about it, and try to make it the best possible.
However, if you like things prepackaged, you might also want to look at the Irrlicht engine. They've taken the opposite approach to Ogre, and provide a self-contained engine. I haven't used it myself, but I am of the understanding it is much faster to learn and use than Ogre, though I don't know how the performance compares..
One last thing I would add about Ogre, and what convinced me to use it was that there are a bunch of profressional games out there that use it. Again, if you go to the Ogre web page, you can peruse the comercial games made.
Avoid Torque - at least for now. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably one of the things I truly regret spending money on the most. Garagegames put a lot of money into marketing and hype but never pull through on their promises. TGEA arrived 2 years late and by the time it arrived had many major features cut from it such as the promised built in terrain editors, OpenGL support and so forth.
The RTS kit was another scam in this respect, it doesn't contain pathfinding, support for RTS AI or anything of the sort by default, Garagegames claim this is because "all games need different pathfinding/AI requirements" however this argument is extremely weak - let's face it, core AI is pretty standard and surely it's better to provide at least some AI to the demographic they sell the engine to on their "why make a mod when you can make a game" premise that provide nothing at all. Also, the RTS kit is about 3 versions out of date with the main Torque Game Engine - Garagegames don't keep it up to date with the main codebase, they simply tell you to do it yourself.
TorqueX is yet another example of Garagegame's cutting of features and delays, it was meant to be ready with 3D support included for XNA GSE's release in their original press release, now however it's still entirely unreleased and anything other than basic 3D has been cut from the initial release.
Do not trust Devmaster.net, it's sponsored by Garagegames and is heavily biased, in it's top 10 list of commercial game engines (http://www.devmaster.net/engines/) Torque is always listed first, even when the site's very own ratings system shows TGE as only have 3.5 stars when the likes of C4 has 4.5 and TV3D SDK 6 has 4!.
Other than that the issues with TGE and TGEA are that the engines have just turned into such messy hacked together swamps of code over the years they're really tough to use. Many features of the engine are also half-assed or extremely dated compared to other offerings on the market, some are even suffering from long running bugs that can even result in fatal crashes - physics and vehicle support for example really need a complete rewrite for anything other than the very simple games that you see in the Garagegames store. The other problem that plagues all GG's products other than TGB is a severe lack of decent documentation - this is really bad when the engine is such a nonsensical mess. The Torque code base is ancient and new features have been hacked in through the years - it's either time to write it off and start from scratch or a MASSIVE refactoring session to clean up and update the code base. The sad fact is, the learning curve for the combination of such a messy engine, non-intuitive scripting system, poor documentation, requirement to fix a lot of things yourself means that you're not far off writing your own engine from scratch over using TGE/TGEA.
So is all of Garagegames stuff bad? No not at all, Torque Game Builder is pretty good if it's 2D your after, that's one product that has a whole lot of polish, good documentation, a good toolset and so forth. Arcane FX is absolutely fantastic too, but this is a 3rd party addon to TGE and is hence unfortunately absolutely wasted on this engine.
I think the problem Garagegames has is bad management and a marketing department that doesn't seem to worry about outright lying to make sales (not that that's a rare thing in marketing of course!). The management problems I'm referring to is the fact they keep announcing new engines or product lines without completing their last projects! Torque Game Builder game along when they were claiming they were too busy to fix the RTS kit. TorqueX came along when not only was the RTS still neglecte
Panda (Score:2, Interesting)
Ogre3D is great (Score:3, Informative)
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Panda3D (Score:2)
Unity (Score:2)
Inside scope (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked on a 3d engine for the last 7 years the most important advice I can give you is "only invest in a game engine that can do what you need right now".
Every game engine I've seen, ours included, have a list of great upcoming features. But there is no guaranty that any of those features will be implemented by the time you need them (if they are added at all).
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This is especially true with DX I don't know why, but MS manages to change JUST enough every time to make a redo sound like less work than adapting. How did you solve that
Ogre Has an Editor (Score:2)
The latest Blender revisions offer tight integration with Ogre, not entirely unlike UnrealEd.
OSG? (Score:2)
While it doesn't provide audio/input sup
Re:Torque on linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally hope to find nice answers in this thread... also, from what I have seen in the Gamedev.net forums people over there do not like Open Source stuff... of course I saw some 2 years ago... things surely have changed by now.
Parent
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With that said, it is probably what the engine get used for most of the time.
Re:Torque on linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Greetings,
A common misconception (Score:2, Interesting)
For a very few developers like id and Valve, their engines are state of the art, and intended to be sold as products in their own right. There is an argument to be made that id is no longer a game company; they are really a middleware company that sells game engines, and releases tech demos every 5 years or so.
For all s
Re:Torque on linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, getting TGE to run on Linux is an ungrateful task, to say the least.
Some time ago I got lured into buying it because they used to state on the product page that they supported linux. I bought both Torque Game Engine (3D) and Torque Game Builder (2D).
Long story short, the Linux version is far from the quality of the Windows and OS X counterparts (when it runs at all) and the company dropped Linux as a supported platform, "because it consumes too many of their resources". Instead, the Linux version is now supported by the community - but it bears the same price tag, nonetheless...
There used to be a guy who offered himself to help with the Linux version of the engine. He did this *for free*. Garage Games used to take months to reply to his e-mails when he sent them a message saying "hey guys, you just released a new TGE version so I took care of making a linux release, it's ready for you to put on your page". There was somewhat of a revolt on the forums and Garage Games eventually worked with this guy for some more time (still for free) and after that, I just gave up on Garage Games, because their support really suck. It's just as UnDiWhan said on another comment [slashdot.org]: a pervasive attitude of "If you can't figure it out without help, you shouldn't have gotten the Advanced Engine". This is also valid for the regular TGE and TGB.
Things may have changed, though, because Garage Games created a buzzword for their documentation and also a site to host it. But again, just like the Linux versions are "community-supported", the documentation is mostly (all?) user created content - it's a Wiki...
As for Ogre3D, I wouldn't say it's slow, it's actually pretty good and pretty fast. But if you don't use it correctly, it can kill your game. I've seen games using Ogre very efficiently and others that were slow as hell.
Parent
CrystalSpace has great documentation (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not saying the other engines could be bad, but I know that CS is awesome.
Parent
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Re:Wrong place to ask (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:WOOT! I Pissed of some fucktarded shitdot sheep (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Crystalspace (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably going to get flamed and down-modded, but what the hell. IAAPGD (I AM a professional game developer) and shipped titles on PSX, PC, PS2, and soon Wii.
CS has been around, what 10 years? It was crap for the first few years. It overly complicated something simple, with terrible class design and coding style that was clearly written by an amateur. Unless you've shipped a game or two, most developers just aren't aware of all the issues -- not just tech, but features, that a game engine needs. A game engine really needs to run on both PC and consoles so it has the opportunity to have a _clean_ API of the various math, rendering, collision detection, collision response, physics, sound, input, etc.
Since it's not good to criticize without offering a solution, David Eberly's Wild Magic engine and books do a very nice job of clearly explaining the how and why's of engine design. It's not perfect, and you can tell where he had to make compromises, but it's a joy to read. Probably because he wrote NetImmerse before they became Gamebryo.
Cheers
Parent
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And here's a thread where David mentions him writing NetImmerse for those interested...
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp
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