Open Source vs Affordable Indie 3D Game Engines? 152
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."
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.
Make your own engine! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Make your own engine! (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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 graphics programming, try Irrlicht or Ogre.
Aaaand, if you want a full-fledged game engine that's easy to use, with Windows/Linux support (Mac support is dodgy at the moment), try Panda3D [panda3d.org]. I don't know how freely-usable it is in commercial projects (something about the libraries it links to), but it's a kickass engine, so much so that I make all my stuff with Panda3D now.
Basically, just don't be swayed by Torque's shinier logo. I mean, damn, it really is a nice logo [wikipedia.org].
Re:jMonkeyEngine (Score:4, Interesting)
http://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html [bytonic.de]
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 luxury.
Game development now requires imagination, creativity, artistic talent and often times story telling ability in addition to programming talent. IMHO it is better to balance your time developing all the different parts of a game than to waste cycles on the ins and outs of C++ (or assembly). I believe this is why the LUA (open source) scripting language has seen so much success in the development of video games. Games such as Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island published by Lucasarts and Neverwinter Nights and MDK2 developed by Bioware were written in LUA. More information about LUA can be found here: http://www.lua.org/ [lua.org] and here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/feat
There are no less than five (and probably more) major 3D engines tied to LUA: Ogre3D (using Emma3D http://emma3d.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net], Irrlicht http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] (using https://sourceforge.net/projects/irrlua/ [sourceforge.net], Apocalyx http://apocalyx.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net], Luxina http://www.luxinia.de/ [luxinia.de], and Electro http://www.evl.uic.edu/rlk/electro/index.html [uic.edu]
I am just getting started learning LUA (for a 2D game - another advantage of learning LUA - the ability to grow) so I make no claims to know which 3D engine is the best. There may be other 3D engines integrated to LUA out there and I would love to hear from other people who have experience developing games using LUA and from people developing 3D games using LUA.
Re:CrystalSpace has great documentation (Score:2, Interesting)
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 smaller developers, their engines are not that impressive. Most would much rather use an existing solution, and focus on game play instead. Those that can afford it license the big name engines. Those that cannot are forced to write their own engines. For the most part, customers are oblivious to the difference. A few hard core players know what it means when the game says it uses the "Source" engine, but most are just looking at the pictures. As long as it looks good, they will buy it. It doesn't matter what engine produced the graphics.
The game industry has a long tradition of reinventing the wheel. If it wasn't written there, they don't trust it. This is slowly changing, and I expect to see a lot more adoption of FOSS, particularly at the indie and small company end of the market.
Re:No silver bullet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Crystalspace (Score:3, Interesting)
As to CS being complicated. This has improved a great deal but it remains the case that CS is probably more complicated to use then the other engines. The big reason for this is that we concentrate on flexibility and modularity. This allows people to extend Crystal Space with their own plugins (and people actually do that) and even to insert new plugins to some application at runtime.
Finally I'd like to add that Crystal Space is no longer alone. We have a companion project called Crystal Entity Layer which is very popular these days and sits on top of Crystal Space to give the programmer a much easier to use game framework. And on top of CEL we also have CELstart. By using CELstart a person can make a full powered game using only Python and/or XML scripts. No coding required. We also have great support for Blender through the blender2crystal project which means that you can nearly code a full working game from Blender alone (with a few exceptions on writing Python or XML scripts for some of the game logic).
Greetings,