For me it's all about creating my own games that will benefit me in the long run. Sadly using Torque X proved to be harder then simply using plain XNA. This is due entirely to it's lack of documentation and proprietary component model. This makes it incompatible with any community written components and apart from commercial reasons, I don't get why that was done.

Also, professional programmer, I'm not sure what the relevance of telling us that Marble blast ultra was ported to Torque X in three weeks is. This was done by GG staff, who wrote the Torque X engine. I can port any of my existing stuff to my engine in three weeks, because I know my engine inside and out. This goes back to a previous poster who mentioned that GG products have documentation that seem to assume that you have been using Torque for years. I will not dwell on this because you have stated that you are working on this. Your forums however, seem to suggest that you have been working on this for three years now!

Penhalion Wolfe:

For me it's all about creating my own games that will benefit me in the long run. Sadly using Torque X proved to be harder then simply using plain XNA. This is due entirely to it's lack of documentation and proprietary component model. This makes it incompatible with any community written components and apart from commercial reasons, I don't get why that was done.

Also, professional programmer, I'm not sure what the relevance of telling us that Marble blast ultra was ported to Torque X in three weeks is. This was done by GG staff, who wrote the Torque X engine. I can port any of my existing stuff to my engine in three weeks, because I know my engine inside and out. This goes back to a previous poster who mentioned that GG products have documentation that seem to assume that you have been using Torque for years. I will not dwell on this because you have stated that you are working on this. Your forums however, seem to suggest that you have been working on this for three years now!

We've been using a new documentation model for Torque Game Builder, to hugely excited responses. The same model is being applied for Torque X, and while the first GA release of Torque X may not be 100% complete, the basics are growing quickly.

One thing that I'm finding very interesting however is how many people are stating that "it's easier to make my game in XNA than Torque X!".

In the last week and a half, having no development experience in either XNA or Torque X, I've made three different 2D game prototypes and developed 6 generic behavior components, in under probably 300 lines of C#. All of my projects are directly deployable to the XBox360, and my content pipeline consists of dragging images from the internet (right out of the browser) to the TGB-X editor application, and then setting the cell sizes/counts as appropriate. This automagically handles all XNA requirements for including the images in my project, which is great since I haven't even glanced at the XNA content pipeline.

I click on the "generate XBox360 Project", and my XBox360 project is auto-generated for me. From there, I could (if I had a dedicated 360, which I don't) do the normal GSE deploy to 360 step, and be up and running.

I don't want this to be taken the wrong way, that's not my intent, but I think that people may be looking at Torque X from too low a level, and worrying about the "engine" aspects, instead of the "game" aspects...and therefore getting bogged down in how they think the engine for their game should work, when the purpose of Torque X is to abstract all of the low level requirements of a game away from the game developer, and let you focus on making the game itself.

I know the entire team has expressed to me their concerns regarding what people are finding difficult, so if anyone has any specific cases of "I was trying to figure out how to do this, but it was easier without Torque X", we'd love to hear them!

I think you hit the nail on the head there Surix. I don't want to be stuck making 2D games because that's all an engine supports. I don't want to wait or compromise because 3D is coming to it at some point in the future. XNA is "Easy enough" for my needs and most others by the look of the responses.

The editor is great but, as someone else mentioned. What happens when you hit the "I need to write an add-on" wall. From the looks of things, you need to spend an additional 100 dollars to get the sourcecode and then learn it in order to correctly modify it. With XNA, everything we need to learn is under the one roof. If I need to write an editor, then I can write a crude one that suits my needs and crucially it's free to modify and change at my whim.

I'm sure some here will use Torque X. For me however, I'm taking no shortcuts. If my game works and works well. I want it to be all my own work with no extra labels or shout outs (except to XNA obviously).

Penhalion Wolfe:

If my game works and works well. I want it to be all my own work with no extra labels or shout outs (except to XNA obviously).

Why? Pride isn't the best attribute to have in game development IMO.

Right now I'm rolling my own simply for learning and the things I want to try. For instance I'm trying to create a Bezier curve system for terrain which I have no idea where to start with Torque X. I also like learning the low level physics and component stuff.

That said, I have downloaded Torque X and once I get an artist lined up, I'm going to try and make a couple games using it. I'd like to really test it out, but without as much programming, I feel more like I need an artist to really proceed. I could always use programmer art, but then I have to see my ugly work :).

 I'm going to start working with Torque X (hopefully) tonight and I'll be updating my blog as I go writing up things I like/don't like and all those things. I think my main problem is that while the Torque X library is free, the Torque Editor is only a 30 day trial and I don't want to be in the middle of the game and have the editor stop working, whereas XNA is free forever (on Windows anyway).


 

Machaira:

Why? Pride isn't the best attribute to have in game development IMO.

Sure it is.

What's more rewarding than being able to say "I made this all by myself".

In a commercial setting, the bottom line is money, so it makes sense to use someone else's technology if it will save money. For hobbyist developers, even those who have professional aspirations, the bottom line is often to create something and own it every step of the way as much as possible. For many people the game is almost beside the point, the process of creation, working towards a goal is what it is all about. It's like asking a fine painter why they don't just use a camera.

Anyone here could grab Torque X and crap out 3 platform demos in a week, but really where's the fun in that? I know that Torque doesn't do anything I want to do, but even if all I wanted to do was hack out an SMB clone I probably wouldn't use it because it just doesn't sound like fun to me.

cronholio:

Machaira:

Why? Pride isn't the best attribute to have in game development IMO.

Anyone here could grab Torque X and crap out 3 platform demos in a week, but really where's the fun in that? I know that Torque doesn't do anything I want to do, but even if all I wanted to do was hack out an SMB clone I probably wouldn't use it because it just doesn't sound like fun to me.

For clarification: are you talking about 3D, or something different?

cronholio:

Anyone here could grab Torque X and crap out 3 platform demos in a week, but really where's the fun in that? I know that Torque doesn't do anything I want to do, but even if all I wanted to do was hack out an SMB clone I probably wouldn't use it because it just doesn't sound like fun to me.

While I agree with you on the pride of doing it yourself, I think you might be missing the point of torque. By your logic you shouldn't be using XNA or C# at all either because they hide a lot of complexity compared to c++ and directx or opengl.. I haven't had a real chance to evaluate torque because of the trial expiration, but from what I can see and have read it seems as though it still leaves plenty of room for custom coding while removing a lot of the grunt work and the need to build a complex level editor.

We all love to experiment, but at some point most people want to be able to create something other people can enjoy. I think the truth of the matter is that we are all here for different reasons. Some people want to seriously produce games, others want to dabble and in the process create something that resembles a game, and still others are only interested in creating libraries for other people's use.

If you look at the samples that come with torque x you'll see that they are not SMB clones and that there is real coding involved, torque does not do all the work for you. On top of that you don't have to use every piece of the engine. Since your project is still an XNA C# application you could phase out any portion of the engine you chose to. For instance you could replace the physics component with one of your own design if need be, or create a new custom particle system.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that I had the same misconceptions about what torque is as you seem to. I think it's at least worth a look to anyone who (for now) is doing a 2d game of any type and does not look forward to building a complex level editor.

Just my opinion, and it may change once I get a chance to really test out TorqueX (how's that key for creators club members coming?)
 

Valrith:

For clarification: are you talking about 3D, or something different?

I'm talking about 3D, among other things. Everything I'm doing is 3D. Also I'm working on an animation system that I'm pretty certain no game has used, ever, so I doubt when TorqueX does support 3D that's it's going to work the way I want it to.

BrokenPlatypus:

While I agree with you on the pride of doing it yourself, I think you might be missing the point of torque. By your logic you shouldn't be using XNA or C# at all either because they hide a lot of complexity compared to c++ and directx or opengl..

Exactly.  Virtually all commercial games are built on someone else's engine -- professional designers don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time they write a new game.  Several of the best XNA games so far use the Farseer, but I doubt anyone is less impressed with Alex Okafor's game design and programming skills because he didn't roll his own physics engine for Wildboarders and Nut Harvest.  It's also worth noting that two of the four Game Studio Express Challenge games were done using TorqueX.

Anyway, I can certainly understand people wanting to tinker with writing their own engine in order to understand the low level stuff better.  But if I was trying to put something out commercially, I would want to build it on an existing engine.

I just hope the GG guys come through soon with their promise to give CC members longer evaluation periods.  Mine's expired too and I really want to evaluate it for my DBP entry!

BrokenPlatypus:

While I agree with you on the pride of doing it yourself, I think you might be missing the point of torque. By your logic you shouldn't be using XNA or C# at all either because they hide a lot of complexity compared to c++ and directx or opengl.

Hey why not take it even further and write your own OS, graphics API and compiler? In my view there's a big difference between using a particular framework, API or language for game development and using someone else's game libraries or engine. If you write a game using XNA and C# from the ground up it's not a huge leap to go to Open GL or DX with C++. If you build a game using someone else's engine it's much more difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to port it somewhere else. I'm not saying this is the case with TorqueX, obviously I never tried porting a game made with TorqueX anywhere. Just illustrating that XNA/C# is not a big leap from OGL/DX/C++.

I, btw, do not have a problem with using someone else's libraries or components. I would use someone else's game libraries or components if they did what I wanted to do, but at this point, TorqueX does not do what I want it to do. There are a handful of things that are important to me that I am fairly certain it will never do.

I wasn't insuating that TorqueX was only good for platform games, I just threw SMB out there as an example. I understand what TorqueX is, and I know it's not something I want to use, that's really all there is to it.

I'll second that sentiment. I don't feel that using a third party engine is justified when XNA framework does more than enough. Sure it will provide a pretty editor but, you are limited to what the engine can do or else you have to write the extra components and effects yourself. At that point you start to wonder why you didn't just roll your own.

Incidentally, a lot of professional development companies roll their own. Valve, Bungie, Epics to name but a few. Arguably the games that the roll your own companies produce are almost always without exception superior to those produced by companies who brought an engine in. This is down to internal knowledge of the engine and isn't something that can be learned over less than 6 to 12 months.

DBP is over in four months I believe, and while there will undounbtedly be more such competitions. I'm not about to try to learn an engine in that time frame.
 

SwampThingTom:

Exactly.  Virtually all commercial games are built on someone else's engine -- professional designers don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time they write a new game. !

 Actually that's pretty far from the truth. I worked in game development for 9 years, making games on every console from the SNES on up through the PS2. 11 games in total. We used other people's engines twice. The other 9 games were written from the ground up by people at the comapnies I was working for.

It's far more common for a PC game developer to use an angine than it is for a console developer, although console developers are using engines in increasing numbers it's nowhere near "virtually all".

cronholio:

 Actually that's pretty far from the truth. I worked in game development for 9 years, making games on every console from the SNES on up through the PS2. 11 games in total. We used other people's engines twice. The other 9 games were written from the ground up by people at the comapnies I was working for.

It's far more common for a PC game developer to use an angine than it is for a console developer, although console developers are using engines in increasing numbers it's nowhere near "virtually all".

I was always under the impression that RenderWare was used for some 90% of PS2 games, but have no factual data to back that up :).  Their site is down now, so I can't quote some selling point statistic.

At any rate, the most involved use of someone else's code I've ever used was an MD2 loader/renderer in VB6 for ZSX3: NinjaStarmageddon! and the fact that some stuff took place in a DLL was a little unnerving in itself.

cronholio:

Hey why not take it even further and write your own OS, graphics API and compiler? In my view there's a big difference between using a particular framework, API or language for game development and using someone else's game libraries or engine. If you write a game using XNA and C# from the ground up it's not a huge leap to go to Open GL or DX with C++.

I agree, C#/XNA to DirectX/C++ is not a valid comparison to Game Engine conversions.

cronholio:

I, btw, do not have a problem with using someone else's libraries or components. I would use someone else's game libraries or components if they did what I wanted to do, but at this point, TorqueX does not do what I want it to do. There are a handful of things that are important to me that I am fairly certain it will never do.

I wasn't insuating that TorqueX was only good for platform games, I just threw SMB out there as an example. I understand what TorqueX is, and I know it's not something I want to use, that's really all there is to it.

I agree here too, I just know that when I first saw torque and the editor videos I thought it was a drag and drop game builder and nothing more. I used to have this dos app years ago called Game Maker or something that allowed you to basically drag and drop to create platformers and it wasn't really good for anything more than that. That's what I thought torque was until I downloaded the demos and saw how much code you really need to write to make things happen and how much control you have over the engine internals.

I only wanted to help dispel the misconception that torque is a drag-drop-play game builder, which your original post made it sound like.

cronholio:

SwampThingTom:

Exactly.  Virtually all commercial games are built on someone else's engine -- professional designers don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time they write a new game. !

 Actually that's pretty far from the truth.

Ok, I should have been more careful with my use of a superlative like that without specific numbers to back it up.  Certainly back in the SNES days, I agree that most games used custom engines.  These days, though, I believe that the majority of games are written on top of an existing engine.  The costs and risks of doing everything from scratch is just too high to justify.

Anyway, my main point is that ultimately game players don't care, or usually even know, if a game was written on top of an engine or everything was done from scratch.  I'd rather make a great game that's fun to play using all of the tools available to me than take longer just to be able to say I did it all.  Obviously, though, if an engine doesn't do what you need, then you shouldn't use it.

But I detect that some of the detractors here (not necessarily you, cronholio) think that using an engine is "cheating".  Given the number of great games written on top of Source, Unreal, RenderWare and many others, that attitude just seems silly.

Tom

SwampThingTom:

professional designers don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time they write a new game.  Several of the best XNA games so far use the Farseer, but I doubt anyone is less impressed with Alex Okafor's game design and programming skills because he didn't roll his own physics engine for Wildboarders and Nut Harvest.  It's also worth noting that two of the four Game Studio Express Challenge games were done using TorqueX.

Reinventing the wheel as far as game engines go is called innovation.  And the impressive GSE Challenge game, the only one that was something people had never seen on XNA before, couldnt have been made with torqueX.  I think the kind of tools that would benefit this XNA community more than a game engine would be a physics system, a LOD system, an animation system, a gui system, systems that can do what they intend without affecting other aspects of the game.  There is a reason SpeedTree does not render the trees, it is a useful componant that is faithful to remaining usefull without you having to design your entire game around it.

TorqueX seems to be a very usefull software, but I am not suprised why this particular community tends not to use it.
 

Jamezila:

I was always under the impression that RenderWare was used for some 90% of PS2 games, but have no factual data to back that up :).  Their site is down now, so I can't quote some selling point statistic.

At any rate, the most involved use of someone else's code I've ever used was an MD2 loader/renderer in VB6 for ZSX3: NinjaStarmageddon! and the fact that some stuff took place in a DLL was a little unnerving in itself.

That's what Renderware would have you believe. Their logic probably works like this... 90% of all PS2 games are published by this handful of publishers. This handful of publishers all own Renderware. Therefore 90% of all games for the PS2 use Renderware. It's just simply not true. These publishers work with many small developers who do not use Renderware and cannot afford to buy into other technologies like Unreal 3. I can tell you for a fact that one major publisher bought into Renderware, announced they were transitioning ALL development to Renderware, yet I managed to somehow work on 2 PS2 games and one Xbox port for this company none of which used Renderware.

Another thing to remember is Renderware is not a game engine so to speak it's middleware. It can be used for many aspects of game development that have nothing to do with the final code that ends up running on a console. For instance, I've seen one developer use Renderware to create a visualizer that ran on PCs so artists could get an idea of what their assets would look like running on the PS2 right at their desk without requiring a PS2 tool. Renderware was not used for their game, however.

I'm starting to see what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what Torque X is, because you can't "see" the engine--what you see are the TGB-X editors, and especially movies and demos of that editor in use.

Surix:

(snip)

Reinventing the wheel as far as game engines go is called innovation.  And the impressive GSE Challenge game, the only one that was something people had never seen on XNA before, couldnt have been made with torqueX. 

That's a misconception. There is nothing at all in Torque X that precludes you from doing anything--it's an engine, not a game maker. The Torque X binary of course (which is what the Creators Club membership grants) doesn't expose the source code, but for a trivial price in the long run, the Torque X source code is available as well.

In addition, Torque X is written specifically to allow for extremely easy adaptation to any (currently 2D, but as has been mentioned, 3D is in development as well) game style.  I would very much be interested in what aspects of the game you mention above couldn't be done with Torque (now I admit, I don't know which game you mean, and if you are speaking specifically of 3D, I'll concede that for now).

I think the kind of tools that would benefit this XNA community more than a game engine would be a physics system, a LOD system, an animation system, a gui system, systems that can do what they intend without affecting other aspects of the game. 

Torque X has:

• full 2D swept poly collision, with collision callbacks that can be delegated to any C# implementation you wish
• LOD and Animation are in development for 3D (and actually exist in some form right now within the binary)
• a complete GUI implementation currently under development, and a fully dynamic GUI capability with 2D objects (which in many ways gives you even more capability than a stock GUI system could, since you can additionally use collision, animation, particles, and many other features of the engine itself within your GUIs)
• all underlying engine systems are fully delagatable (sp?), as well as the fact that they provide callbacks specifically for customization purposes.
• an event manager that allows for full journaling of game events (something that XNA does not provide), giving you snapshots of entire game states for testing and debuggin
• A full dynamic unit test system that allows you to manage your QA process as you develop
• Material Management system that removes all need for (but not capability of) direct control of the content pipeline
• Scheduling Manager
• Input abstraction away from direct devices to a meta structure that allows for swift and feature rich input mapping to your controlled object(s)
• A feature rich particle system 
• Object Pooling and Management
• a lot more, but I'm rambling!

TorqueX seems to be a very usefull software, but I am not suprised why this particular community tends not to use it.
 

As I mentioned in my first statement, it appears that our marketing of the ease of editor use has given people a false impression that Torque X is a "game maker" that locks you into pre-defined design criteria for your game, and nothing could be farther from the truth!

Valrith:

I'm starting to see what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what Torque X is, because you can't "see" the engine--what you see are the TGB-X editors, and especially movies and demos of that editor in use.

...<snip>...

As I mentioned in my first statement, it appears that our marketing of the ease of editor use has given people a false impression that Torque X is a "game maker" that locks you into pre-defined design criteria for your game, and nothing could be farther from the truth!

Well, without any decent API docs, the demo and videos are only thing we can use to judge if we want to invest time into using TX engine.  It's like GG is trying to sell us a set of ginsu knives, but is only showing us how to butter a piece of toast with it.  What is in dev really doesn't help us much unless you are going to release far before DBP.  ;)

Surix:

Reinventing the wheel as far as game engines go is called innovation. 

I'd argue that most videogame innovations have been innovations in game mechanics, not engines.  The time for a new engine is when a current one won't support your innovative game design.  That's not true for 99% of the games being made, commercially or by hobbyists.

 And the impressive GSE Challenge game, the only one that was something people had never seen on XNA before, couldnt have been made with torqueX. 

I disagree again.  Not to take anything away from Ben's awesome Dungeon Quest, but my favorite of the four games was Damage Control, written using TorqueX.  It was the only one that I felt met the goals of the challenge -- creating a complete, playable, and polished game in four days.  Dungeon Quest is an awesome tech demo (assuming your computer can run it at greater than 10 fps, which many can't), but it's not a complete, much less playable, game.  (That said, I couldn't do what he did even if you gave me four months, so believe me, I'm quite impressed.)

Also, I'm not convinced that Dungeon Quest couldn't be done in Torque or Blade3D or another 3D game engine.  Is there something in particular in it that you can point to that can't be done in an existing game engine?

Like I said, I haven't used Torque enough to know how useful it is.  But there seems to be a bias in the hobbyist community against game engines that is silly.  An engine is like any tool -- if it helps you make a better game faster, you should use it.

Tom

SwampThingTom:

Surix:

Reinventing the wheel as far as game engines go is called innovation. 

I'd argue that most videogame innovations have been innovations in game mechanics, not engines.  The time for a new engine is when a current one won't support your innovative game design.  That's not true for 99% of the games being made, commercially or by hobbyists.

 And the impressive GSE Challenge game, the only one that was something people had never seen on XNA before, couldnt have been made with torqueX. 

I disagree again.  Not to take anything away from Ben's awesome Dungeon Quest, but my favorite of the four games was Damage Control, written using TorqueX.  It was the only one that I felt met the goals of the challenge -- creating a complete, playable, and polished game in four days.  Dungeon Quest is an awesome tech demo (assuming your computer can run it at greater than 10 fps, which many can't), but it's not a complete, much less playable, game.  (That said, I couldn't do what he did even if you gave me four months, so believe me, I'm quite impressed.)

Also, I'm not convinced that Dungeon Quest couldn't be done in Torque or Blade3D or another 3D game engine.  Is there something in particular in it that you can point to that can't be done in an existing game engine?

Like I said, I haven't used Torque enough to know how useful it is.  But there seems to be a bias in the hobbyist community against game engines that is silly.  An engine is like any tool -- if it helps you make a better game faster, you should use it.

Tom

Id imagine anyone with a remotely modern computer could play DungeonQuest at full framerate. My Computer is close to 2 years old and had hundreds of frames to spare.  And I said it cant be done in TorqueX, but now that you mention 3d engines in general, it would have had lower framerate if done in those.  With generic bsp or oct tree compared to the custom collision and culling designed for cave tunnels, the custom optimized for the task at hand method will slaughter the doitall rendering/collision engine. In fact a game like that could have been done with multiple heightmaps and and the collision/culling processing would have been virtualy nonexistant.

I Looked Over the TGEA Site and it Mentions an Extra 360 License ... No Further Info (?)

???