TGE => TSE transition

#1 You will have to tweak artwork and scripts, so...no it is not a drop-in solution. I believe the FPS tutorial has been converted to TSE, but I'm not sure about the racing one.

#2 Right now it's a lot of work. You can make and ship a game with TSE Today if you have the right talent in your team.

But it's Early Adopter.. not production. You could maybe post a debate all day long about that. You'll have to read earlier posts about the subject to get various opinions.

TGE games can and will be portable to TSE. But not every function is there right now or will be in the end product.

It's a no brainer for me to buy it. I mean for the price vs. the technology? It's a great deal for the money.

But it's not done, I am using it as a learning tool. Learn about how things are implemented in the engine.

The kind of people that should be buying TSE are. People looking to learn in advance, People that already know shaders. People that want to actually help build TSE.

But if you want what 1.4 is.. polished.. it's not. It's still in the oven.. but it smells damn good :)

#3 I understand TSE is an unfinished product still; my interest was in the eventual finished product. i.e., I was concerned about the feasibility of using TGE as a stepping stone so I could get TGE now, and then when TSE was eventually moved into production, migrate my game over to TSE without major re-work.

If the changes to TSE were significant and backwards compatibility with TGE wasn't provided, then it might be better to just start learning with TSE, though, as you pointed out, its still a work in progress.

#4 I've been doing exactly what you're referring to. I purchased TGE in the summer with the eventual knowledge that I'll be updating to TSE. I took advantage of the early adopter price while I could and never looked back. TSE is actually pretty well formed as it is, the only things really missing are lighting and my speedometer (after I ported starter.racing).

Good luck!

#5 Thanks for all the feedback and info!

#6 I'm in a group of students making a game using TGE. We started with the racing demo, and have made considerable changes in script and C++. Now we're considering porting the game to TSE in order to gain experience using shaders. I get the impression from the previous posts that porting it would be a major task. True? Does anyone know how much work it was to port the FPS demo to TSE?

Thanks!

#7 Not to much.. much of the code is the same. There are a few demo's that come with TSE. I used waterterraindemo (or something like that) as a base for my port. It has the new water and a sample terrain in it. You can just copy the spawn code and player datablocks over and it works. Just dont forget any functions :P ... it's a bit trail on error but it's not hard

#8 I have the same kind of question.
I'm planning to use TSE for our game. But we have a tight schedule.
So I don't want to implement all nice features of TSE, but one or two.
The thing is that I want to be able to go back to TGE whenever I want.
For instance, I want to put nice water and glow effect with TSE, but if I discover in large scale tests that it creates bugs, I want to get it off and go back to 1.4 (which is more stable I presume).

Is it possible ?

#9 If you want to spend a lot of time transitioning back and forth.

I plan to move to TSE soon enough, but it will be one heck of a long haul porting all of our (heavily modified) source to TSE's new rendering layer etc.

Edit: Finished moving to TSE, and it really isn't that bad.

#10 Does this mean that even for one feature (say water), I have to port all my sources to TSE, and if I want to go back, I have to port back to TGE ?
Does this mean also, that TSE without using shaders and special feature is not as stable as TGE 1.4 ?
I guess I'll stick to 1.4... but the eye popping TSE is so tempting.