SpeedTree+UnrealEngine3 ?

#1 Unreal Engine is a high quality engine, but it's also one of the priciest options out there. I'm not sure what the current rate is for UE3, but it's roughly $500,000 up front plus royalties.

#2 Yeah I have to point out that if you're balking at all about spending $6k for SpeedTree, then the hundreds of thousands that UE3 will cost you to publish a game with is probably well out of your budget...

That $7000 is if you want a version of SpeedTree already made to be integrated with UE3, that's not the cost of SpeedTree PLUS UE3.

#3

Quote:That $7000 is if you want a version of SpeedTree already made to be integrated with UE3, that's not the cost of SpeedTree PLUS UE3.

Aaaah makes sense now. Thanks guys. So sticking to Torque is the best choice. Plus we can add all the features from UE3 if we have good programmers right?

#4 yes you can add all features from UE3 if you have good programmers thats what source access is for. :P

#5 Nice. And the programmers wont come in cheap either. But I am sure they will defiantly cost cheaper than 500K.

All you guys are experienced, can you tell me how I can get funded?
http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/89063

#6 Hello,

Torque 3D or maybe TGEA could be used for an MMO but I think in the long run, you'd invest a lot of time into the TGEA engine/T3D to be able to support an MMO though.

There are other types of speedtree style systems and even advanced shaders that can be used. But one thing about Unreal 3 or even the Unreal 2.5 which has been popular for MMO's is also the fact that it uses Rakknet. I don't see TGEA or OpenTNL network code having the MMORPG features as Rakknet. And Rakknet is now free for indies.

I was a beta tester for Spellborn.. Unreal 2.5/Speedtree/Rakknet.. TGEA or T3D isn't even close to being able to compare to that kind of engine.

I just don't think TGEA / T3D would cut it. I would rather have a DX9 / DX 10 renderer but I would want Lua or Stackless for scripting, Scaleform for UI's and in game menus, Havok or PhysX for physics, and Rakknet for networking.

Thats just my thoughts..
Chris

#7 Until ATLAS, the Unreal networking layer was pretty much the same as Torque networking. You could use Raknet with the earlier versions, but it's just as much work to integrate it with them as it is to integrate it with Torque.

The level of usability of Torque for an "MMO" is going to depend on how "Massive" your MMO is going to be. As an indie who is probably not realistically going to have hundreds of thousands of users on your first game, you can probably get away with some modification to Torque networking. If you really expect your user base to be large you'll almost certainly want to use something else, like Raknet, for the backend.

Even if you could afford a UE3 or Hero, which I doubt, there's still not much chance of getting a license if you have no published games, unless your funding is coming from a large, established publisher which will vouch responsibility for the quality of your work (which you're not going to get without any published titles).

Get yourself a small-scale prototype of your game concept with whatever technology you can afford, and then try to find some backers when you have something to show.

#8 Yeah, Hero, UE3, Bigworld and such are expensive. If you are looking for or wanting a cheap solution to test the waters, I would suggest looking at Panda. It's opensource and it's pretty complete as compared to up and coming Opensource MMORPG Engines like IndieZen.

Panda3d Link;
http://panda3d.org/

Panda3D also Powers Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean. (Free MMORPG)
http://apps.pirates.go.com/pirates/v3/welcome

Chris

#9 Chris, do you have an email? I need to ask you some stuff.

#10

Quote:Unreal 2.5/Speedtree/Rakknet.. TGEA or T3D isn't even close to being able to compare to that kind of engine

Compare how? The success of an MMO isn't measured by graphics, or else Age of Conan would be raking in the dough instead of hanging on by its pinky-nail...

#11

Quote:Compare how? The success of an MMO isn't measured by graphics, or else Age of Conan would be raking in the dough instead of hanging on by its pinky-nail...

But having a beautiful looking game will get you more hype in the design phases. Wouldn't it? If its an ugly looking game and you try to market that, there wont be as much as hype. Even though it might have two-three features more than the pretty one.

Plus, graphics is a factor now a days. Its true, some not so looking persistant worlds are really famous (Example Runescape) but they would not get a good rating when they are criticized because now, Graphics is a factor. Its really biased sometimes. Good looking games will get more marketing even if they are bugged out as hell.

#12 You can make a pretty game without bleeding edge graphics features. There's really not much that you can do with UE that you can't do with TGEA/T3D as far as graphics go anyway. It will just take a bit more work because Torque's material system isn't as advanced as Unreal's.

Having good artists makes a much bigger difference. The difference in price between Torque and Unreal is about 8-10 man-years worth of full-time professional game artists salary.

Quote:
Plus, graphics is a factor now a days. Its true, some not so looking persistant worlds are really famous (Example Runescape) but they would not get a good rating when they are criticized because now, Graphics is a factor. Its really biased sometimes. Good looking games will get more marketing even if they are bugged out as hell.

You can have the best looking game ever made and you're not going to get free marketing. The level of marketing you will get will depend precisely on how much money you have to spend on marketing.

#13 What I am thinking of doing is, I am going to buy T3D (Indie at first). Show some artists let them play with it (learn). After they get the hang of it, I will upgrade to T3d Commercial. Then, I will have the programmers change the engine (Thankfully, T3D is full source). So basically I got most of what I need from Unreal engine from like 10000 million times less the price! Take that Unreal! Your prices are Unreal! xD

#14 Unreal is priced as an old school vertical market thing. Where Unity and Torque come in is providing an engine that can do 80-90% of what Unreal can out of the box, but at two orders of magnitude less cost; broadening the market. As much as I hear “Unity, Unity, Unity...” hype in the gaming press (but not Torque – GG, you guys have to change that) we could very well see the vertical market engines go the way of the dinosaur.

My prediction - In ten years, there will be a market leading “game engine” at the Unity/T3D price point and a couple of smaller market-share contenders. The high end vertical market engines will be a thing of the past.

#15 Open source engines like these help Indie devs like us get started.

#16 I installed Pirates of the Caribbean last night; awful, awful game. I'm not one to worry about graphics too much but I thought it was 1990 all over again. Ugh. Panda3D is interesting because it's Python.

#17

Quote:In ten years, there will be a market leading “game engine” at the Unity/T3D price point and a couple of smaller market-share contenders.

No game engine can suit everyone's needs.

I predict in less than 10 years we will see some game engine frameworks that will make it so that any decent programmer or small teams of programmers will be able to put together a custom game engine in a matter of weeks or months.

Oh wait... we can do that already.

Fully integrated game engines is going the way of the Dodo. Game engine middleware split into discreet components that are easy to integrate (such as SpeedTree, Ogre, RakNet, PhysX, Lua, etc) is the way of the future.

We'll see several competing frameworks varying in price from hundreds of thousands down to free and open source.

Personally I'm rooting for the FOSS one's :P

Now... if only we could get the tool developers to do the same... :P

#18 Tony, I read an interesting book on marketing a couple of months ago (one of the cross-trained skills you have to learn if you have any pretensions of trying to found a startup anytime in the near future) called “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing”. It made an interesting observation. In nearly every mature industry, there is a single market leader that is by far the dominant holder of marketshare; at least twice the market share of the 2nd place holder. That 2nd place holder likely holds at least twice the market share of the #3. Number three is actually the leader of the niche players.

The American auto industry prior to the penetration by the Japanese in the 70’s was this way. The PC operating system market is this way. Etc. The engine market is a very immature market at the moment and up for grabs. At some point it will start to consolidate.

I’ll also make a different prediction on the fate of the engine market and on different criteria than you used. Why do I hear “Unity, Unity, Unity...” so much lately? Because a designer can pick it up easily work with it and even quickly prototype something. It carries a much higher presumption of designer productivity than coding in c++. Designers want to design. They want to download, install with a wizard, get to work and deploy their magnum opus with one click. They don’t want to muck with make files and worry about whether they have missing dependencies. This is where the market is heading.

#19 Most industries have different levels of "market leader". i.e. the market leader for exotic sports cars (Ferrari) is not the same as the market leader for exotic luxury cars (Rolls Royce), is not the same as the market leader for family cars (whoever is leading that bunch now).

We currently have a market leader in the high-end game engine market, and that's Unreal, and they're probably not going anywhere anytime soon. They are sort of the #1 Enterprise Game Engine solution. Regardless of what happens with lower-level, cheaper engines, there will always be a substantial market for more expensive, higher-end, bleeding edge engines.

As a related example, despite database software like MySQL being a defacto standard for the little guys, plenty of people still use PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. Oracle is still immensely popular despite really having a price of entry starting at around $50,000.

The main reason is service and support. With Oracle you can get on the phone at any time 24 hours a day and have a knowledgeable company representative hold your hand and walk you through any problem you're having. In most parts of the world they will come to your location too. It costs money but it's there when you need it, and it's usually effective.

With Unreal, you have more than just a high-end game engine with super-cool graphics. You have high-end developer support. You have developer and business tools geared towards large game studios that are on another level from anything else out there.

When you have a problem with the Unreal engine, you don't get on a forum and ask a question hoping for an answer from the community in a few days. Though you can actually do that too in the private Unreal developer forums, you can also get the programmers and engineers themselves to help you through the problem.

Most of this stuff isn't that important for indies with more time than money, but for large game studios that have budgets of $20 million and up, but have to have their game ready to ship in time for Christmas, this type of service is invaluable and will most likely never be replaced by a $1,000 or open source game engine.


I think a more likely scenario is that there will be a number of market-leaders in more targeted types of middleware. i.e. a market-leading Physics middleware, a market-leading Audio middleware, a market-leading AI middleware, a market-leading networking middleware, market-leading animation middleware, etc.

We're starting to see things go in that direction now, with Havok, FMOD, Raknet, etc.

Perhaps we'll start seeing more types of rendering middle-ware, and what we'll have for game engines is sort of different types of frameworks that tie these middlewares together for different types of genres and business models.

I think the game development landscape is far too diverse for there to be a game engine equivalent of Microsoft Windows.

#20 In my opinion, Torque has almost been the Best Little Engine for 3D games. But my personal views about the engine stem from seeing the same exact issues today as I first asked about on these forums in 2008.

The best feature of Torque is that the integrated editors made torque a very easy to use engine from the level creation standpoint. I am not an artist or a modeler so this is why Torque originally attracted me. But I'm still an engine guy. I like having the technology or source too. Unity3D will never, be something that appeals to me nor will I ever use it.

But the problem with Torque is that they lost focus on what could have been and included atlas, more rendering hacks and other useless code. Even today, while looking at the new videos for Torque3D, I see the nice GUI's, the nice new TGB editors, and you see the outdoor scenes with all the grass and trees, but you can also see what all that is covering up! The terrain, just like TSE, still is not right. It's still showing the repetitive textures blending that looks like someone painted the terrain all in one direction. Much like cutting your grass from one side to the other using a riding lawnmower.

There are literally hundreds of articles on terrain systems. If GG would just focus on writing a real terrain system, dynamic lighting without the old style snapyse system and focused a little more on seperating the DX and OpenGL code, Torque could really be a great engine.

I've talked to people like myself who would want to remove atlas, All of the opengl related code and then start from that base and work up. But there are so many bit of test code, small hacks, and hard coded referrences that I persponally can't see licensing an Engine if I am going to have to rewrite most of it before I can even focus on a game. With Unreal, it was written for Unreal, So natually, a lot of programming goes into networking, gui design, game design and such but you don't have to write a new renderer, a new terrain system ect. When you buy a 3D Engine, well, in my opinion, It should work out of the box. Torque has been around long enough that these issues I mention with the terrain, renderers and crap code, there has been more than enough time for GG to fix that instead of working on the next big offering..

TGEA could smoke most 3d engines for it's price range.. But it appears that it's never going too because the focus is always being put in the wrong place.