how about finally upgrading to a new version of torque?

[fat boy]

how about finally upgrading to a new version of torque?
thats is a decent suggestion. of course i know i might get banned for even posting this. thats ok.

[Ad Bot]

[Squideey]

People have computers that are so terrible, that it's somehow just not worth it. I don't understand either.

[blitz9100]

Not to mention its probally over $1000 to upgrade to what the current license supports.

[MegaScientifical]

To do this would likely be an undertaking. You don't just change a few files and this works. You don't consider that a version of an entire engine is likely quite different from the previous versions. He couldn't simply transfer things, he'd need to go through most of the engine by hand, make sure his stuff still is compatible, make sure there aren't new things that might ruin the game, and all that.

Or, you could hire him a team to do it.

Edit: Damn you, blitz, and your interrupting posts.

[Wedge]

Why should the engine be upgraded?

[Welknair]

Why should the engine be upgraded?

It would benefit a number of aspects of BL. (I have not done my research and as such cannot tell you exactly what).


However, updating, as Mega has said, would quite the project. It would involve pretty much re-creating blockland on the new engine. Chances are, it won't happen any time soon.

[Squideey]

Badspot and his team of super-technofaces are in his underground base working on it.

[Wedge]

It would benefit a number of aspects of BL. (I have not done my research and as such cannot tell you exactly what).

You don't need to spend $1000 on a new engine and 6 months porting code for pretty water and dae model support.

If the author could say what exactly from the engine they wanted then it would actually be a suggestion.

Keep in mind that the Blockland engine is pretty much it's own engine, a heavily modded version of the TGE, and going to a newer version of the TGE or even a different Torque engine branch wouldn't necesarily be a uniform upgrade, some things might become worse (until they got better). Badspot has the source code of the engine he's using now, so it's not like things from the newer engines can't be added if there's a good reason for it. Exampes of stuff added to the engine would be the blb rendering system, upnp support, etc. Some of this stuff isn't even in newer versions of the engine!

[Regulith]

Would new torque have better lighting and stop emitters from being invisible when viewed through transparent bricks? That'd be nice.

[Squideey]

Would new torque have better lighting and stop emitters from being invisible when viewed through transparent bricks? That'd be nice.

Probably.

[Joekirk]

Badspot has made a lot of edits to the engine. Upgrading to a new one would probably take years.

[fat boy]

i just want him to come in this topic and tell us the reason

[MegaScientifical]

i just want him to come in this topic and tell us the reason

Did you link to the wrong video?  Cause all I see there is maybe 200 physics objects that glitch out and disappear when too many of them are disturbed at the same time.

The problem here is that you guys don't understand what a game engine provides for you.  There is no game engine that will be super fast at rendering 100,000+ discrete objects out of the box.  You cannot simply fire up source or crysis, stack up a million boxes and go to town (those crysis videos that are all over youtube are pre-rendered).  If you want to do something unusual like that, you're going to have to write your own renderer and you're going to have to cut corners on the simulation.  There is no general purpose "have a million of everything" engine.

Cutting edge engines like crysis, source, unreal 3, and id tech 5 cost upwards of a million dollars (still way cheaper than developing your own engine) and even if you have the money (I don't) they won't license to everyone because they only want to associate and give tech support to AAA titles that have a reasonable chance of success.  Second tier engines like Unreal 2 or doom III cost in the $250,000 range (I don't have that much money either).


I need an engine that is priced and designed to be used by a single person or small team.  Here are the possiblities:  Torque, TGEA, Ogre, Blitz, flash/shockwave, crystal space, C4, unity, Sauerbraten/Cube 2, Quake III GPL, DIY.  (Sauerbraten, TGEA, and unity did not exist at the time I started Blockland)

Of those, Sauerbraten is the only one that could possibly provide a graphical advantage out of the box because of it's unique rendering paradigm.  BUT.  There are glitches in the rendering system that look quite difficult to solve and may be systemic.  There is no scripting system.  The networking sucks and would have to be replaced completely with something like TNL.  I've talked about it with kompressor and we concluded that it would be easier to port the sauerbraten rendering over to torque.

I picked torque because it's the only one with a good scripting integration and robust networking that works well with low bandwidth.  It also runs well on low end hardware and can be ported to the mac, appealing to the widest audience possible.

The most important thing about making a game is having it work.  Jumping around from one engine to another chasing after the latest features is a sure fire way to fail (are you reading this George Broussard?).  

Best I could find on him saying stuff like that. You can actually search for "engine torque" by Badspot. Took me work to quote that since the topic was so old, btw...

[Carly]

As the previous comments have stated, switching the engine is neither cheap nor easy. It's easier said than done.

[Brickmaster]

Buildable vehicles!