Deciding on an Engine...

[Guest Adam Zeliasz]

I've been playing around with Unity and Torque 3D for a while now. Someone mentioned this engine so I thought I would post to get some user feeedback. My background is in 3D modeling and animation. I'm looking to develop a demo of an online 1st person shooter with vehicles for external funding. I'm fresh to programming, so I'm looking for an engine that has some sort of scripting capabilities rather than get into the source and write code. My target audience is specific to newer systems, so ideally I would like to work with the latest shaders/features that are out.

 

Torque 3D's feature list is great including their online multiplayer capabilities, but their documentation/tutorials is lacking or non-existent.

 

Unity seems very easy to use for artists due to their scripting, but I have a feeling that their engine is designed to target older systems, so the latest shaders/FX need to be coded. I'm also not comfortable with their networking components. But there user base/forum is second to none. People are very eager to help and you can usually get solutions or advice quickly.

 

How does everyone feel about Leadwerks vs. the others? I'm looking for some incite as far as its networking capabilities, scripting and tutorials to get me up to speed with achieving my objective. I just started looking into this engine so I will be playing around with the demo and reading the documentation myself, but I thought I could get some constructive advice/suggestions in the meantime.

 

Also how many developers are actually working on the engine? I'm trying to get an idea of the speed of updates and new features in the future.

 

Thanks!

[wh1sp3r]

so, If you are fresh to programming quickly forget Torgue3d .. It's pretty messy code in my opinion. Very messy... and again, very messy, lol.

About unity .. you are right .. they target a older machines. It has fantastic editor, but it has only scripting, which i don't like i like freedom, programming in c++. LE is engine, which support latest technologies (should, lol) + you can program in lots of languages like c++, c#, blitzmax ... or script in LUA.

[Josh]

I actually wrote some new networking code a couple weeks ago. It's not released yet, but it works really well. There's a command to sync an entity over the network, and you can just move it or let physics move it, and it is synced on all other clients. We had a bunch of players on the server running around at the same time.

 

I also just announced this project yesterday. It sounds like exactly what you are looking to create, so maybe it will help you:

http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/topic/1215-leadwerks-wars/

[Niosop]

Forget Torque3D. They have some cool demos, but from everything I've seen and heard, the codebase is a mess.

 

Unity is a great engine, but it is built to run on a wide variety of hardware. You can write shader code that is conditional on it being supported by the card w/ fallbacks to other techniques if the preferred one isn't supported, but it would involve knowledge of writing shaders and what different generations of cards support. It's editor is a little more friendly than LE's is, and it does a little better job of exposing engine functions to the user than LE does at this time. You'll also have to pay 7.5 times as much as LE to get the Pro version to get real time shadows, which you can't really live without for the type of game you are talking about. Unity's performance profiler and asset streaming system are some advantages it has.

 

LeadWerk's rendering engine looks awesome and it's editor is pretty good. There are some rough edges, but Josh makes frequent updates to try and address these, although keep in mind that your priorities are not always going to be his priorities as far as feature additions/bug fixes. You can expect new features/fixes to come out for LE every few weeks, whereas Unity seems to release bigger updates every 6 months to a year.

 

I'm currently doing parallel development in both LE and Unity. I'm more productive in Unity usually because of it's asset pipeline and how polished the system is, but the same scenes using the same assets tend to look a little better in LE.

 

So between LE and Unity, they're both great but different. For your project, LE is probably a better fit as it has a more advanced lighting system and offloads a lot of stuff to the GPU. And Unity costs 7.5 times more and definitely isn't 7.5 times better, so LE wins hands down as far as bang for your buck goes.

 

I'd say try the demo of LE and download the Unity free version and play with both so you can get your feet wet without shelling out any cash. That should give you a better feel for what works best for you.

[Michael Betke]

I use Leadwerks for visualization stuff without having an idea of coding too.

If you worked a lot with AAA engines like Unreal or Cry you'll probably miss some things here and there but you can work in a productive manner with Leadwerks.

The engine/editor works stable in my opinion and I don't have a lot of crashes. Maybe one time in 50 working hours.

There is a nice exporter for 3dsmax models too.

 

Like in other engines the overall eye-ccandyness depends on the assets you use. You can browse my galery (and others of course) to see decent stuff.

 

Just test it for a while and ask if you have trouble. This forum is very helpfull as well.

[Rick]

LE is by far the best engine I've worked with but I'm a programmer and not an artist. I personally think artists are almost better off either teaming up with a programmer to work on game engines or are better off modding existing games as they can generally just change up the art and do little tweaking of an existing game. Coding a game is a very large task as is making the art assets. To try to do both for any decent size game is near impossible.

 

That being said this community is by far the most diverse community I've seen in terms of artists & programmers. Most of the time it's all programmers with few artists but since this engine is top of the line graphically we see a ton of artists.

 

Also how many developers are actually working on the engine? I'm trying to get an idea of the speed of updates and new features in the future.

 

As far as we know it's just 1 or maybe 2. Mr Josh seems to be the main guy but he does hire out for some things. I think you'll be amazed at how involved Josh is with the community but given it's just basically him updates/fixes come (in my view) slowly.

[Marcus]

Hopefully no one takes this as a flame...

 

I have both engines and both engines have different strengths and weaknesses. I think in the long run, Torque3D will hands down be the better choice. I only say this because, Torque3D development is really starting to accelerate. They have to. They have lost SO much market share to Unity, that they are starting to give extra perks to licensees. For example, the original reason I stopped using Torque3D and only Leadwerks was because the forest editor was going to cost an extra $300-$500. They just made it free. It has a lot more features that Leadwerks vegetation system, like collideable vegetation. They both use deferred rendering, which I think LE wins at. However, it is optional in Torque3D. If you add the extra baked global illumination, it looks heads and shoulders better than LE. Networking isn't even close. You get source code with Torque3D (which may not be a good thing if you need to make major changes). They are cleaning up the source. They just cleaned up and modularized the physics so it is easy to implement whatever library you want to use.

 

I think if you are aiming to make a multiplayer game, at this point Torque3D is the better choice. But, if you are limited by $$$$, then LE may be the choice. In the end, I think that LE will have a very difficult time competing with Torque3D and Unity. Not because it isn't as good or better than the other two, but the other two have millions of dollars being invested in them. Competition drives growth and I see both of those competing against each other driving the tech way out of the reach of LE, C4, and the like.

 

I like LE and plan on doing a project with it, long term I will most likely be using Torque. Hopefully Josh can find some good partners or investors. There is absolutely no way he will compete in the long run as a one man show.

[Rick]

I don't think it's a flame at all. Seemed very fair in my view.

 

I like LE and plan on doing a project with it, long term I will most likely be using Torque. Hopefully Josh can find some good partners or investors. There is absolutely no way he will compete in the long run as a one man show.

 

I agree he won't be able to compete, but I think he can get more programmers than Torque (probably not Unity though), because using their scripting language is basically a joke. It's such a mess it's unbelievable. The programmers that want to start with their own main function and create their game from scratch would be better off with LE all the way, because it gives you that freedom. I think what happens is that the non programmers are more drawn to Torque because it looks like you can plug and play stuff, but then the programmers are drawn towards people making games (designers & artists) so they don't have much choice but to follow them to Torque.

[Marleys Ghost]

Flame? no .. not at all .. fickle maybe

[Marcus]

I don't think it's a flame at all. Seemed very fair in my view.

 

 

 

I agree he won't be able to compete, but I think he can get more programmers than Torque (probably not Unity though), because using their scripting language is basically a joke. It's such a mess it's unbelievable. The programmers that want to start with their own main function and create their game from scratch would be better off with LE all the way, because it gives you that freedom. I think what happens is that the non programmers are more drawn to Torque because it looks like you can plug and play stuff, but then the programmers are drawn towards people making games (designers & artists) so they don't have much choice but to follow them to Torque.

 

Honestly, I actually think TorqueScript is awesome. The source code is a mess right now. To be fair though, they are cleaning up the source one chunk at a time. They have known they needed to do this for years and it is finally happening.

 

Both have advantages and disadvantages.

[Rick]

Honestly, I actually think TorqueScript is awesome.

 

By looking at your sig it seems you are an artist first and maybe a coder/scripter second? Not sure but just guessing. From my experience with talking to coders, and I'm in that boat as I've purchased Torque about a year ago, they generally dislike TorqueScript. I'm in that boat as well, but that's just a preference I guess. I'm not a fan of engines making up their own scripting language when Lua is basically a standard.

[Canardia]

It's hard to convince hardcore programmers to use anything else than C++. Lua is the only exception, since it's the best scripting language, and it fits very well as a scripting expansion to C++.

[Niosop]

I think the biggest threat might be Unity moving to a deferred lighting system (ether entirely or as a swappable rendering subsystem). They have a bigger development team, more money, more users, can deploy cross platform and to browsers, a great editor, plus people can write stuff in the free version and upgrade when they want the Pro features. LE's big advantage is visual quality, so if that gap is closed, LE doesn't really have any advantage anymore.

 

I think the one big thing that Josh can do is make things more accessible to us, enable us to disable subsystems (Audio, Physics, etc) so we can replace them if desired, expose as much of the engine as possible at as low a level as possible so that we can contribute to the development, fix bugs, add features. Make the editor support plugins and expose all editor events to these plugins so we can contribute plugins back to the community. I'm really impressed with what Josh has done, but he can't do it all alone, as shown by the number of bugs in the tracker that are unresolved and the shear number of feature requests.

 

All that being said, I really do like LE, enjoy developing in it, and look forward to what Josh is going to do with it next. The price is great and well worth picking up a license even if you're not sure that you'll end up using it for your project. The community is knowledgeable, helpful and generous with code and assets.

[Marcus]

By looking at your sig it seems you are an artist first and maybe a coder/scripter second? Not sure but just guessing. From my experience with talking to coders, and I'm in that boat as I've purchased Torque about a year ago, they generally dislike TorqueScript. I'm in that boat as well, but that's just a preference I guess. I'm not a fan of engines making up their own scripting language when Lua is basically a standard.

 

I am primarily a game designer and level artist. I do however program in C/C++, Java, and C#. I like TorqueScript because it is essentially C++ without variable types, pointers, and references. Coming from a C/C++ background, I can't stand the syntax of Lua. Ugly.

[Blue Solitare]

I've used all three engines, and have released a product using Unity. Each engine has it's strengths and weaknesses. The best advice I would give somebody is to download them and try them out and see which fits your needs. That is what we did. What attracted us to Leadwerks was it's price, render, and API. With the addition of the editor and lua scripting, the sauce keeps getting sweeter. I equally like Unity, but for different reasons; it's a good and very capable engine. I'm Not terribly impressed with Torque3D, however, from what I've read they have been making some pretty big changes and maybe someday I'll look at it again. There is not one ring to rule them all, at least not in this case.

 

Just my .02$

 

Blue

[Canardia]

The main point of C++ is the huge standard library support, which Lua has also. You can even make a video player in Lua with a few commands.

[L B]

Ahh, these debates always leave me wanting GI. Oh well.

[Canardia]

GI and a decent AO is basically the same thing. GI illuminates areas, while AO makes more shadows, so the result is the same with a corresponding ambient light setting.

 

I hope the new SSDO will be finished soon and give better results than the old SSAO, then LE would be the only engine on the market besides CE3 which has realtime GI. Then the gap to other engines would widen even more on the 3D engine comparison chart (LE is already now #1 on the chart, while CE3 is 2nd).

[macklebee]

I hope the new SSDO will be finished soon...

 

uh i thought Josh just released that earlier today?

[Marleys Ghost]

uh i thought Josh just released that earlier today?

 

 

He has Here

[Niosop]

GI and AO are NOT the same thing. AO only takes ambient light into account, GI takes all lights, the way they bounce and their color into account. And no matter how many times you say it, LE is not in the same league as CE3. It might be close as far as rendering, but it's the tool set that makes a development environment and LE isn't there yet. But it's within my price range which makes all the difference.

[Marcus]

Then the gap to other engines would widen even more on the 3D engine comparison chart (LE is already now #1 on the chart, while CE3 is 2nd).

 

No offense Lumooja, but your chart is one of the most absurd things I have ever seen. You miss critical features and you don't give proper weight to other features.

[L B]

GI and a decent AO is basically the same thing. GI illuminates areas, while AO makes more shadows, so the result is the same with a corresponding ambient light setting.

You disregard the fact that GI uses color too.

 

GI adds significant improvements to any render. Let's not try to hide it. It's simply hardly possible in real-time.

[Rick]

LE's big advantage is visual quality, so if that gap is closed, LE doesn't really have any advantage anymore.

 

I think the biggest thing LE has for it is the easy API. It's the easiest API I've ever used. As a programmer even if the graphics quality wasn't as good as it is, I'd still use it simply because the API is so easy compared to the others I've used. Entity programming is the only way to go and LE implements it very well.

[Rick]

You disregard the fact that GI uses color too.

 

What one is supposed to be better in those 2 images? I find the left one looks better, but not sure what GI does. On the right one it seems like you lose what looks like shadowing and detail seems to kind of fade out.