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MM out-
Thought travels much faster than sound, it is better to think something twice, and say it once, than to think something once, and have to say it twice.
"Frogs and Fauns! The tournament!" - Professor Winneynoodle/HanClinto
I reserve the full right to change my views/theories at any time.

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|steveth45|
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[This message has been edited by steveth45 (edited November 19, 2007).]

I'm probably a bit biased in saying this, but I'd recommend you try Blender before purchasing Torque.

steveth45, I would like to respectfully suggest that you don't have enough experience with Blender's Game Engine to make an authoritative statement about it. As for games not working, there are sometimes major differences between versions (the development is a bit unstable ATM) which often causes games to need a little tweaking to run on different versions. If you want an objective look at games made with Blender's internal game engine, then you should download compiled executables or packaged games (.blend files with the special blenderplayer.exe that will run the game).

Here are a few games you can try:
Zark 2: Into the Titan (A Myst style puzzle game. Produced by a single user in about 1.5 years.)
Marble, by a user who goes by Mmph! is a nice little game made over the course of a couple weeks.
Zody the Slug 2 is the sequel to Zody the Slug, a game made with Blender about a year previous.
My own Marble Labyrith 0.9 is available at http://www.blendenzo.com/indexGames.html . It was the first game I made with the BGE. The marble occasionally drops through the table, but this is not the fault of the game engine. I used the wrong type of motion to rotate the table (I used "dRot" which rotates in discreet steps, causing the table to sometimes move above the ball's collision bounds... beginner's mistake).

An article entitled The Blender Game Expose 2007 was recently written. It showcases the most prominent projects that were in the works at the time. My team's current project (a Sokoban clone) is featured there.

A couple of newer and very impressive works in progress can be seen (screenshots and videos) here:
KRUM (YouTube video)
Zodiac Spear (by my friend 3DGURU from Jordan)
Sobem

Also, Zaigam was made seven or eight months ago. The links in the thread are broken, but the attached images are awesome (you may need to register on the forum to view images... not sure why they did that).

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The Life is in the Blood.

(Find Blender Game Engine tutorials at blendenzo.com.)

If that's not as much of a priority then any game engine that fits your fancy or that appeals to you most should be fine.

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Matthew Langley
Lead Tool Development Engineer
GarageGames

quote:

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Originally posted by David Lancaster:
3D Game Studio

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So the David Lancaster has written, so it shall be done. And there was peace upon the land flowing with milk and honey.

I think David could make gold come out of watercolors and paper! More props to him than the game engine of his choosing.

as a response to steveth45:
There are poor programmers out there that could manage to mess up anything independent of using tge or Blender ge. I would suggest that you try the above-mentioned games and in the future try looking for files with .exe rather than running just the .blend files.

Running the .blend file would be the equivalent of distributing source code, this code may work well when compiled a certain way(version of the compiler) or fail on another compiler. The reasons for people posting .blend files is usually for other people's education, just as source code is often posted to help new programmers.

Also to blame for the instability of older .blend files in newer blender versions are the extensive re-wrights of the game engine over the past two years. These have lead to a much more stable and accurate game engine with a much better physics engine. Also, support of GLSL has been added for a while now.

As a conclusion, I would like to mention that Blender is much capable of making games just as tge is. The main difference is that one is free and open-source with the option of getting a business license to ensure that no one can steal your work (encryption/model protection). For anything that someone would do alone or in a small group, Blender will work just as well as tge. So if your planning on doing small projects yourself, then I suggest Blender, but if your working with a group of experienced tge users then that would be when you need to use tge...

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Heart of a Warrior

When you use a cross-platform development tool, you open yourself up to a broader market. You can still sell just as many Windows copies as you would have, so all sales in the Linux and Mac sectors will be in addition to what money you would have made.

While 3D Game Studio supports only Windows 2000 and up, Blender supports Windows 98 and up, Mac OSX, all major Linux distros, and even (theoretically) FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Keep in mind that some people still use Windows 98. (I was still using Windows 98 SE as recently as April 2007, until I switched to Linux Mint.) Torque is also cross-platform, and apparently Torque Game Engine Advanced can even be used to author Xbox 360 games (according to Wikipedia, some Torque made games are currently being sold in the Xbox Live arcade).

3D Game Studio sounds to me like it has some better features than Blender (notably fluid physics where Blender has only rigid body physics, and up to 8 texture layers where Blender can only support 3 layers).

Torque has several better graphics features than Blender, including a builtin LOD system (very important for massive terrains) and landscape texture blending. Torque also has a network framework from what I understand, so online games would be easier to make. You would need to code your own network in Python with Blender (though there are some great working examples that are freely available for study).

Blender has a capable graphics engine, though it is not next-gen by any means (but neither are TGE or 3D Game Studio). The graphics are OpenGL, with multi-texture up to 3 layers, multiple UV maps allowed per object, and support for single-pass GLSL shaders (bump-mapping and etc.). Blender features the Bullet physics system which is the same physics system currently being used in some PS3 and Xbox 360 games. The biggest benefits of Blender's game engine are zero startup cost, easy to use Logic system (allows for making games with little to no scripting), and the completely integrated modelling and animation and UV mapping tools. The biggest downfalls of Blender's Game Engine are poor documentation (a lot of it you have to learn from forums and tutorials... my site is a good start), slightly unstable development from version to version, and the lack of commercially successful games made with the BGE (this is because no one has made them, not because it isn't capable).

Anyway, I don't know exactly what kind of game you're hoping to make and whether or not you want to sell it, but if you are trying to make an indie startup game with a small and inexperienced team, I think Blender is by far the best option. If you have a reasonably sized team including one or two capable programmers and you're hoping to make something as close to next-gen as possible, I suggest you examine your budget and look into something in the several thousand dollar range.

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The Life is in the Blood.

(Find Blender Game Engine tutorials at blendenzo.com.)

God Bless!

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Sam Washburn

Check out my CCN SpeedGame 2 Blog

and great info!
Nice website btw

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Heart of a Warrior