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THINK ABOUT THIS


Ron Kapaun

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Hi All..!


Just wanted to point something out on the web:


I know, I have always pushed the 'Blender' open source model and I originally left T3D because my feelings concerning the Blender Open Source Model fell flat. I just want to post this because its a validation of my thoughts for T3D. Blender is about to release it's 2.8 version (a major milestone) and if you look back, it's (at it's core) a 30 year old software system. 30 freakin years. Amazing. They managed to keep the development alive by creating situations (in this case 'short films') then once they solved the problems encountered they release the 'fixes' to eliminate or ease those issues. I can see this philosophy still working now in T3D. It's not the BEST, most up-to-date real-time render engine but, it has potential. I think we can all agree on that. So, add your thoughts and comments. Nothing is 'out of bounds' here. This is posted in order to expose thoughts and issues I may have not thought of. What do you think? Should the community do a 'live' project and work any issues out and publish them as an update? Thoughts, concerns and general comments welcome. It's been a long time since this site was updated... Garage Games is basically dead, anyone out there still see the potential here?

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I know I'm sure glad T3D is still around, and grateful af for @JeffR and all the other contributors! Because after one life-work-threatening experience watching Torque almost disappear, without going open source, I am 100% committed to _never_ having the fate of my work rest in a private company's hands ever again. I can easily take a little less modern render power in exchange for a free and permissive open source license. Oh and also Blender ftw! My two cents anyway.

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Torque could easily do much better, if more people would stick to it, it is mostly just confirmation bias saying that it is bad, since many other open source projects easily outdo the proprietary software, if it reaches a certain size.


Regarding the live project, I'm doing one for like 4 years now, but nobody cared. I had lots of people over the time ( 50+ maybe, did not count them ) writing me they want to contribute, but in the end they all ran away being of no use at all, now think about THIS...

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A community-driven project isn't a bad idea at all, I think.


The big aspect of it is to agree on a game concept that challenges the engine usage, while still having a broad appeal. This is a pretty much why FPS games are the go-to for demonstrations(or real-time movies, which can just focus on the graphical functionality). Functionally easy to understand, and a good way to show off the feature set.


So if we were to put together a community project/demo, the first step would be an agreement on what it would be. If I were putting my 2 cents into it, I think pushing a different genre would be useful as we can exhibit a different gameplay/mechanical style(as everyone held the presumption that T3D is an "fps only" engine).


So maybe a 3d platformer, similar to the 3d Mario games? It allows an aesthetically pleasing art style that can be very high fidelity, but not constrained by photoreal rendering which allows flexibility to the art style, and the gameplay allows for interesting mechanical elements like your walljumping, climbing, etc. If we had to have some sort of shooting mechanic, a pickup/powerup that would shift the camera perspective to over the shoulder could work.


If we pursue that angle, I'll note I've already got a headstart on a good 3d movement player object with the new entity/component stuff which would be a good jumpstart. The Ubiq guys also put up their old 3d Action Adventure kit open-source so we could take their much-better-for-this camera system logic as well.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Blender is almost a unique product in the software world it is a project managed and run by a private organisation that has lots of money but just happens to be open source. It should also be noted that Blender is a tyrannical type organisation as far as development is concerned, expected for proprietary software, less so for Open Source software


Blender also probably has more paid developers than torque has users;


Most of your post is fairly indicative of how the engine is fixed and updated anyway, so that pretty much amounts to preaching to the choir.


As for building a live project, this is what I'm attempting to do, but I have my own demons to deal with.


The biggest hurdle in the case of a community project is that there are no real artists in the community, or at least no public exposed artists willing to devote time an energy to a project that won't earn them any money.


Unlike Blender torque doesn't have the finances or the manpower to create its own projects, yet despite all that the engine improves month on month, year on year, at a rate that imo is impressive (if you actually ignore the release schedules and check the dev branch)

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I would not bother with baking lightmaps, if it is not for high quality indoor scenes. I did some experiments with baked ambient occlusion vs SSAO and SSAO is not as good as the baked version, but it is decent and has the advantage that it is dynamic.

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