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[Richard Kain]

Reality Factory, Z-Game Editor, Genesis 3D, Torque!? Man, this thread is really taking me back. A lot of nostalgia for all of these old game engines. It's good to see that some of them are still getting support.

I'm almost tempted to try out Torque. It was one of the first indie-targeted game engines, and I have a lot of love for the old Tribes games, as well as the Dynamix team responsible for them. I'm sticking with Unity for now, I've just learned so much about the engine, and am now able to do so much in it. But all this old engine talk really brings back the memories.

[husainhz7]

^ That's interesting. It seems like I always get stuck with jME or Godot on exporting my models to show up in-engine. For Godot, I chalk it up to it just being in alpha-stages and having some bugs here and there in importing models. For jME3, I dunno. I don't want to say it just stinks... I guess I just suck when it comes to exporting my models or something? It seems like it's very, very unclear when it comes to actually importing models, especially since there's multiple ways to go about doing this (i.e. in engine with blend files, in engine with OGRE XML files, out of engine via conversion to j3o files). A simplified tutorial that kind of walks through the steps to a simple approach with the engine would be appreciated, I think.

I use Blender, and it's pretty solid overall. No mobile support, but it's the fastest at implementation. Not everybody's cup of tea overall, and it's starting a transition phase at the moment, so it may not be the same engine a few years from now that it is now. Anyway, I like it.

I haven't encountered any problems now. You can directly import .blend files without the need of the ogre xml exporting. It's great to just edit refresh and see you work. U only need to convert it into j3o when you are exporting it. so win-win with jMonkey

[Polly]

A lot of nostalgia for all of these old game engines.

Unity is older than ZGameEditor though

• Genesis3D (1998)
• Torque (2001)
• Reality Factory (2004)
• Unity (2005)
• ZGameEditor (2007)

[SolarLune]

Ionno about ZGE - I like the idea of something light-weight, but it seems like it lacks basic built-in functionalities (physics, shadows / shaders, etc), and the workflow is highly unorthodox. Not sure how you would make a full game with this functionality - like, how you would actually put something together...?

I guess you'd use an editor of some description? There doesn't seem to be a way to define scenes or areas with the software... I guess you'd have to make an editor or something to actually piece your scenes or levels together.

The scripting in the examples is pretty weird in terms of flow as well - it also follows this "component-based" approach that makes things hard to follow (i.e. in the left keypress group, an expresssion is executed to move an object to the left a unit, while in the right keypress group, an almost the same expression is executed to move the object in the opposite direction).

Maybe a jam for this piece of software would be appreciated, haha. Something to help people get to know it a bit better.

@husainhz7 - Hum, I'll have to check it out again, it seems. Thanks for the info.

EDIT: Okay, just trying to load blend files via code like j3o files simply doesn't work for me. The docs say that a default blend model loader instance is assigned behind the scenes, but that, apparently, isn't true...? "blendmodelloader" and "blendloader" aren't defined at all by default. This is why I hate conventional game engines, haha.

EDIT EDIT: Found out I had to add "jme3-libraries-blender" into the Libraries used to load blend files directly.

@Richard - Yeah, I remember them too. Torque is probably cool, but the lack of Linux support's a bit weird.

[Richard Kain]

Torque is probably cool, but the lack of Linux support's a bit weird.

Yeah, that is a bit of a shortcoming. It came from an era when Linux support was an afterthought, so it's not really surprising. But these days there's a stronger push to provide Linux as a platform option. I'm a big fan of Jeff Tunnell, one of the founders of Dynamix, and a lot of his classic games. So I'll always have a soft spot for Torque. But I'm still sticking to Unity. The network programming I've been working on has been going well, and I'm making progress faster than I had expected.

[Ky.]

Torque is probably cool, but the lack of Linux support's a bit weird.

Yeah, that is a bit of a shortcoming. It came from an era when Linux support was an afterthought, so it's not really surprising. But these days there's a stronger push to provide Linux as a platform option. I'm a big fan of Jeff Tunnell, one of the founders of Dynamix, and a lot of his classic games. So I'll always have a soft spot for Torque. But I'm still sticking to Unity. The network programming I've been working on has been going well, and I'm making progress faster than I had expected.

Its pretty early, but: http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/135114 That's Torque3D running on Gnome3 and Unity on Ubuntu and SteamOS Desktop, complete with instruction on how to build on Linux


I feel like I'm bringing Torque up everywhere I go on these forums lately.  I assure you that's just because I've recently chosen it to handle a project, and I've needed to really dive head first into the engines culture and history haha

[HDSanctum]

Just to clear things up, the Genesis-3d that I linked to is not the old Genesis 3D, you can see a GDC talk about it here:

[SolarLune]

^ Oh, so it is. This is that new Chinese engine, right? I haven't heard much about it other than it coming from devs in China. Also no Linux support, oddly. Kinda weird to make an engine from scratch and not support it.

[Geti]

fwiw until SteamOS is a household thing linux support is still a minor profit stream. Being so surprised about it not being available is kinda misinformed - even though we've supported linux with KAG since pretty early days, the combined revenue from Linux and OSX is still less than 10%. Windows is still where the majority of the money is on desktop, and developing for it first and foremost (or solely) is sane practice imo.

[Ky.]

fwiw until SteamOS is a household thing linux support is still a minor profit stream. Being so surprised about it not being available is kinda misinformed - even though we've supported linux with KAG since pretty early days, the combined revenue from Linux and OSX is still less than 10%. Windows is still where the majority of the money is on desktop, and developing for it first and foremost (or solely) is sane practice imo.

Couldn't agree more with everything said here

[Sik]

fwiw until SteamOS is a household thing linux support is still a minor profit stream. Being so surprised about it not being available is kinda misinformed - even though we've supported linux with KAG since pretty early days, the combined revenue from Linux and OSX is still less than 10%. Windows is still where the majority of the money is on desktop, and developing for it first and foremost (or solely) is sane practice imo.

Depends though, because Linux support is still so rare that merely supporting it could result in a marketing boost that will eventually reflect on Windows sales. If adding Linux support is relatively easy (i.e. your game is built on software that already works on it, so you only need to take care of minor details), it doesn't sound like a bad idea to try.

Then again I'm biased, I'm running Ubuntu =P (I can't believe that these days I know more about X's internals than about the Windows API)

[Geti]

We've certainly received hardly any attention just for supporting linux, but we haven't handled marketing as well as some others. Building tech on portable middleware made getting it running under linux and osx _reasonably_ painless (with OSX being the major pain there due to packaging requirements), but there have been numerous times where compiler differences have come back to bite us, and the occasional feature in some libraries which (despite documentation) crashes under several possible configurations of the 'nix systems - which we of course only find out on releasing a patch using those features.

I'd definitely suggest considering the increased testing cost if you're using anything open source - while they tend to be more friendly to linux it's common to find something has become unmaintained right when you need support with something (or at least realise that development isn't as quick as it was when you first picked up the library). There's also more potential breakage with every update for anything cross-platform, since there are inherently more dependencies in there.

Slightly better than if discontinuation happens with something proprietary, since you can technically fix it yourself, but paid solutions have some obligation to provide service as well, where free software is a labour of love, and a little easier to ignore for the developer

(this is getting quite detached from the subject of course)

[Richard Kain]

Well, a big part of the push for greater cross-platform compatibility is not actually from OSX or Linux. It's been created by iOS and Android. Smartphone and Tablet gaming has become so ubiquitous that supporting those platforms has become a necessity for most engines. And neither of those platforms runs DirectX. So just about any modern engine that wants to compete on licensing is going to provide capable OpenGL support.

DirectX was a major reason why the majority of game development on PCs shifted in Microsoft's favor in the 90's and 00's. When hardware power became a more significant part of the hobby, having a standardized platform was a big advantage. The rise and prominence of mobile development has changed that. Linux itself is still not a big market. It may never be a big market. But it is indirectly benefiting from mobile development. By forcing a greater emphasis on cross-platform support, mobile development is making it easier and more affordable for developers to support Linux.

And of course, all of this leads us right back to Unity. One of the big draws that has been keeping the Unity engine popular and supported is its broad cross-platform support. It's never been a popular engine for huge-scale development. But it is one of the go-to engines for mobile development, and its popularity with small-scale indie PC development has grown thanks to that.

[clemzio]

Not sure if it was mentioned, but Multimedia Fusion (now renamed Fusion) is also a great software for game making:

http://www.clickteam.com/clickteam-fusion-2-5

Probably not the best for drag & drop haters, but really friendly and easy to use. It can export to many platforms as well (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android, HTML5).

An alternative to Fusion would be Game Develop

http://www.compilgames.net/

Pretty similar though not as mature as Fusion, but great tool overall as well.

[Geti]

Seen some really good things done with MMF (FarmerGnome's games come to mind) so definitely have a look if you're not so strong on the programming front (or want to try something different).

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Didnt that dude who made noitu love and all those other games use MMF too?

[SolarLune]

Konjak? I think he uses Construct 2, though perhaps Noitu or others were in MMF. Maybe I'm mistaken, though.

[Jeff Skyrunner]

Konjak? I think he uses Construct 2, though perhaps Noitu or others were in MMF. Maybe I'm mistaken, though.

For sure in Construct 2 forums there's a Konjak

[clemzio]

Didnt that dude who made noitu love and all those other games use MMF too?

That's correct.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/207530/

Just to list a few of the amazing games (being) made with MMF:
- A.N.N.E. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1445624543/anne
- Heart Forth Alicia https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alonsomartin/heart-forth-alicia
- Knytt Stories http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Knytt+Stories

[ink.inc]

all of konjaks old stuff is made in mmf, but iirc he hated it and has since moved on to construct