hm.. let's stick to facts.
you started a thread with large posts about a technical topic without doing any appropriate evaluation of the technical options you wanted to know more about first. right?
isn't it better to make some profound testing beforehand to avoid all that trouble?

Not sure I can agree with the sentiment here. If you were lost in a city and asked someone for directions, would you think it a bit unfair if they publicly disparaged you for not having mapped the city first?

I am, essentially, lost. I ran into unexpected behaviour in what appeared to be two of the stronger alternate 3D engine choices to my own. Confused by the results, I thought I would ask around to get additional perspective on the issue, including hopefully the experiences of others, so I can determine what to try next.

I am confident that I have not been unreasonable.

My preference would be to spend time discussing 3D engines, where possible.

to keep objective: it would make more sense if we could really help eachother out (man, that's indie business ). we could test a little engine_test.exe for you if you want to, and post some results, like if it works and how good it does with the features you would like to use..
toastie's completely right!
but all this technical sophistry isn't worth it anyway

I'm not quite sure which engine you're offering to try out, but I should be fine for now. I thank you for your offer.

btw: i finally continue whith my own code. python is ok, panda is ok. really almost all worked on the first try. but i don't like this bloatedness of these engines... a small hello_panda.exe is at least 24 mb large, cause python has to be packed with it. it's a really nice engine, it features all a solid 3d game needs (man, Disney developed that thing). but i felt too much like user...

Definitely wanting to explore this in depth. The finished-commercial-games thing for Panda3D is a big plus.

but that's a really individual opionion. someone else may like that, so it wouldn't make much sense to ask about that in the forum. all what others can tell you is about *facts* and *their* experience... clear questions: clear answers

Nothing wrong with individual opinions- eg. X works well for me, Y is a piece of crap, Z has a huge learning curve but it's worth it, etc. In fact, that's one thing I'm really hoping to hear from people.

My dear doctor, captain catton, you are right on the risk of the Seer speaking up. However, later on they may have had many visions and should they speak up then, they would likely share them all. But they may never speak, as their words may draw their enemies to them. Thus I hope the Seer remains very quiet until near the end.

Beware, of course, of anyone claiming to be the Seer. It may be a cunning ruse.

A clever idea, GeneralValter. And as fartron has noted, a skilled mask can conceal ones features, but not ones voice. If the theory is true, perhaps increpare is still with us, but would he speak with the face of another? Again, if true, his silence may be the best way to find him again.

Of course I see no reason at all that it would make him a wolf, just a force of darkness. I cannot support that part of the theory.

Cheater, my friend, it was of course the freshest and finest quality beef, as you should all know! I take pride in my work, and the quality of my produce.

I seem damned either way. I am a suspect of Melly as I do not defend myself enough, therefore I am suspicious. I am a suspect of yours for I do defend myself too quickly, and am thus suspicious. I am too confusing, so fartron would have me hang. As I am devilishly handsome, should I also hang twice for being both too beautiful, and too ugly?

If not about the meat, it seems you would have me hang for being "slightly suspicious", and your second-most-likely candidate? There is a certain brutality in that.

you didn't seem to give OGRE... a decent trial and dismissed it offhand

... I've got a PC with an ATI 3D card set aside for a Windows testing, and occasional access to a couple of others .... Perhaps I should set it up today and see how well the samples behave on real hardware ...

toastie, I propose that we not begin an argument and instead mutually acknowledge that we may not be able to help each other much in this particular discussion at this particular time.

Thankyou for the clarification. I thank you for your civility even as I inch closer to doom at sunset, even if you would be one to hold the rope.

Yes, of course I must be a suspect in increpare's disappearance. I did, after all, give him some meat, and publically too. And then he was gone.

I did pose two scenarios to you with regards to the armour situation. The second one is that you might be being set up by a third party. It is interesting that you did not acknowledge this. It is also interesting that you somehow suspect me because I gave something to increpare- yet you claim innocence when I ask about your armour going to our departed Nitro Crate.

Nonetheless, my vote remains unchanged.

Ah! It seems I have made too many enemies, all too fast. That is the risk one faces.

Cheater, my skilled artisan, when you say "Our dead friend. The first one". Who do you refer to?

Oh, and caring Melly, I almost forgot. I am quite confident that I'm not trying to make myself look suspicious. To pretend to forget about everything that casts doubt on me would make me look very suspicious indeed! Better to be upfront about it. If I am to die, my words have greater weight if I am shown to be innocent, and less weight if I am guilty. If I were aligned with the forces of darkness, I would likely be a somewhat hated ally, I imagine.

Indeed, dear Melly, I understand your decision.

Were you innocent, and felt I was innocent, you would likely seek to reason with me to ensure our mutual survival.
Were you innocent and felt I was guilty, you would likely accuse me to protect yourself, and remove a threat.
Were you guilty, and felt I was guilty, we are either warring factions, or working together to confuse everyone. The latter would be a dangerous game to play.
Were you guilty, and felt I was innocent, you would likely accuse me to remove a foe and the danger to yourself.

Of course, you were very fast to retaliate. I think we can rule out the first scenario as unlikely. Which gives us both a hint as to what the other may be, wouldn't you say?

Mistake in my post-before-last: That last sentence should read "And finally, he was too fast to dismiss me as not suspicious, which I would appear to be."

I should add that I think GeneralValter is voting for Melly for very, very different reasons than I. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, for now.

With four innocents taken from us, these are dark days indeed. And with the loss of our Guardian Angel Imaginationac, were we to have a Seer, they dare not reveal themselves.

It would appear that we are dealing with not only werewolves, but likely vampires, a murderer at least, and one additional unknown party. This character has either harmed or hidden increpare, and may be increpare himself.

There are sixteen that remain standing amongst us. It is probable that there are at least three werewolves, and three vampires, plus at least one murderer. That probably leaves, at best, nine innocents. At best! And to those out there who know they are innocent, remember that number includes you, so you know that at best there are eight others. And that is assuming that my crafting theory is wrong.

On my crafting theory- skaldicpoet9 offered ale to people. It was accepted by Fartron. skaldicpoet9 turned out to be innocent, and Fartron is still alive. I have some doubts about this theory now, but I haven't written it off.

Increpare, however, is missing, and I don't think he got a mask away. If my theory is right, however, one suspect for that is myself. He accepted meat from me, and a credible theory is that somehow doing so harmed him. From here, I can see a few possibilities. One: coincidence. Two: A setup to frame me. Three: I did it, and this is all a bold play to throw you off. Four: I did it, but I don't know about it. Taking this into account, especially the last, I would like to reiterate that I have closed my store. I will neither sell nor give away any meat until this tragedy is over. Besides, vegetables are good for your complexion.

Another concern- Nitro Crate accepted armour from Cheater. And is now dead. Actually, this lends a fair bit of credibility to my theory, but it is also possible that he was murdered to create this suspicion. Either way, it is entirely possible that crafters can only kill if you accept their goods or go to their abodes. I would thus encourage everyone to think twice before accepting any goods or visiting their residence.

Also on increpare- I has suggested that our Guardian Angel who turned out to be Imaginationac, should protect him. This leads to a few possibilities. Firstly, Imaginationac protected someone else instead. Secondly, whatever got increpare can beat a Guardian Angel- not that it matters, our Guardian is no more. Lastly: Increpare is still alive, we just can't see him. I'm leaning toward the first, Imaginationac probably had no reason to believe me.

One also has to wonder what "IWBTG" in Nitro Crate's accommodation means. It could be gibberish, meaning nothing; it could be a deception, designed to throw us off track; or it could have meaning. In the latter case, what does it mean? As an acronym it could catch anyone. For example, "I Went Back to God" could finger our priest. "I Was Butchered, That Garth!" could finger me. I fear we don't have a lot to work on.

With a new day comes a need for a new accusation. I'm torn three ways here. My second-highest suspect is jstckr, for the reasons I outlined previously, which haven't changed. Going by my theory of yesterday (irony, humour) and using the additional information gained today, my inclination is that he is some sort of vampire. Probably a head vampire. But he does not get my vote today. My third inclination is to find someone who hasn't voted or spoken yet, trying to avoid accusations through on silence, and vote for them.

My first suspect at this stage, however, is Melly, and I vote for him.

Why? Firstly, Melly is experienced in the ways of these things, no doubt having hear many a tale from other villages that fell in a similar way. Yet for someone so learned, he seems to have forgotten a few details in his initial theory about what voting early may mean. Secondly, he was quick to join and encourage the chutup bandwagon. Thirdly, his initial comment was to cast doubt on a group of people without really accusing them all. Fourthly, the weak logic in the initial post. And finally, he was too fast to dismiss me as a suspicious, which I would appear to be.

EDIT: Retracted vote for Melly.

toastie,

A read through my initial comment will indicate to you that I have written my "own damn engine", as well as why I am looking at other ones.

If you have pent-up outrage, may I suggest that you read first, then rage later.

I won't address your other points. You are extremely rude.

[really]

I've seen a bundle of 3D games floating around,

Really? I've found commercial indie 3d games to be quite rare...

I see them float around on various indie-type sites, usually in the feedback sections. Unfortunately, if I'm going to make an assertion like I did, it's up to me to back it up, and I'll have trouble doing so. Hence the following sentence talking about the engine in use. And also...

All the 3D stuff I come across seems to be "in development"

I suspect you're quite right there. If I could rattle off a list of strong, completed 3D games, I might then be able to dig around and find the engines they were using. More research needed by me, I think.

If I was going to make a 3D game to sell (not likely, I think 2D rocks :D) I'd get a Torque license and investigate its capabilities myself. Could well be that it's good enough to get the job done, at least there's proof that others have succeeded.

I've considered just dropping the money and then trying it out. I just don't hear enough people saying "damn, this *is* good" to overcome my concerns. I'll have to keep thinking on this one.

Btw, about poor documentation... Some of the big commercial engines I have worked with have had really poor documentation. But I think that when you're a developer using third-party stuff, you always feel like you want more documentation, and then some more again. Though what is really needed is that you spend lots and lots of time to understand the inner workings of the library/engine, so you know what's going on and how to best use it.

I feel quality documentation achieves three things- makes it easier to evaluation, makes it easier to get started, and makes it easier to maintain through its life. I've had to struggle through frameworks with shocking documentation before, and if the standard is low enough, sometimes it's easier just to write your own from scratch. In my experience, poorly documented systems tend to be the first to fall into disrepair and into obsolescence- unless something external is keeping them alive (eg. being the only solution). Thus my sensitivity to documentation.

And yes, I know some people will just complain about anything, and sometimes a framework is so good that you just bite the bullet and don't fret about the doco.

A lot of people expect an engine to just take care of stuff for you. In my experience, no engine does, and you can choose to use your time either to write your own tech, or to become intimately familiar with someone elses. I reckon it adds up to about the same amount of time in the end (though using a ready-made engine will get you stuff on screen quicker, while with your own tech that bit takes longer. When it comes to finishing of the product, you'll work quicker with your own tech, and much slower with the third-party). At least in my experience.

This is good advice and is consistent with my experience in other (non-3D-engine) areas, with one exception- that the own-tech versus learning pre-existing is roughly comparable in time. I've found it varies a lot, and not always in the same direction. But then, we're talking 3D engines, and not in general, and my experience in working with and evaluating different engines is extremely limited.

Hi Crackerblocks,

There's a lot to read through in the thread and it would be unreasonable to expect you to have read all of it (especially true due to my verbosity), but have a skim through the fingers and toes comment I made above. Completion is not an issue for someone who has completed multiple games and projects. The advice, whilst good in general, is mistargeted.

I've already got a cross-platform framework that I'm using that I developed as part of my game suite. That's not a problem. I can't take your advice on sticking to one platform and porting at the end as it is not consistent with my experience in this area. Unless by "end" you mean the end of each month. Perhaps this is a debate for another day. For the time being, I'm evaluating different 3D engines to see what I can gain. I am comfortable spending time exploring the options. What are your experiences in regard to 3D engines?

Re a team of artists- I learnt from that mistake last time. The design is such that the artistic requirements are minimised, and for what is left, I intend to throw money at a pro. I have no artistic ability but saleable skills. I work, I get money, I give it to a pro, and they make it purty. There's a lot to developing 3D engines, as I have discussed through the thread, and if it is something I can leave to the more dedicated, I wish to do so.

I realise there is only so much advice that can be offered with only the tiniest slice of my actual circumstances. Thanks for the input

I've had a look at ogre, irrlicht and C4, but quickly discarded them, for about the same reasons as you did... Compatibility and performance issues. Plus, I couldn't find any examples of commercial games done using them (this was a while back though). I haven't looked at Torque, but at least there's some games been done using that.

Last time I looked at Torque I had a bit of trouble finding reliable information short of paying, and this time around I keep hearing "awful doco". I've kind-of ruled it out already, short of a few people piping up and say "yeah, I've used it, and it's great".

Haven't looked at C4 at all though.

I've worked with Renderware, Gamebryo and Unreal engine, and I wouldn't say any of them worked well. They worked, but only because we threw a lot of programmers on the engine problems to make them go away. Generally, I experienced less headaches with in-house engines (though there certainly was some major issues there too). So even if those engines was in a reasonable indie price range, I wouldn't recommend them to indie-devs or small teams.

That's quite worrying.

Maybe, maybe not. In my experience, compatibility is an issue even with the big commercial engines. It rarely "just works" everywhere... Speaking for myself, this is one of the major reasons I've chosen to go with 2D for everything I do. The compatibility issue becomes way more manageable.

I had suspected as such- it's hard for me to know though, as I have zero experience with any of the larger commercial engines.

As far as I'm aware, there's really no viable option for indies making 3D games. It is rather a lot of work to make your own engine. The ones that exist are either not suited for games (but more for tech demos) or requires a lot of work (= big teams) to get them to do what you want (plus, they're too expensive). Would be nice if there existed a solid, lightweight indie-engine for 3D games, design for the needs of an indie dev...

That's... disturbing. I've seen a bundle of 3D games floating around, surely not all using their own hand-made engines though? But I'm honesty not sure. I guess I've also been hoping that someone will post "I've used X to create a game, and it's great".

Many things to think of, and not a lot of good news. Regardless, thanks for the extra input.

Hang on a second, something foul is afoot. The votes don't add up at all.

I'd like to look at the tophat of justice. I mentioned my vote for jstckr three times. I know it doesn't make a difference ultimately, but his name never appeared in the final list.

Heya.

What's wrong with OGRE again?

Paragraph nine in my original post.

not all that far gamewise... but since 12-2007 i'm completely hooked on games . so i made some prototypes with my own framework, which really can't be considered as an engine. it's just a set of independent classes to handle windows on win/linux, do basic interaction, draw stuff with opengl, do calcs with vectors and make some noise. it's usable for prototyping and learning, but for nothing more. simple games are possible that way tough, but if it gets real 3d, things definitely get more complicated. drawing is only one aspect, like we all know. - the point, when i was completely fed up with all that engine tech stuff was just a couple of days ago, so i can't really tell you if it's going to work out with Panda3D (which is really a professional but easy to learn/use engine) or any other ready-made package.

Yeah, I've developed a bunch of useful classes as well. Fully intend to keep a hold of them. I haven't found 3D in general to be that hard, mostly because I keep it simple. 3D graphics on the other hand, is hard work.

the last prototype i've made was just a simple indoor scene. i mean: simple as it can get: only one model with some seperated rooms drawn with hard-baked lightmap + diffuse texture plus a skybox. i just wanted to see how good my collision method will work in such an environment using basic opengl rendering and realtime sound for collision response. - but it didn't work as expected. like expected . although collision was quite easy (i did it directly on the polygons of the model, which were split up first in a regular grid), i saw that there were some problems with the camera movement. sometimes it lagged hard, and screen flickered. so i turned on vsync with a spcial ogl extension. but all was slowed down by that, and the sound synth began to crackle. so i had to compute the sound i a seperated thread (linux incompatible). but the hangers were still there, sometimes the framrate dropped instantly under ~10 fps. i had to add simple frustum culling with an additional octree (besides the regular collision grid, hmm). but there were still some unsmooth parts in the cam movement, i had to seperate the simple "physics" in its own thread and to update it only in regular timesteps, cause delta_t physics simply don't work out (what i had to realize after testing both, euler and verlet method with dt). but the jittering was still there sometimes, just because the fillrate of my graphics cards isn't high enough. and the scene is really very simple, just a couple of overlapping polygons. i would have to learn how to do occlusion culling/portals/bsp now. then all the scene graph thing with matrix/quaternion transformations would have to be done, realtime lighting for non-lightmaped models, writing editing tools and so on. simply not the thing i would like to do anymore. NOOO! 

It gets very complicated very fast, doesn't it. :}

I haven't got any heavy scene optimisations in my engine, so it'll never run as fast as others. It's mostly just a big node tree, with a whole bunch of funky effects that I like.

but it's really a point where all indie devs have to decied by themselves imho. - what do you really want? - the techy path is as equally deep as the more creative one, inf == inf... i just think, it depends a lot on what type of games you are interested in too. 3d is only that complicated if the whole gameplay is 3d. (but i don't really know yet, i'm still learning). all the rendering isn't so crazy hard in my opinion. it makes sense to restrict it to a basic level, like standard opengl, for compatibility reason too. that's compilable and runnable on almost every computer without too much hassle.

If you were still on your own engine, I'd ask if you've had much of a play around with your engine of different PCs. My experiences were that it starts getting tricky, as every card and driver has its quirks.

I fear I only have a passing interest in the 3D graphics side- or at least, I'm not happy about only being able to dedicate a small amount of time to it.

@Irrlicht/Ogre: after some tests a while ago, i think they are simply too crappy and overloaded to use in commercial projects. i couldn't rely on them.

That's interesting that you say that. I keep telling myself that I'm being far too harsh, and I'm far too biased toward my own code, when I think that maybe they aren't up to scratch.

@MinGW: that compiler always worked for me, even for these gamey prototypes... in combination with Mingw Developer Studio it's quite a useable alternative to visual studio (one good thing with that: you can export gcc makefiles there, easy modifiable to use under linux). code::blocks is ok too, and available under linux. - but at the end, MSVC is simply the best ide i know. and its compiler produces mostly smaller, faster binaries, and the build process is faster too, the debugger better. but sometimes it can even make sense to use both - msvc and mingw - in parallel. i did that when i made my synth lib, which should run and compile under linux and windows equally well. so mingw was a good way to produce fully gcc compatible code. sometimes there are still differences between them (esp. with templates, although it improved a lot since msvc version 6). and that way, it was nice to have an easy double check mechanism for cleaner more compatible code...

I've had mixed results with MinGW. It can be great to work with, but an incredible pain sometimes.

From what I've heard: Smaller, hell yes. Faster, maybe not. The template situation in MSVC 6 was apparently really bad. I'm a bit rusty. I believe that was the one I used to use?

Thanks for sharing your experiences.