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"RealmForge GDK v0.6.2 Released" Discussion |
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 |   RipTorn
Member since: 4/30/2001 From: Christchurch, New Zealand | |||
Posted - 7/5/2005 8:28:22 AM | ||||
| I remember evaluating RealmForge for a small 'non profit' project I was doing for a company.. This was about 4 months ago. And frankly, I was seriously dissapointed. The blurbs the engine was given on the dev'master engine list suggested it was the ultimate do-it-all OSS engine. Ohh boy o boy. Basically it's an expansion for the Axiom engine, which is a good engine (although somewhat over designed, but thats just OGRE's heritage). The core is the world editing system. It had a menu (new, readme and quit worked), that led on to a fairly detailed looking interface which, by what I'd read, allowed creation of games (targetted at RPGs). Well. um. when the interface is simply there for show, and not a single button worked (not even 'exit'), you know something is badly wrong. Not to mention the mechanics for actually 'editing' your world were utterly and totally broken. The remainder seemed to just be modified axiom demos, that either worked or didn't. There was also a paged-terrain demo, that was quite poor. Also having to download a 100+mb 'media' file didn't impress me. Especially as the vast majority of this media was either duplicate files, or simply not used. Simply put, I was massivly dissapointed. Especially after reading 'reviews' of the engine comparing it to the likes of Source, and the Doom3 engine. I know I'm being very negative, but everything I'd read about the engine at the time was extremly positive, almost gushing. To be so utterly let down was very, very dissapointing. I, and my boss, were really looking forward to what the engine had to offer (while waiting for the nearly 200mb of files to download). So take it all with a grain of salt. I do hope that things have changed, and I do wish the team the best. I just feel they may be trying to sell the rooster before it's hatched. | ||||
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| xeonx1
Member since: 7/3/2005 From: Champaign, IL | |||
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Posted - 7/5/2005 10:39:23 AM | ||||
| Well, I think it a tad unrealistic to expect that every component is finished and working for a very early alpha release, especially considering that the majority of the work was done by a single developer. However, now there are many devs on the team and things are really coming along. The Axiom and CEGUI# source code is included in releases and the SVN codebase as I am not the project lead for it and it is continuing development in partnership with the RealmForge, Might and Magic Tribute, and SDL.NET devteams. The blurbs that you have referenced are the reviews I assume? Or are they the list of features that *are* available? Though Networking and AI are still in design stages, I wouldn't expect such components to come before the rest of the platform is mature. The devtools have a strong flexible design and a lot of work has gone into making every aspect of the game engine editable at run-time (which is certainly no small endeavor) however it was noted that they where not usable for that release. I make releases often so that who ever is interested in the engine or is ambitious enough to use it so early (such as the Might and Magic Tribute team and several others) can do so. However I never make any claim that the engine is finished or even beta yet. I would sincerely appreciate it if you would have at least considered evaluating this release and the great progress that has been made on this product *before* you discourage others from doing so… especially considering that - as you have said - is has been 4 months (nearly half the life of this project!) since you have last done so. The development tools would certainly be one of the last components to be developed considering that they build upon the rest of the entire platform and require that run-time modification work perfectly. I made a release with interface for the tools designed yet without they functionally yet as could have been read in the release notes. This again follows with our approach of iterative releases so that they users can give feedback (as has been happening quite nicely on the forums and mailing list) and we always respond to them. The tech demos were *hardily* just modified versions of the Axiom tech demos, they are complete rewrites of all of the tech demos making use of RealmForge's features to ensure that they are were much more concise, flexible, and easy to understand and they have been well commented and documented unlike the earlier Axiom demos. They where complete rewrites that took quite a bit of time to ensure that they were functionality equivalent to OGRE and Axiom's so that you can see how much the use of RealmForge simplifies game developed as opposed to using this rendering engine's directly. This was all notes in documentation, release notes, etc. however. The demo game GUI was not meant to be fully functional yet as there is not yet a fully functionally game built using RealmForge (as would be expected at this stage, though they are being developed now). Your downloading the media library was not a requirements, it was uploaded at the request of quite a few users to simplify following releases by only including the changed media files with them as opposed to all the media for all of the numerous tech demos and demo games and the winter tutorial. However, I have taken it down because I few other users were confused as the whether or not they needed it. With regards to the comparison between RealmForge and the Source engine for instance, was referring to the approach for development tools: that no other game has taken an entirely *run-time* approach to development allowing design and modification to occur during gameplay. However these tools are not entirely finished yet though this version is the first to have some of the core devtools working properly (though there is a bug or two with scene graph persistence that will be addressed in the following releases… our goal is to make one every 3 weeks.) There was also a comparison to Max Payne in terms of physics, and this is certainly not a stretch since ODE, the same physics library that is used in numerous high profile commercial games, comes with out-of-the-box support for RealmForge and eventually other physics middlewares such as Netwon Physics .NET will be supported as well. Cloth-based physics has been successfully developed and tested as well and will be included in the following releases. I do apologize for the earlier releases having not been as full-featured as you had expected and will change the information on DevMaster.net to further emphasize the early stage of development and make less bold comparison. So many improvements to note have been made since those releases (though there is a comprehensive change log available with all releases for those who are interested). Though most changes however are refactorings, redesigned, and additional components as the creation of more impressive demo games and development tools has just begun. Much more information has been provided on the wiki, the development mailing list has been made public, and Axiom, CEGUI#, and MMT are now partnered in their development with RealmForge. I am open to any and all suggestions and very often follow through with the development community has grown and now many users and developers in addition to myself are not contributing and there are more tutorials and demo applications and lots of information on the wiki. I have also written an article for Software Developer's Journal (http://software20.org/en) at their request on the design of this platform and its implications for game development with .NET and it is the featured article in this months issue. So all-in-all development is gaining substantial momentum and you may find it work while to revaluate RealmForge. Thanks, Dan Moorehead (xeonx) | ||||
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| SirKnight
Member since: 1/7/2001 | |||
Posted - 7/5/2005 3:49:47 PM | ||||
| Ok...you really need to do something about that freakin screenshot page. For one thing, get rid of the pngs and use jpgs. Also the "thumbnails" are not really thumbnails, they are the entire full res image trying to load and is being shrunk to look like a thumbnail. Please create REAL thumbnails (as jpgs of course) so they load fast and link to the full res shots (that are also jpgs). I'm sorry but the method you have of creating a thumnail screenshot page like this really annoys me. Plus it's hell on my modem. However, I will check out the GDK as it looks pretty cool. It's neat to see the Axiom engine being used for something other than a techdemo just to say "yay look at me engine!" :) The integrated doom 3 like editor is neat. I really like that feature about doom 3 as it makes going from map creation to map playing extremely quick and easy. I can't say the same about HL2 map creation. With HL2, it takes freakin forever to go from editor to in game. I'm also quite interested in using C# as a scripting language. I thought of that for my 3d engine but right now I'm thinking either python or lua. Although I'd prefer to use C# as it's just dandy. :) Ohhh...I just noticed on your page (i'm reading it as I type this :)) that there is lua and python .net. That's so cool. :) -SirKnight | ||||
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| SirKnight
Member since: 1/7/2001 | |||
Posted - 7/5/2005 3:55:06 PM | ||||
| Good god that download file is big. My poor poor modem. :( Ahh...the joys of living in the middle of nowhere land. :/ -SirKnight | ||||
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| RipTorn
Member since: 4/30/2001 From: Christchurch, New Zealand | |||
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Posted - 7/5/2005 11:37:21 PM | ||||
| Ok. I guess I'll reiterate what I said.. But in more friendly 'not writing this at 2am' terms. Simply, I was paid to evaluate many open source, closed source, commercial and free engines for a small product that would be the foundation of a startup buisiness. Over the course of a week I tried or evaluated many, many different engines. Axiom, OGRE, crystal space, purple#, torque, OSG, realmforge, etc etc etc. My overriding concern was that I needed something that was stable, wasn't bloated and provided robust content creation and managment systems (or would be easy to create a framework within). My boss isn't the most technically minded when it comes to graphics and engines (although he does do a bit of programming), so it was pretty much up to me. He personally was most excited about realmforge. So much so that I spent about 6 hours downloading and struggling to get it to work. What has to be understood, is that as a potential customer, we must take everything at face value until experience tells us otherwise. This is one of the pitfalls of open-source software, and is something we experienced with a number of projects we evaluated. Marketing your project must be done with care. You have to be careful that, as I said before, you don't sell what isn't finished. And honestly, if you do read the vast majority of the information out there about realmforge, the overwhelming impression is one of a nearly complete, feature rich engine that will allow content creation out-of-the-box. The reality when I evaluated it was obviously quite understandably different, yet nowhere obvious was it stated. I spent a long time looking for indications that I hadn't done something wrong, and the features were actually there. I'm glad that you are taking steps to improve the information to potential customers. Dispite what you may think of me  , I do understand the situation. I have previous lead free projects, in one case a half-life total conversion modification, and unfortunatly I've learnt the hard way what over selling yourself can do. In my case I inherited the project that was sorrounded by so much hype it was rediculous. The end result was that things that we were planning, or had in the pipeline, didn't turn out for various reasons, yet the community expected them because we had been selling it to them.Needless to say, dispite our best efforts the entire project collapsed quite spectacuarly. While it did eventually release, it had 2 maps, and 4 weapons. Hardly the 20+ of each we promised (which at one point we had...) My point is that the same thing happens in software. Companies like microsoft are experts at not doing this. Your desires to express to the world you ideas and desings must be tempered with commercial reality, and a pinch of salt. Otherwise, you will get people like me who expect everything you say, yet wind up seeing nothing even though the intention and the groundwork may be there. I'm trying this myself with my current personal project, which chances are only about 10 people know about. But this I'm happy with, when it's ready I'll start to publicise it, but for the moment I'm just going to quietly work away at it. I do appologize for my tone in my original post. It probably wasn't a good idea to express my feeling about the project at 2am. However, I still stand by what I said at the end, 'Take it all with a grain of salt. I do hope that things have changed, and I do wish the team the best.' If you are interested, the final decision for the engine we choose was a very hard one indeed. Realmforge was diguarded fairly quickly simply due to how dissapointed we felt, purple# had design and portability problems, OSG was bloated to hell, Torque was too much of an unknown, etc. In the end, the decision we made wasn't for the obvious best, as there was none, it was simply an educated guess on what should proove the least painful. For that we choose the Axiom engine, and in some ways this was a good decision, but in a lot of ways this has come to bite us in unexpected ways. Axiom unfortuantly suffers for a case of over-design. This, as I mentioned was a legacy of OGRE, but has certainly prooved problematic. There is no doubting the engine is powerful, but that power is somewhat limited in it's flexibility. Often times very simple things have come to haunt us and cause some really quite exteme problems. An example is that in axiom/ogre, the x-axis is globally mirrored. Simple, but definitly not something we could have picked up on early on, and this brought out lots of other problems, like how you cannot easily set a node's position to an arbitrary matrix, the camera mirroring breaks the user interface, picking, etc. Many other small things that generally came down to poorly thought out or poorly tested design, and ended up costing upto several days delay trying to work around them. Once again, I do wish you and your team the best. | ||||
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| xeonx1
Member since: 7/3/2005 From: Champaign, IL | |||
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Posted - 7/6/2005 1:36:04 PM | ||||
| Thanks for the advice, I certainly have faced a lot of difficulties with high expectations for the still-alpha project, so I think that I will start to temper my comments about it (difficult as I am somewhat optimistic and see potential in its design). Now that an article has been published in an international magazine about it, I think think that the assumption that it is a finished project will be even greater be all those that read it... So, I do appreciate you commenting on your own experiance. I am now the new project lead for Axiom, however, so I can't complain about your choice ;) However, please post on the new forums for it about these kinds of difficulties that you have encountered or bugs that need to be fixed as I could certainly use the help in indentifying these things. I was left with no documentation of the design or current state of the engine and my current work is in documenting these and figuring out what needs to be done and by who. I am interested in what the project is that you are working on which is using Axiom. Would you be able to tell me a bit about in in at least a private email if you do not wish to attract attention to it yet? Also, have you made any significant changes or fixes to the Axiom engine and if so do you intend to release them before you do your product? | ||||
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| Anonymous Poster | |||
Posted - 8/4/2005 5:20:57 PM | ||||
| I for one am very much for the png files opposed to jpgs, as it's widely known that png is a superior format in many ways. If you're legacy browser (read: internet explorer) can't understand them correctly or something, I suggest you trade in your toys for real software. | ||||
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