quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
true, but you need to have several programmers dedicated to such optimizations and they need to be familiar with the engine to make such customizations, plus all the support needed from either criterion or intrinsic to get things to fit in smoothly. when we first looked into renderware and intrinsic for our project, our in-house engine out performed both by a large margin.
Yes, of course the engineers would need to be familiar with the engine. Just like the engineers would need to be familiar with the internal engine to make customizations. And yes, they would have the same support needs as working with internal technology, but at Criterion you would have access to support engineers who have helped on nearly 200 RenderWare titles on next generation consoles and the PC.
I will admit there are definitely situations where an internal engine is going to out perform RenderWare (or Intrinsic) out-of-the-box. That''s not the point. No one can make an engine that''ll make everyone happy all of the time. But that''s not the point! The point is that RenderWare (and middleware in general) provide a jumping off point for your technology. It''s not an even match to compare RenderWare out-of-the-box to an internal engine that''s been in development for 3-6 months for a specific task. I would ask what type of performance tests you were making?
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...i work at one of the companies that has licensed renderware for a few of our games. in-dire situations it is a life saver, but overall i dont think they are up to par.
It was definitely "up to par" for Grand Theft Auto 3/4 and hundreds of other titles.
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you make me laugh. its a driving game, very little besides the car and the tires actaully animates..i know ive made a few of em''. i wonder what their numbers wouldve showed if they had a couple of 50+ boned skinned characters running around. i seriously doubt they would hold..to do so something else would have to give, be it texture reduction or that cool projected shadow!
You actually make me laugh... what are the limits of RenderWare? The same of the underlying hardware, be it the PS2, Xbox, GAMECUBE, or PC. Only a very uneducated use of RenderWare would be limiting. 50+ skin-and-bones characters? Is that stitched, 2-weight, 4-weight? How many bones? What''s the maximum number of vertices in the skin? How well is the geometry tri-stripped? How many different textures are being used and what are their sizes? Do the characters share bone hierarchies? Share animations? Share meshes?
I don''t want to confuse my point. No one should think I''m claiming that you license a graphics engine that you can simply drop artwork into it and get blinding speed. That''s not going to happen. There is no universally optimal engine, unless it has a dozen different implementations internally. The point is that RenderWare provides an excellent initial framework to hook your more custom technology onto. And while you focus on the parts that make your game unique (like 50+ characters running around) someone else in the world is working on improving the core components of the technology, all the while making your life easier (if you let them).