Torque 3d! is it worth the time and money for an MMO?
The problem with making an MMO (and other modern 3d games) is not so much the programming as all the damn artwork you need. I don't understand why you would penny-pinch on an engine ($100 or $200 for the license) when you need to spend >$3000 for tools to make professional artwork (3D Studio Max or Maya and Photoshop). Sure, you may be able to do it in Blender...good luck with that on the scale you would need for an MMO...
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hey guys i just though it would be a good idea to say im not spending a dime for tools. For my upcoming projects im going to be using blender as for 2d image editing im using gimp and here comes torque for 180 which is the only expense at the moment .i can use 3ds max alot better than blender and Photoshop just as much as gimp but those industry standard tools are at my school and i only have a student license with max so yea im not about to go find even $4k for the main 3d app max because as a student with a part time job thats not going to be happening but thankfully theres blender so yea now lets see just so i can know where im headed what do you guys think is are some of the most major things MMO's miss out? im not going to make one for now as we all established its quit the task but as time goes by ill find a better team so how about it?can you guys list a few things you all hate in mmo's and what you'd love to see more of or have in the game at all im sure this is going to be useful for a ton of other devs too thank you hope to hear your great replies soon.
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Theres another thing to clear up what size should i make the texture maps for the UVS and such ? I usually go with 1024x maps and they really don't go as far as id like so id like to know how often can i use per say 2k maps ,whats your take on that, guys remember im asking this in terms of performance for the average users pc ? i mean the only pc i have atm is the asus g73sw bt6 best buy version USA,which has 8gigs ddr3 memory, i7 2nd gen 2 ghz up to 3 ghz when needed and a 460m nvidia gpu so im kinda stuck figuring out what would run fast or slow on an average pc and honestly i dont even know what average is anymore so this is why this is another important question thanks hope to see more replies ahead .
It is hard to define the avaerage PC, especially with different demographics. Most of the people on the minecraft server I play on when asked have 2 to 3 ghz dual core, 2 to 4gb of RAM and universally all have integrated GPU's, infact its only 5 or 6 of us that do have dedicated GPU's (on a server with many many more players than that). But most of the players there are all in school playing on cheap laptops. The few with dedicated GPUs (including myself) are no longer in school and are either working or at uni or similar. I know a large amount of people who seem to think buying a netbook is an awesome idea and use that as their only computer. That will usually be 1.3ghz dual core, 1.6 single or 1.6 dual as the most common setups I see, usually complemented by 1gb ram, I occasionally see 2gb. Never seen one with a dedicated GPU before (unsurprisingly).
You should ask friends, see what machines they run and so on. My machine: 3.5ghz AMD athlon 2 triple core, 4gb dual channel DDR3 RAM @1333Mhz and a GTX460 1gb 336 core at 823Mhz. This is a desktop not a laptop
You should ask friends, see what machines they run and so on. My machine: 3.5ghz AMD athlon 2 triple core, 4gb dual channel DDR3 RAM @1333Mhz and a GTX460 1gb 336 core at 823Mhz. This is a desktop not a laptop
Theres another thing to clear up what size should i make the texture maps for the UVS and such ? I usually go with 1024x maps and they really don't go as far as id like so id like to know how often can i use per say 2k maps ,whats your take on that, guys remember im asking this in terms of performance for the average users pc ? i mean the only pc i have atm is the asus g73sw bt6 best buy version USA,which has 8gigs ddr3 memory, i7 2nd gen 2 ghz up to 3 ghz when needed and a 460m nvidia gpu so im kinda stuck figuring out what would run fast or slow on an average pc and honestly i dont even know what average is anymore so this is why this is another important question thanks hope to see more replies ahead .
Check the Steam hardware survey for what gamers are using...
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
You can use the "reach" (which means crappy hardware) and "hidef" (high performance hardware) profiles as a guide even if you are not using XNA. See here for a comparison on "reach" and "hi-def":
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff604995%28v=xnagamestudio.40%29.aspx
I would also make a decision ahead of time as to what shader profile or model you are going to target as a minimum for your users....because that effectively decides whether you can use geometry shaders, whether you can sample textures in your vertex shaders, etc.
I have used Torque3D for a long time, been a big proponent of GarageGames for many years... but honestly, unless your programmer has a great deal of experience and doesn't mind spending a lot of time fixing the engine that you're paying for, I would stay away from Torque3D right now. It has a great deal of potential, has an excellent rendering engine, and you can do a lot with it since the source code is included in the low price point, but it is a highly broken engine at this point and it really doesn't look like it's going to be fixed any time soon. As a relative beginner there will be no end to the frustrations you will face with this engine.
Since you have experience with Unity, I would probably stick with that. You don't get the source code, but (almost) everything works out of the box, and it's a lot friendlier to beginners than Torque.
Since you have experience with Unity, I would probably stick with that. You don't get the source code, but (almost) everything works out of the box, and it's a lot friendlier to beginners than Torque.
The only problem with the steam hardware surveys is that it doesn't reflect the average PC overall, only the average PC for games, this is absolutely fine though seeming as your developing a game. In reality intel graphics I would think would have a larger market share than 11.4%, more like 30 to 40 possibly higher and I know about 5 people who actually have 5gb of ram or more (which is supposedly the most common on steam). It does show nicely that single core systems are increasingly rare although for now don't bother with multicore programming, its alot harder and introduces alot of complexities that you might not want to deal with yet, you may be able to take advantage of it in future.
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