A Game Development Weblog! torque 3d garage games tribulation knights game engine
Chapter One Sneak Peak
I have been hard at work on Chapter One after taking a break for a while.
Now looking at everything with fresh eyes, work is progressing quickly toward a release of the first chapter. All work on the other chapters will cease until the first is released.
Here is a sneak peak of the food store in Bunker town. Since food is in short supply, food is the number one item for all consumers! Funny how starvation changes peoples priorities. Keeping up with the Jones is not as important as feeding what family you have left.
The future is not as fun and shiny as we would like. Read Revelations and find out for yourself.
Bunker Town store selling food
New Look of Game!
Ok I decided to test a few models and code in the newest T3D engine now that it’s our of beta. The tests looked so good that I have decided to make the jump! Yes I know this will delay the game once again, but it will be worth it.
I have started porting all the code and models over to the new T3D 1.0.1 engine. The rendering looks fantastic, and to prove it here is a snapshot with several evil Enforcers. The environment was created by a 3rd party, and it looks great. These new environments will make the natural environments look realistic. The new T3D engine does a nice job of rendering and it can be seen when you compare what everything looked like only a few months ago.
Once the porting is complete, we should be able to release a technical demo.
It will be used for testers to check the frame rates and rendering abilityof the game on their home computers, and send that information back to me.
Click on the image below to see it full size.
The Tribulation Knight’s game technology rendering can be photo-realistic if so desired. The new Torque 3D renderer, includes per-pixel dynamic lighting, normal and parallax occlusion mapping, and much more. Lighting can support hundreds of lights and global real-time dynamic shadowing on every object.
Looking at New T3D Game Engine
I purchased a license to the new Torque version of Garage Games T3D engine. The speed, features, and tools make it the perfect choice for future game chapters of Tribulation Knights. It is too late to migrate the current chapter of the game over without delaying it. So I will move forward with publishing the first chapter using TGEA 1.7.1.
I have to say that the new engine when finally released will make my job easier when designing levels and environments. The new model format collada is a welcome addition for Torque developers. I have looked at multiple large levels built in 3DSmax and imported into T3D in several large pieces using the collada format. The results are fantastic.
I have to tear myself away from it so I can finish the current Tribulation Knights.
TK Models in T3D Engine
The image above demonstrates the high quality of the rendering capabilities of the new engine. I recreated the terrain from chapter one, in the T3D engine in only minutes.
A level building comparison:
The roads I built in chapter one using the TGEA 1.1.7 engine took me a long time because of the pain to line up the road pieces. Even then I had to tweak the terrain so that the road would look correct when laying on the surface. Time it took, at least 4 Hours.
In T3D I have the capability to lay down roads, or paths using a spline technique. After adding them I can go back and tweak the path, and alignment. Time it took, only 30 minutes.
An indie developer has to watch the bottom line on every purchase, and I admit I did debated over this decision. The discount I received for being an early adopter, and a existing TGEA licensee helped me with the cost. The actual results I receieved when using each beta interation has proved to me that it was worth the investment of my money and time. I am so excited about using it on Tribulation Knights, but at the time of writing this it is only up to Beta version 4. Only once it has reached a full release version will I consider jumping to it. The reason why is that I have to convert my code to each version of the code, and that takes time. Each change and modification would need to be moved from a previous version to a new version of the code. That takes a lot of time, troubleshooting, and bug fixes. I want to avoid that and wait for the full release. Once that happens, expect to see more screenshots and videos of TK conversion tests.
Go over to the Garage Games website and check out the engine for yourself.