Spring Engine vs. ___

[REVENGE]

Discussion of RTS-type engines:

Any feature engine wise that we have, but other engines don't have? Any engine that you believe is superior to the Spring engine in almost every aspect? You can talk about extensibility (lua, python, etc) too.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well I don't know much that is worth mentioning here at all (that isn't AAA). There's Glest & its engine and there is TA3D. The first is a bit crappy imo (as it afaik is just meant to run the game and not work as an engine basis and also itself is rather basic) while the latter is more interesting...

TA3D might get huge advantages in terms of rendering speed & general performance in comparison to Spring. It might even surpass it in most aspects at some point but until that it'll need lots of time and a community supporting it has to be created for that task...

[REVENGE]

I don't like TA3D's approach towards visual appeal vs. performance balancing. IMO, they're willing to sacrifice too much and take too many shortcuts in order to get everything running smoothly on your old PIII GeForce 3.

[El Idiot]

I don't like TA3D's approach towards visual appeal vs. performance balancing. IMO, they're willing to sacrifice too much and take too many shortcuts in order to get everything running smoothly on your old PIII GeForce 3.

That was the beauty of TA. You could run it on nearly any computer. All it needed was a rotatable camera. Nowadays, a PIII and Geforce 3 is 'any computer'.

It really is TA, in 3D.

[Hoi]

Skeletal animation, bumpmapping, normal mapping, specular mapping, another *mapping, a proper map format, dx 9-10 support, free cookies when I win a game....

[REVENGE]

Skeletal animation, bumpmapping, normal mapping, specular mapping, another *mapping, a proper map format, dx 9-10 support, free cookies when I win a game....

Not feature requests hoi.

[Jasper1984]

dx 9-10 support

Prefer not. Please do not require DX either..

[[Krogoth86]]

I don't like TA3D's approach towards visual appeal vs. performance balancing. IMO, they're willing to sacrifice too much and take too many shortcuts in order to get everything running smoothly on your old PIII GeForce 3.

Still I think even that's enough to outperform Spring from a technical point of view. You might have some nice things in Spring too today but most of it are LUA hacks or something like that which isn't an ideal solution. TA3D doesn't have to deal with "ancient" ways of things being done like it for example is the case for Spings, renderer and pathfinder. If done right it really has lots of potential...

Just like Spring its focus while creating the basis is about porting over TA content which is kind of a downside and most certainly limits the engine's potential...

Still Spring imo has no real competition and won't have in the near future. It really needs to advance on certain areas though - while that might be a bit complicated when it comes to basic stuff like the renderer (What happened to the project about integrating the Horde3D renderer btw?) there really is a need for another good model format which supports some basic animation techniques - if you tell an artist new to Spring how this currently is done he'll most certainly start to run for his life...

[Satirik]

pfff TA3D outperforming Spring ... you have no idea what you're talking about i guess

[[Krogoth86]]

You probably have no idea of what you just read...

It's a simple fact that for example the pathfinder is in pretty rough shape as even its author said it isn't really optimized. With things like that in mind and having a way more modern hardware to design for the TA3D guys now have the opportunity to involve that (although this most certainly is going to be about graphics - you might even see that in the 2nd trailer where it seems to run with reasonable framerates even with everything having a dynamic shadow - I don't know much of their nature and if the recorder compensates sucky framerates like in Spring but it would be kinda impossible to tape such a scenario with Spring's dynamic shadow - just to give an example)...

That's why I said it has a good chance / potential to outperform Spring's graphical performance once it gets a bit more developed (while in contrast to that this part most certainly won't be touched for quite a while in Spring)...

Right now it's not much more than a nice showreel that's right but when looking at how fast some development was finished we may expect some nice results in the future - probably not anytime soon but you can't really demand that...