Reality engine

[KungFuSquirrel]

Gotta love the feature comparison page... apparently Doom III has no sort of scripting support whatsoever (funny, what have I been branching into in the last couple months, then? ). And they talk like Source and D3 are "useless" for any game more than 18 months down the pipeline and aren't getting any expanded development (which, of course, they provide). :roll:

Hell, including a "day/night cycle" as a major engine feature on a comparison checklist is a sure sign things lean a little on the gimmicky side. I could write one of those for D3 right now if I wanted to. Some people already have.

There's some cool power and features they're pushing, but nothing useful you can't find or implement in a major licensing engine - most of it is just more polys and higher res textures. It looks like an excellent platform for a smaller dev studio to use to get some decent power for cheap, but I don't see it standing up to id, epic, or even Valve (though they don't seem as aggressive on the engine licensing front as I'd expected - whether that's them or people choosing against it, who knows *shrug* ) in the primary engine market - especially now that unreal engine 3 is practically the official middleware of the next xbox with so many studios licensing it already.

[von*ferret]

Source has its benefits but I'm starting to open my eyes to other things now like unreal's pro's/con's. I'm finding that source has the best looking lighting so far, but I've barely dived into unreal lighting so I can't say for sure. I just like how source lighting looks. As for more user friendly source is definately a pain in the ass to get anything custom into the engine compared to unreal where its only a couple of mouse clicks and voila. Dunno, maybe in the future valve will implement somehting more user friendly.

as for the Reality engine, I'd really have to play it to get any sense of whether or not I"d like to learn it. I"ve been playing Dawn of War recently and have downloaded the SDK tools to explore it for a while this summer possibly.

[rockdude86]

well i sure hope there will be updates to the modding tools voor hl2 especially the hammer editor has been pretty fucked by valve so many bugs that i have run into and as ferret said getting custom material into hl2 is pretty f*cked. i think valve made a big mistake with not making these things easyer.

[InsaneSingingBlender]

haha yeah seriously kfs, when i was that i was like 'wtf!?!'.

[TomWithTheWeather]

Source has its benefits but I'm starting to open my eyes to other things now like unreal's pro's/con's. I'm finding that source has the best looking lighting so far, but I've barely dived into unreal lighting so I can't say for sure. I just like how source lighting looks. As for more user friendly source is definately a pain in the ass to get anything custom into the engine compared to unreal where its only a couple of mouse clicks and voila. Dunno, maybe in the future valve will implement somehting more user friendly.

Unreal Engine 2's lighting blows compared to Source. Now if you're talking about UE3... that's a whole other situation.

[ReNo]

I read in some interview that valve are very interested in improving their tools and helping to smoothen the development pipeline for mod authors, but these things are easy to say you are going to do. I guess that the versatility and power of the materials system, and that wealth of options available for compiling custom props/models, means that its hard to make a particularly straightforward or automated pipeline. The more options there are available for content creators, the more time the creators of the content need to put in choosing from these options. That said, I don't know how versatile UE2's texture and model systems are, so perhaps they really have just pulled it off far better. A decent GUI for all the compile options for both materials and models, with provided presets and the ability to create and save your own, would be enough to make the source modding community much happier. Of course something like that is quite trivial and easy for the modding community to create itself, but its the lack of things like this being provided by valve that get people pissed off.

[Section_Ei8ht]

real-time rendering in hammer (ala d3radiant) is all i want. I'm happy with everything else.

[TomWithTheWeather]

but its the lack of things like this being provided by valve that get people pissed off.

I think that's the reason most of the custom HL2 maps we've seen so far is the boring industrial/canal/concrete look. If the "Source" community doesn't get better tools for this, it probably wont reach the level of creativity it could have. It's gotten to the point where everytime I see another industrial themed map, no matter how well done, I think "bla, do something original please".

[Hourences]

I already had that feeling a few weeks after the game was released. I dont think valve cares tho, if you look to their contest, the rules and the results.., I think they find all the c17 style stuff just fine..

I want to make a hl2 tex pack at the moment but Im seriously put back by the sheer idiocy of needing txts to make game textures..in the year 2005...

The future is in tools and not in other crap, just like other things there is gonna be a point where graphics are already at its maximum (or at least near realism), where all games look great. The only difference at that moment why you would choose engine a and not b would be how easy it is to use

[Pericolos0]

well heres a quick and easy tool for exporting your textures . It also writes all the basic shaders for you (spec, normal etc etc).

VMTCREATE

http://www.electrofiction.com/index.php ... &Itemid=45

hammer still needs model/texture import options tho

[ReNo]

I want to make a hl2 tex pack at the moment but Im seriously put back by the sheer idiocy of needing txts to make game textures..in the year 2005...

The problem is that I don't see much alternative. Any engine or tool that allows you to create many variants of the same image (eg. source offers different lighting models, automatic detail props like grass/plants, shader effects like reflections and refraction, normal maps, etc...), will need some sort of data to specify which options you are going to use. A simple TGA or BMP isn't going to do that itself - your game will need a proprietary format (such as source's VTFs/VMTs), and to create such a format from a standard like TGA will require further data (taken from an associated txt file, for example). The more advanced the capabilities of resources like textures become, the more steps there will be involved in creating them. Yes a GUI frontend would be nice, but there will be essentially the same steps needed regardless.

[Evert]

We need something like Nems Batchcompiler for textures.

Like all shaders are there, and you simply mark those you want, add the path to you TGA, and then it just compiles it in the right folder...or something.

[von*ferret]

Even with VMT create it is a major pain in the ass to make anything in Source. The editor needs tools to easily and readily import custom content otherwise the community will not feel up to the task of doing it. I'm sorry to say it but its true. How long has it been since halflife2 has come out, and how much custom content do you see outside of organized mod teams?

[ginsengavenger]

i get the feeling that if in six years of development valve didn't improve the tools for themselves then we can't expect them to do so for us.

[Zacker]

A little offtopic, but I also really agree regarding that the Source tools are very bad. I got tired of them almost before I really got into them. Ahh well, Source has made me look into a lot of other nice engines.