Comment from a new user after a week of use (TV3D vs. TGEA, again).

[MiloDC]

Real quick:

I've been using TGEA for about four months.  It took me about that long to get to the point of having my HLSL shaded characters in-game (with shadows and animations), with a working custom camera and an animated background.  Most of my time was spent digging through and modifying highly esoteric, widely-disseminated, and infamously poorly documented C++ and TorqueScript code, in efforts to modify the engine to get basic functionality working the way I required.

After all of that, it was time for me to get collision detection working.  Since TGEA doesn't support any character collision better than bounding box collision, I realized that I'd have to code hit box collision pretty much from scratch.  Having experienced the nightmare that is TGEA during these past summer months, I decided to shop around.

I happened upon TV3D about a week ago, and I was impressed enough with what I saw online (feature set, docs, user community, etc.) that I downloaded the engine to give it a go.

After just a week of using TV3D 6.5, I find that I have done, in mere days or even hours, things that took me weeks to do in TGEA.  Unlike TGEA, the API is simple yet very powerful, and features numerous current-generation features that many other engines (including TGEA) lack altogether.  Even though 6.5 isn't documented, the libraries are very intuitively constructed, and because TV3D users often don't need to put a ton of effort into getting something working, the community is so much more helpful.  (In GarageGames' forums, questions frequently go unanswered, or they're responded to with vague suggestions about checking some part of the C++ or TorqueScript code, with only the most rudimentary relation to one's desired implementation.)

I shudder to think how much time I have wasted up to this point.

So far, TV3D is a fantastic engine that seems to perform very well (although it does have performance issues in some areas, e.g. shadows).  I find myself enjoying coding again, and it looks like I'll be buying a license soon.

Kudos.

[MenDAKE]

This is basically the same experience I had with the older Torque engine and 6.2. I went on for weeks and weeks trying to get Torque to work for me, and while it had more tools and starter code to work with than 6.2 I ended up right back with TV. It's just a more flexible, easier to understand engine with just the right balance of flexibility and ease of use.

[sgrippa]

Whoah! Again another former torque user (just like me  )

Welcome buddy !

[newborn]

Its good to see that you came up to that realization by yourself. Most of people here are fan boys (including myself) and we kinda take TV3D for granted.

Sure enough, there are more engines on the market nowadays, but once you touched TV3D for a while, its hard to go back to something else.

But do not forget that TV3D was/is meant to be a 3D engine, nothing more (not a MMORPG maker for instance) so it offers a wide range of opportunities for the ones who are patient enough to build their own tools.

Oh, btw, welcome aboard MiloDC!

[MenDAKE]

Yes, it's really very much suited to programmers, and is not necessarily the best RAD solution.

But the thing about many other engines such as Torque is that they contain more tools and starter kids, etc., which looks appealing at first. For example, you can get a working first person shooter with an excellent feel up and running in no time, when the equivalent might take weeks of work in TV. But once you delve deeper and start to customize you're stuck digging through complex, poorly documented code. So I think in the end TV3D strikes an excellent balance.

Sort of reminds me of my days of youth when I'd try to throw together "quick and easy" visual basic applications. I always ended up feeling terribly limited at the end and would have to try to stuff it full of a bunch of C or assembly. Very cumbersome.