TV3d vs all others.

[pnaples]

I'm really happy to use tv from a week i'll licence it as soon and i want to share with others what in my opinion makes tv different from other engines and why is one of the best choices.

It's hard to me to talk about another engine from s2 because i had spent 1 year developing it.For my actual work and some personal game development needs i had to try different engines(almost all indes)and i get very disappointed about almost all.

I tried with a very simple game idea and made a prototype of it with almost all engines that i tried(if they don't show some limitations at first look)

the only 2 engine that pass my test are leadwerks and TV3d and logically S2 but with some limitation (sdk is not available also for me,but this is another story).

Tv 3d has performed the best and i never had to ask for support also if the documentation is really outdated.There isn't any feature missing that don't let me do my game.

main pros
1)well designed and really easy to understand.(just from .h files)flexible and extensible.
2)One of the only real shader engine (you can develop almost all custom shader you want,other engine miss some feature that don't let you do some kind of shaders)
3)Is possible to access in a safe way to the d3d inner layer this is not possible without problems also for engines with source code.(other engines don't let you lock a texture for example or accessing to some inner things can run to a disaster).
4)there isn't any problems to add things that are missing or make some modules sostitution(i putted in a sound lib in half a day and also a gui sys).
5)No unusefull features or things that restrict to some kind of scene or game generes.(a lot of engines are restricted on open scenes or indoor or use a too complex culling on all.
6)packing system cover also user defined files es. level data.In other engines file sys only work on engine supported formats.
7)actor class is really usefull and ready for very complex hardware characters(features as actorbinding(to use actors with more than max num bones in hardware dividing it in pieces),weighted blending(a lot of engine supports onlysoftware skinning others with hardware one are hard to use with multiple pieces and you have todo actorbinding by yourself.
8)minimesh class to improve batching(implemented in very few engines and without too mutch control so not so flexible).
9)no unusefull editors and tools and easy to do one yourself(i think that engine generic editors are a waste of time there is always an external tool also free that make it better and is maybe scriptable or programmable or you can write directly one from your own,personally i'm using max to export the entire level with physic and gameplay data from it,but one can use also blender and always have a better tool than a standard editor.it's not easy for all but take very little time to set up a perfect suited editor for your game with max sdk or at least max script or using both with a medium knowledge of them).
10)morph target ....(


there are also some things that can be better i'll espose in the right place some of them.
but i want to do a little overview.
1)real documentation(at least like 6.1)
2)explaination of how some thing works to decide if use them or not.(es get actor from name...it use a binary tree a self balanced one hashing or whatever else?i think that people have to know at least techniques that can hit performances or that can be improved for their special needs.
3)make available some engine internal functions also for custom data and class like the prior example on find by name.The engine could expose some functions to do things on custom classes like on standard tv classes.
4)explaining of the resource system and make it available for other custom data.(it use add ref?es i want the engine to manage the resource for my gameplay type objects definition files or whatever else.if add refs when it does it?on load,on set?
5)a physic character controller(with slopes and steps support,crouching,is on ground and so on).
6)custom per instance data.using per instance streams in minimesh.
7)skinning support more kind of bones es...dual quaternion and 4x4 matrix instead of 3x4..dual quaternion to have more bones,4x4 to have anisotropic scaling(expecially on facial animation or cartoon characters at cost of fewer bones or using splits).
8)a method to do raycasting in physic that retrive all hits and not only the closest.
9)shader for pointsprites(that seems at a first look the only thing one can not customize)
10)shader save and load of precompiled shaders.

many of them can be added by user those are the oly things that i noticed at a first look

[Raine]

there are also some things that can be better i'll espose in the right place some of them.
but i want to do a little overview.
1)real documentation(at least like 6.1)
2)explaination of how some thing works to decide if use them or not.(es get actor from name...it use a binary tree a self balanced one hashing or whatever else?i think that people have to know at least techniques that can hit performances or that can be improved for their special needs.
3)make available some engine internal functions also for custom data and class like the prior example on find by name.The engine could expose some functions to do things on custom classes like on standard tv classes.
4)explaining of the resource system and make it available for other custom data.(it use add ref?es i want the engine to manage the resource for my gameplay type objects definition files or whatever else.if add refs when it does it?on load,on set?
5)a physic character controller(with slopes and steps support,crouching,is on ground and so on).
6)custom per instance data.using per instance streams in minimesh.
7)skinning support more kind of bones es...dual quaternion and 4x4 matrix instead of 3x4..dual quaternion to have more bones,4x4 to have anisotropic scaling(expecially on facial animation or cartoon characters at cost of fewer bones or using splits).
8)a method to do raycasting in physic that retrive all hits and not only the closest.
9)shader for pointsprites(that seems at a first look the only thing one can not customize)
10)shader save and load of precompiled shaders.

Welcome pnaples
I agree with pretty much everything.

A few things tho:

3) I didn't quite get that. You mean TV could be exposing a base class the end user can build other classes on?
4) not sure about this either

[pnaples]

3 and 4 are bit similar i'm referring to exposing some internal algoritms to extern...for example for sound you have to do retrieve sound by name by yourself,and it don't fit in the tv resource managment so you have also to do controls like if you have just loaded the file to retrieve the handler to the same just loaded resource and raise it reference count instead to load the file every time...this is just in the engine but you cannot access it for your own file.and however know how internally the resource manager behavie need is needed to know if you can and how mantain files in memory from a level to another and if you really delete all unnecessary files and how to do it good.

raine cmq io sono italiano...purtroppo st'altra lingua non sempre la padruneggio:)

[jviper]

Your talking about sound but there is no sound engine in TV3D yet, unless your talking about the old one for TV 6.1. If your talking about anything else then apparently you have not seen TVInternalObjects which exposes the DirectX stuff.

[pnaples]

i have to know the version i'm using what you think jviper?ahaha i talked about sound but mine sound implementation in 6.5...and also i'm just know and using internal objects next time read carefully ...at least as i readed the manual before to write those things. however i know the power of access directly to d3d device but there are some things that is better to not implement or you risk to redo some engine parts that are just well done only to add a little feature.So i think one have to decide what to implement hisself and what to wait.