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Torque or Unity?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Zorbtek, Dec 23, 2005.

  1. Zorbtek

    Zorbtek

    Joined:
    Dec 23, 2005
    Posts:
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    Dear Unity owners,

    I have been searching for an easy to use, visually pleasing and affordable game engine. With so many out there, it's becoming more and more of a challenge to figure out what game engine is suitible for certain projects.

    I have come across, so far, 2 solutions to the small Commercial release of Stunt Force Futurity (Stunt Vehicle game closely related to Rush 2's Stunt Course), Torque Engine - and now I have come across Unity.

    Now, I request your honest opinions :)

    1. What game engine is most easy to use?
    Torque or Unity?

    2. What game engine can accomplish more?
    Torque or Unity?

    3. What game engine would be best suited for a vehicular stunt game? Torque or Unity?

    4. What game engine can pump out the best looking - smooth frame rate?
    Torque or Unity?

    Basically, I'm looking for insider information and suggestions on which direction to go about things.

    I hope you can help,
    Regards
     
  2. NicholasFrancis

    NicholasFrancis

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    Well... You DID post on the Unity forum, so while honest, our oppinions are still a bit biased

    Unity by a long shot. We have an editor that was there since day 1. You edit everything there. We have a very robust and fast scripting system (mono / .Net), so you're not limited either

    Depends. For large worlds, online play that looks 3-4 years old, Torque shines.
    For smaller, high-quality games, Unity is the way.

    Unity. We have the PhysX physics engine - the same one powering Unreal3 and a lot of other games. AFAIK, In torque, there is no built-in physics other than a car that "behaves just like Halo"...


    Unity. We have bumpmaps, reflective stuff, dynamic lighting etc. At the same time we make use of all OpenGL tricks available on the Mac to maximize performance. The latest official word from GarageGames is that they will not support stuff that is Mac-only.
     
  3. yellowlabrador

    yellowlabrador

    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2005
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    562
    Hello There,

    I own a license of Torque
    To answer your questions.

    1. Unity

    2. Unity

    3. Unity

    4. Unity

    Torque is a good engine, but sometimes compiling it in mac is a pain. OpenAL issue and sometimes graphics stuttters for me. I think Torque compiles smoothly using a windows machine).

    I like reading Torque's source code (Helps me understand C++).

    If you need to learn Torque, You need to buy the book which is a good book. Unity has good tutorials included.

    Torque updated their version to 1.4, downloaded it hoping it will fix my issue, but did not.

    Prototyping on unity is alot easier for me compared to Torque.

    Torque is worth $100.00 but not more :)

    I'm not bashing Torque, it's a good engine but Unity Rocks.

    Both engine can be downloaded and demoed. Try both and compare.

    Ray
     
  4. jeremyace

    jeremyace

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    Also the Unity DEVs are putting out new releases quite fast considering their perfectionism (they make sure everything is easy to use but still powerful before they release it), and all 1.X updates are free for license owners.

    Judging by what they have added for 1.2 alone, Unity is moving ahead very fast and we have many cool things to look forward to.

    I love it.

    -Jeremy
     
  5. Zorbtek

    Zorbtek

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    Dec 23, 2005
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    Thanks very much for the help folks, I always did have a strange feeling that Unity may be better than Torque.

    But now the big question remains: Will unity eventually be ported for use on Windows computers?

    I do not have a Mac, I'm running on a Windows XP. I understand at the moment no announcement has yet been made on a Windows based version.

    However, I'm sure that in time, it could happen, by the Unity team or someone within the community.

    It's just really a question of how soon :)
     
  6. Marble

    Marble

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    While I know it's a priority for most, I'm a little anxious that a Windows release will change the friendly Unity community and take away that "Mac is best!" sentiment that it's fun to tout every once in a while. That said, I expect it's on its way. More power, and financial security, to the Unity team.
     
  7. Aras

    Aras

    Unity Technologies

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    Probably the biggest problem with this is that it's a lot of work (anyone who tried GUI coding in C++ would agree with me :)) - a huge manpower (and money) investment. And it does not add features, per se, just makes editor run on Windows (right now you can publish to Windows, you only need a Mac for development).
     
  8. Zorbtek

    Zorbtek

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    Are there any PC demos out there for download? I couldnt find much of anything on the site...

    Does anybody have anything for me? - I am considering a purchase.
     
  9. Aras

    Aras

    Unity Technologies

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  10. Guest

    All of these comparisons are moot once you ask "So which is better on the Mac?"

    The Mac Torque forums are plagued with "I can't get Torque to compile", "Mac Torque hasn't been updated in months... when are we going to get the same version as Windows users?"... I think they have one guy (no joke) working on the Mac version.

    I might have turned into a fanboy about all this, but I think Unity is simply revolutionary as the first WYSIWYG game development tool that works as advertised. I am continually amazed by its versatility and depth. OTEE has created an extremely open ended tool with which you can make anything from the simple puzzle game to some full fledged game rivaling anything current gen on the available hardware.

    After using Unity for the last couple of months I can't imagine a better environment for creating this type of content.

    I bought Torque and within 10 minutes in the forums there I came across a discussion about Unity. I bought Unity 2 weeks later and have never looked back.
     
  11. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    ...damn guest setting. That last post was mine. Maybe you guys should stop letting us "guests" post. Make people register before they can post to the forums.
     
  12. Zorbtek

    Zorbtek

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    Well, If I must I have enough funding for Mac OS Xs.

    Just a matter of what one someone would suggest is good for Unity.
     
  13. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    If you can, I'd wait until the intel pro macs come out, then buy the last available PPC architecture G5 for a serious reduction in price. Or of course if money isn't a major issue, wait for the intel based mac and buy that... but a Unity port to the new architecture might take awhile and will probably be too slow to run in the "Rosetta" emulation mode.

    Damn, I really hate that Apple is making every software company port their code yet again... like the OS9 transition wasn't painful enough!
     
  14. socksy

    socksy

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    This transition won't be anything nearly as painful. Just have to sort out Endians, and perhaps processor specific stuff (unlikely). And then we'll get the normal .1 upgrade stuff. A lot of people won't have any of these problems, and can compile straight out of the box.
     
  15. guategeek_legacy

    guategeek_legacy

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    I think OTEE already promised unity on X86 OS X before any were on the market. Jeff
     
  16. jcadam

    jcadam

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    I was none too impressed with the mac version of Torque. Using it feels kludgy, the editor feels very tacked-on. I bought it, toyed with it, threw up, then forgot about it for a year. Then I toyed with it again after the 1.4 release, and said to myself "yep, still sucks."

    The torque development community is definitely windows-centric, also. Many of the third party development tools that Torque likes are windows-only (the QUARK DIF editor comes to mind....)


    Just bought Unity. It's downloading right now, don't know what I think of it yet, but what convinced me to buy was the fact that it's Cocoa based - made for MAC OS X from the ground up.
     
  17. yellowlabrador

    yellowlabrador

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    Bet you a penny you'll love unity!!! :D
     
  18. Guest

    That's how Apple tells the story. But if your project depends on external frameworks (FBX SDK, Mono, PhysiX, etc.) you first have to wait until all vendors made a universal binary of their library available. :cry:
    Until now I haven't heard to much of available universal binary frameworks like the FBX SDK etc. Or did I miss something.

    By,
    Martin
     
  19. klindeman

    klindeman

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    Don't see mono taking that long. Not sure about Ageia Physics, but they seem to be fairly dedicated to the Mac platform.

    What is FBX SDK?
     
  20. jeremyace

    jeremyace

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    The SDK for the .fbx file format now owned by Alias.
    www.alias.com/fbx

    -Jeremy
     
  21. antenna-tree

    antenna-tree

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    Apple has been building an X86 version of OSX in parallel with the PPC version since the beginning of OSX (and most likely before)... so it's probably solid and good to go. But the problem is getting all of the third parties to put the man hours behind porting their code. No matter how easy Steve Jobs says this transition is,"Mathematica required less than 100 lines of code to be updated to work on X86, and that was automatically taken care of by Xcode," it's just not true. Apple said this with the OS9 transition too and I still had to wait over 2 years for some key software to make the leap (which isn't Apple's fault, just a reality of the industry). For something like Unity they need a number of frameworks to settle into this new architecture in order to work right. But in the end, after everythings settles, the mac platform is going to much better off.
     
  22. klindeman

    klindeman

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    Is the FBX SDK required to read in an FBX file? Certainly would make it easier, but you could write your own importer...
     
  23. jeremyace

    jeremyace

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    I am sure you could write your own, it's just a file format, but is it really worth the time and headache when there is an sdk for it already? Why re-code the wheel? ;)

    -Jeremy
     
  24. socksy

    socksy

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    I don't know. The FBX SDK wouldn't be necessary, especially since Unity doesn't support all of the FBX format features. Like embedded textures for instance.

    Anyway, I do believe that they use the FBX SDK, as the example animation with that guy that can run, and be shot, etc, is straight out of the "ViewScene" example from the SDK.
    And anyway, the SDK is available for windows too, which means that there isn't anything PPC specific.
     
  25. Martin

    Martin

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    The FBX file format is quite complex and there exist the version 5.0 and 6.0 files plus FBX can also be either ASCII or binary. All in all writing a full and robust FBX loader probably takes much more time than waiting for the universal binary FBX SDK.

    I'm sure that compiling the FBX SDK to a universal binary is quite easy. Alias probably already did that. But we still have to wait for the public release. :cry:

    By,
    Martin
     
  26. klindeman

    klindeman

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    Exactly. More of what I was getting at was that a Universal Binary version of Unity would not hinge on whether or not there was a UB version of the Alias FBX SDK. It also probably wouldn't even hurt it to stay as like a PPC bundle it runs whenever it needs to import an FBX file (at least until there were a UB version of the FBX SDK), since its only affecting it at import time, at which point it converts it to the internal Unity format...