Hehe... I'll agree with that... Just gonna have a peek! a little one...Polo wrote:The only thing I can say is it has been made by the Dark Basic Software guys, so it's crap
First Person Shooter Creator
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Re: First Person Shooter Creator
Sorry Num3!Num3 wrote:It's a shake and bake game creator, you just need to drag'n'drop stuff in the game area.
To rough and buggy, just like DarkBasic.I like THIS better (very pro and working stuff);
http://www.3dgamestudio.com/
Load the TechDemo, select "Run Level" and enjoy... Be sure to enter every room and set the volume to max!!
What I don't like is the price; $899 for the pro version.
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techjunkie, I lost the respect for you after posting and suggesting AND WHAT NOT saying 3dgs is very PRO...
I have worked on a studio were we used 3dgs for a game project, (the game is being sent to Wal-Mart by now) But, I must tell you, stay away from 3dgs, just as a friendly advice, you're going to lose lots of hair and become frustrated if you really want to develop serious games in that """engine""". We worked 4 years with Conitec's 3dgs, Im not saying this because I tested their demo and got that conclution. Im saying it because I had enough time to think about it, its really really the worst around. And we are talking about commercial game development. (at least I am). If you want to make some crap for fun, go ahead. But for a serious project, stay away. Else PM me and i'll be happy to list you the amount of trouble this """engine""" caused to us the artists during the development of that game I talked about.
I have worked on a studio were we used 3dgs for a game project, (the game is being sent to Wal-Mart by now) But, I must tell you, stay away from 3dgs, just as a friendly advice, you're going to lose lots of hair and become frustrated if you really want to develop serious games in that """engine""". We worked 4 years with Conitec's 3dgs, Im not saying this because I tested their demo and got that conclution. Im saying it because I had enough time to think about it, its really really the worst around. And we are talking about commercial game development. (at least I am). If you want to make some crap for fun, go ahead. But for a serious project, stay away. Else PM me and i'll be happy to list you the amount of trouble this """engine""" caused to us the artists during the development of that game I talked about.
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Brice Manuel
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Well, I've only tested the demo version, so I can't judge - it was a first impression (a quick one). I believe you - have you worked with that stuff for so long, I'll guess you know what your are talking about...dagcrack wrote:techjunkie, I lost the respect for you after posting and suggesting AND WHAT NOT saying 3dgs is very PRO...
So I apologize for my stupid comment and I promise to never judge a product so fast again...
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Well I didnt meant to lose the respect for you for such a comment - everyone is able to think and believe on whatever he wants. So I cant be mad at you if you like their products. However I can be mad if someone says their engine is any good. Because truth is, it isnt.
However, Indeed I worked for 2 years non-stop with their "engine". Many frustrations in that time.
Since I'm done with my job for this month (which I add, has nothing to do with this engine nor conitec nor anything else..), I'll have some time to enumarate some experiences with 3dgs in here now
Let's start...
First of all, this guys couldnt start something from scratch - what did they do, they just got some already made stuff (which was fairly good for that time) and made it WORST.
I was hired by a game development company which was using 3dgs A5-Professional licences - engine, to develop games. The game project was quite ambitius, about 90 levels, fluid gameplay, etc. It required lots of texture and modelling, same with level design. Now, we had about 50% complete, when A6 came out, we upgraded our licence to A6-Standard (later on to Professional licence). Lets see, Conitec charges 400 more dollars, for letting you use 6 more lights, fake dynamic shadows (they are the so known "noob shadows" - As I call them - an many others does - How to achive them?, technically you duplicate the mesh, take out materials and disable depth-testing, now you stretch it down (or proyect its vertices using very simple math so it looks like the light source is not over the object but pointing from a 45° angle). However, this guys never knew they could do some simple picking on terrains and level geo to modify the height of the vertexes of said shadows. So then, those noob shadows only works on plain-static floors. NICE! .. - As for now they should have stencil shadows (non volume, just stencil proyected). Thanks to some user who made a shader perhaps.
Conitec support is very bad - I was accused to be using a pirate version when on the forums we (team) had on our profile that we owned A5Professional (I understand now, by that time only a few teams bought this licence, and one of them shared it on some p2p networks - therefor Conitec staff got hemorroids and they were very shy when they saw someone that claimed to have a professional version on their hands). I'm not going to hide you what DOUG a Guy from Conitec staff told me via email: Or you buy the professional licence now or I send you to our legal departments. (with out even checking first that my team leader had bought the professional version and I had nothing to do with that since I didnt modell anything with their stolen-crap MED tool - Yes Conitec is famous to "steal" other's projects and make them worst).
By then I was already modelling in Cinema4D R6 - May I say that I had to spend 30 minutes to port each mesh into a legible 3dgs mdl format? (mdl5 as they called it...) PLUS Correcting the UVs in their MED editor was something as painful as hammering nails into your eyeballs while dropping lemon over them.
And what not, our animator guy had to spend days animating (per vertex) our characters. By A6 we got "bone animation" - Heck worst bone system I ever seen, even Blitz3D had better support (and for those who doesnt know, in blitz3d you cant even create bones by code.. so Imagine). All this didnt only irritate us, but also our publisher was starting to freak out. Because he knew about all the limitations the engine we were using had. And he didnt like us using it. Nor I did. I was the first one on saying NO When I heard for the first time the words "3dgs" coming from the project leader.
The pricing is ABSURD -- TOTALLY -- If you work on your team, you must buy at least the standard version to be able to do something for your team. They (Conitec) wouldnt let you share MED or WED (their lame, stolen, buggy, slow bsp-based world editor) to your teammates - Therefor you Had to buy a crap licence in order to being able to use this bad tools that, we used just for porting purposes and not to develop an entire commercial game. We, the artists had a very extense and bitter time optimizing everything so the engine could handle it, when at those times an 7000 tris character was totally acceptable even for having 10 at the same time, 3dgs couldnt handle half that amount of tris with out slowing down as hell.
Every time we had to test something, we had to transfer (or receive) 4mb to 20mb (simple tests .. perhaps showing off the walking cycles of a character). Because conitec cant handle their "publish game" option, such option "publishes" all the files your game uses into a dir with the prefix: ".cd" at the end. This publish option added files you didnt even need nor wanted (like their lame bitmap font, their lame sample sounds, sample palletes, sample sprites, etc). Now, the exes were as big as they could.. The "compiler" just "attaches" your scripts (heck - developing an entire game with scripts is nothing funny nor fast both developing wise and runtime wise - However on A6 you were able to do some Cplus programming and "add" it to the game). May I add that this is the worst designed engine I ever worked on? And I have worked with unreal technology, quake3, croteam's engine, and well, the most user-known: blitz3d, qfusion, N2D, etc.
Media support is aweful, For meshes, 3dgs only supports THEIR OWN MDL Format and includes a half-baked md2 loader as well - which may I add, its crap..
For images, only bmp, tga, pcx. May I add - No PNG and No JPEG Support - Therefor if you had 100 512x512 textures, that'd be about 80MB for just that.
Video support is the worst I've seen - Heck, Even B3D has better video support. I admit that.
Sound support is ok, you can use OGG. But not all its features, just the basics. However their sound engine is as limited as a monkey with no tail. When you want to fly in 3dgs, you fall and die pathetically.
Gushh, Would you ever work for Conitec?
- I Don't want to hear about Conitec anymore in my life.
Their terrain support makes me laugh! - Even right now its the worst available in earth (im not overkilling in anything I'm saying, its just what happend to us and the very truth) - Thanks to a friend who developed a small tool that lets you create extense terrains out of extense heightmaps, now they can use bigger terrains than before (with seamless support between each terrain block) but apart from that tool, you cant make quality outdoor games in 3dgs. For indoor I must say that, if you're talented. Got 2 years to wait till your level compiles (and then you found out some bugs on it, and you have to recompile THE WHOLE THING instead of recompiling the bad chunks, conitec dictatorship will make you do it all over again just because they can't think of a better way...).
The lighting support is horrible - A model that looks as it is in your modeller viewport - It will look horrible in 3dgs. Even with the correct face disconnection (This is, when an engine doesnt support phong tags, you must dissconnect the parts you dont want to be taken into the main phong group, so the shading will be "cut" on that part and not continue as it was a single surface). Even by applying that technique (that we still use in games) 3dgs is not capable of offering you a good lighting setup for your environment.
Shader support is not that great in A6, everything you could do and achive 200fps using pure DX and Cplus, you'll do it in 90fps at 3dgs. And perhaps with some limitations. We didnt use shaders on our game at the end, simply because we wanted to support any type of system with any type of gfx card - 3DGS Is very bad at choosing which routines to use in ati or nv.
May I also say that, the engine must compile the script during execution time, because it must see which routines are available for your gfx card, compile the script (if you got big amounts of scripts, the script compilation can take up to 10 minutes and im not kiddin, in a pc with 2ghz processor for the first time, then it might take less time to compile and run the game). This is something that still makes me laugh.
There are lots of limitations in their engine, you cant even disable their loading (and compiling) screen which is horrible and says "3dgs" and even has their local address in there and some names. Thats horrible.
You cant, nor should, develop commercial games in 3dgs for all those reasons and for all the reasons i'll enumarate on my next post.
I'm quite tired, been working all day. ANd having to remember about this past experiences gives me a bitter taste.
HOWEVER..
There is even worst things I remember while we were developing the game in 3dgs. But I'll tell you later. For now, you should know that they havent updated their site since their A4 version (laughs - heck even their filenames claims A4). They have 0 knowledge of design, nor even web programming. And less, product support. As a company, they are horrible. However they lie to their customers, they offer literal crap for big prices, and some kids are in love with it simply because... Wait I'm intercepting something... "Mum, look, im a gamedevlprer I clickd here! there look and mwah look I made a game look that druid look i made it i opened it and then saved it and changed his beard with paint look how he hovers on the ground itz cool! mum can i have the pro vershion? so i can add 2 more lights and use the bad implemented newton physics engine? PLZ!".
Heheheh. That's how it works for Conitec.
I must add, those who worked all their life with 3dgs, if you ask them: "hey why don't you add a spheremap to those metalic objects? at least you wont have to worry about adding cubemaps if the player's gfx card doesnt support this feature you wont have to hardcode anything else"
They'll say: "WHAT IS A SPHEREMAP? WHATS A CUBEMAP? WHAT YA TALKING ABOUT? YOU CANT DO THAT!" - (this is a serious text I got from someone who worked 3 years in 3dgs and didnt knew what a spheremap was, however he claimed to be a game developer and was serious about thinking that, however you can see he aint).
Then when you tell them that B3D is capable of such techniques (heck spheremaps are as old as my left ball).. They say that 3dgs supports it (you see, there is a war against 3dgs and b3d users somewhere around the net) But however they cant show you as they don't really know what a spheremap even is.
Show a 3dgs user B3D and he'll say: "WTF WHY DO I NEED TO WRITE 50 LINES OF CODE FOR DOING THIS WHEN I CAN DO THIS BY IMPORTING A SCRIPT IN 3DGS!" (such script is 2000 lines by the way).. Funny.
If I had to work with 3dgs or with b3d, i'd work with b3d. All the limitations can be surpased easly and plus, Add as many shaders as you want, if your game is crap, it will still be crap No matter how many shaders you add (laughs).. However right now I would simply use my engine - in its current state I already developed a game and was sold to a small company. So why would I mess with other engines anymore?..
People: Focus on the game story, the gameplay, focus on developing a smooth and polished game. Dont bother me with 3dgs anymore!, please..
Have fun.
However, Indeed I worked for 2 years non-stop with their "engine". Many frustrations in that time.
Since I'm done with my job for this month (which I add, has nothing to do with this engine nor conitec nor anything else..), I'll have some time to enumarate some experiences with 3dgs in here now
Let's start...
First of all, this guys couldnt start something from scratch - what did they do, they just got some already made stuff (which was fairly good for that time) and made it WORST.
I was hired by a game development company which was using 3dgs A5-Professional licences - engine, to develop games. The game project was quite ambitius, about 90 levels, fluid gameplay, etc. It required lots of texture and modelling, same with level design. Now, we had about 50% complete, when A6 came out, we upgraded our licence to A6-Standard (later on to Professional licence). Lets see, Conitec charges 400 more dollars, for letting you use 6 more lights, fake dynamic shadows (they are the so known "noob shadows" - As I call them - an many others does - How to achive them?, technically you duplicate the mesh, take out materials and disable depth-testing, now you stretch it down (or proyect its vertices using very simple math so it looks like the light source is not over the object but pointing from a 45° angle). However, this guys never knew they could do some simple picking on terrains and level geo to modify the height of the vertexes of said shadows. So then, those noob shadows only works on plain-static floors. NICE! .. - As for now they should have stencil shadows (non volume, just stencil proyected). Thanks to some user who made a shader perhaps.
Conitec support is very bad - I was accused to be using a pirate version when on the forums we (team) had on our profile that we owned A5Professional (I understand now, by that time only a few teams bought this licence, and one of them shared it on some p2p networks - therefor Conitec staff got hemorroids and they were very shy when they saw someone that claimed to have a professional version on their hands). I'm not going to hide you what DOUG a Guy from Conitec staff told me via email: Or you buy the professional licence now or I send you to our legal departments. (with out even checking first that my team leader had bought the professional version and I had nothing to do with that since I didnt modell anything with their stolen-crap MED tool - Yes Conitec is famous to "steal" other's projects and make them worst).
By then I was already modelling in Cinema4D R6 - May I say that I had to spend 30 minutes to port each mesh into a legible 3dgs mdl format? (mdl5 as they called it...) PLUS Correcting the UVs in their MED editor was something as painful as hammering nails into your eyeballs while dropping lemon over them.
And what not, our animator guy had to spend days animating (per vertex) our characters. By A6 we got "bone animation" - Heck worst bone system I ever seen, even Blitz3D had better support (and for those who doesnt know, in blitz3d you cant even create bones by code.. so Imagine). All this didnt only irritate us, but also our publisher was starting to freak out. Because he knew about all the limitations the engine we were using had. And he didnt like us using it. Nor I did. I was the first one on saying NO When I heard for the first time the words "3dgs" coming from the project leader.
The pricing is ABSURD -- TOTALLY -- If you work on your team, you must buy at least the standard version to be able to do something for your team. They (Conitec) wouldnt let you share MED or WED (their lame, stolen, buggy, slow bsp-based world editor) to your teammates - Therefor you Had to buy a crap licence in order to being able to use this bad tools that, we used just for porting purposes and not to develop an entire commercial game. We, the artists had a very extense and bitter time optimizing everything so the engine could handle it, when at those times an 7000 tris character was totally acceptable even for having 10 at the same time, 3dgs couldnt handle half that amount of tris with out slowing down as hell.
Every time we had to test something, we had to transfer (or receive) 4mb to 20mb (simple tests .. perhaps showing off the walking cycles of a character). Because conitec cant handle their "publish game" option, such option "publishes" all the files your game uses into a dir with the prefix: ".cd" at the end. This publish option added files you didnt even need nor wanted (like their lame bitmap font, their lame sample sounds, sample palletes, sample sprites, etc). Now, the exes were as big as they could.. The "compiler" just "attaches" your scripts (heck - developing an entire game with scripts is nothing funny nor fast both developing wise and runtime wise - However on A6 you were able to do some Cplus programming and "add" it to the game). May I add that this is the worst designed engine I ever worked on? And I have worked with unreal technology, quake3, croteam's engine, and well, the most user-known: blitz3d, qfusion, N2D, etc.
Media support is aweful, For meshes, 3dgs only supports THEIR OWN MDL Format and includes a half-baked md2 loader as well - which may I add, its crap..
For images, only bmp, tga, pcx. May I add - No PNG and No JPEG Support - Therefor if you had 100 512x512 textures, that'd be about 80MB for just that.
Video support is the worst I've seen - Heck, Even B3D has better video support. I admit that.
Sound support is ok, you can use OGG. But not all its features, just the basics. However their sound engine is as limited as a monkey with no tail. When you want to fly in 3dgs, you fall and die pathetically.
Gushh, Would you ever work for Conitec?
- I Don't want to hear about Conitec anymore in my life.
Their terrain support makes me laugh! - Even right now its the worst available in earth (im not overkilling in anything I'm saying, its just what happend to us and the very truth) - Thanks to a friend who developed a small tool that lets you create extense terrains out of extense heightmaps, now they can use bigger terrains than before (with seamless support between each terrain block) but apart from that tool, you cant make quality outdoor games in 3dgs. For indoor I must say that, if you're talented. Got 2 years to wait till your level compiles (and then you found out some bugs on it, and you have to recompile THE WHOLE THING instead of recompiling the bad chunks, conitec dictatorship will make you do it all over again just because they can't think of a better way...).
The lighting support is horrible - A model that looks as it is in your modeller viewport - It will look horrible in 3dgs. Even with the correct face disconnection (This is, when an engine doesnt support phong tags, you must dissconnect the parts you dont want to be taken into the main phong group, so the shading will be "cut" on that part and not continue as it was a single surface). Even by applying that technique (that we still use in games) 3dgs is not capable of offering you a good lighting setup for your environment.
Shader support is not that great in A6, everything you could do and achive 200fps using pure DX and Cplus, you'll do it in 90fps at 3dgs. And perhaps with some limitations. We didnt use shaders on our game at the end, simply because we wanted to support any type of system with any type of gfx card - 3DGS Is very bad at choosing which routines to use in ati or nv.
May I also say that, the engine must compile the script during execution time, because it must see which routines are available for your gfx card, compile the script (if you got big amounts of scripts, the script compilation can take up to 10 minutes and im not kiddin, in a pc with 2ghz processor for the first time, then it might take less time to compile and run the game). This is something that still makes me laugh.
There are lots of limitations in their engine, you cant even disable their loading (and compiling) screen which is horrible and says "3dgs" and even has their local address in there and some names. Thats horrible.
You cant, nor should, develop commercial games in 3dgs for all those reasons and for all the reasons i'll enumarate on my next post.
I'm quite tired, been working all day. ANd having to remember about this past experiences gives me a bitter taste.HOWEVER..
There is even worst things I remember while we were developing the game in 3dgs. But I'll tell you later. For now, you should know that they havent updated their site since their A4 version (laughs - heck even their filenames claims A4). They have 0 knowledge of design, nor even web programming. And less, product support. As a company, they are horrible. However they lie to their customers, they offer literal crap for big prices, and some kids are in love with it simply because... Wait I'm intercepting something... "Mum, look, im a gamedevlprer I clickd here! there look and mwah look I made a game look that druid look i made it i opened it and then saved it and changed his beard with paint look how he hovers on the ground itz cool! mum can i have the pro vershion? so i can add 2 more lights and use the bad implemented newton physics engine? PLZ!".
Heheheh. That's how it works for Conitec.
I must add, those who worked all their life with 3dgs, if you ask them: "hey why don't you add a spheremap to those metalic objects? at least you wont have to worry about adding cubemaps if the player's gfx card doesnt support this feature you wont have to hardcode anything else"
They'll say: "WHAT IS A SPHEREMAP? WHATS A CUBEMAP? WHAT YA TALKING ABOUT? YOU CANT DO THAT!" - (this is a serious text I got from someone who worked 3 years in 3dgs and didnt knew what a spheremap was, however he claimed to be a game developer and was serious about thinking that, however you can see he aint).
Then when you tell them that B3D is capable of such techniques (heck spheremaps are as old as my left ball).. They say that 3dgs supports it (you see, there is a war against 3dgs and b3d users somewhere around the net) But however they cant show you as they don't really know what a spheremap even is.
Show a 3dgs user B3D and he'll say: "WTF WHY DO I NEED TO WRITE 50 LINES OF CODE FOR DOING THIS WHEN I CAN DO THIS BY IMPORTING A SCRIPT IN 3DGS!" (such script is 2000 lines by the way).. Funny.
If I had to work with 3dgs or with b3d, i'd work with b3d. All the limitations can be surpased easly and plus, Add as many shaders as you want, if your game is crap, it will still be crap
No matter how many shaders you add (laughs).. However right now I would simply use my engine - in its current state I already developed a game and was sold to a small company. So why would I mess with other engines anymore?..People: Focus on the game story, the gameplay, focus on developing a smooth and polished game. Dont bother me with 3dgs anymore!, please..
Have fun.
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techjunkie
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dagcrack wrote:Well I didnt meant to lose the respect for you for such a comment - everyone is able to think and believe on whatever he wants. So I cant be mad at you if you like their products. However I can be mad if someone says their engine is any good. Because truth is, it isnt.
I didn't say WHAT I liked with the product, as I wrote... I just took a quick look. I have no idea about what to think about the engine.What I thought was proffesional was; the GUI and the how the way the designer works and it seems very stable if you compare with some other products.
Well, I'll rest my case - now I will continue to read your post. Very interesting reading...
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Brice Manuel
Since this thread has continued, I will.Why not posting it anyway ? It's interesting to know things about Acknex
Back in 1993 Larry Myers released a 3D engine for DOS called ACK 3D (Animation Construstion Kit).
In 1994 an improved version was released called ACK NEXT GENERATION (still open source).
In 1995 ACKNEX-2 was bought by Conitec and released under the new name "3D Game Studio".
In 1997, A3 was released, but DOS was dying and they needed to make a Windows product.
From my understanding, Conitec then licensed the Quake engine and adapted it for their needs. For a world editor, they licensed QOOLE and modified that for their needs. The "scripting language" is very similar to the scripting language used in the Quake engine. This, too was likely just modified for their needs.
By continuing to improve the licensed code and likely licensing and implementing newer versions of the engine, they have kept 3D Game Studio competitive, to an extent. They have used gimmick tactics to promote the engine.
Back when JAVA was the rage, the scripting language was called "JAVA like" and had a different name. When JAVA was no longer envogue, they changed the name of the scripting language and started calling it "C++ like" (although the syntax really didn't change, just a new name).
Version 5, was the last I had. And for Version 4 & 5, I had the pro versions along with team licenses. Even back then, there were better engines for professional use. We ended up NOT using 3DGCS for anything due to the performance issues and compatibility issues. Instead I ended up licensing a couple of different commercial engines.
In summary... 3D Game Studio has always been a hacked together product, and the comparison to legitimate alternatives, easily proves which is best. Commercial titles? Nah, All I have ever seen is Shareware/Budget titles released with 3DGCS and these usually are only sold in the $5.99-$9.99 bins.
Like 3D Rad, its a point and click 3D game maker. You can make full games just using existing scripts. If you are a programmer, to me, it is always better to use a real programming language and a real 3D engine.