Transport Tycoon Forums

Hello

As uzurpator wishes to have his topic free from side discusssion I started now the dedicated topic. (This is a personal view and understanding of them, you can correct me keep in mind, if I did something fundamental wrong in the review it may be the problem of your PR)

First, where do we get the Engine(s)?

Uzurpator Engine - non existent - I call them UzuEngine because I am lazy
TRoS - http://tros.ath.cx/subversion

Some review:
TRoS Engine is a addition on top of OpenGL, in it current state it looks like that you still need to handle quite a bunch of OpenGL stuff yourself. You seem to have all builddepencies (except nvidia cg) in the svn so a compile should be possible without much problems. Some signs of Network support spotted, aswell as MySQL support. Personally I don't know why an engine needs MySQL support. In TROS there is already a gui system. Currently from outside you can't yet see the goal or the design of TRoS when you want to use it.

The license for it isn't yet clear. Consindering the TEmpire agreement that the Game should be GPL the decision useing TRoS engine is astonishing.


UzuEngine
Nothing really to review yet, from the said specs, it should be quite good on multiprocessors, this can create subtile problems however. uzurpator promised it shouldn't by design. Currently we don't have much to see.
It will have the necessary base, aka 3D Support, Network, Multithreading, GUI, Terrain rendering
As it's an engine directly for TEmpire it may be better in code size and overhead.
-edit-
Uzurpator writes it together with the game core, but still seperate so the core can be used together with TRoS. Uzurpator made a deadline: "16 of june 2007" for a "running TE alpha" with thread, modifable terrain, and a some bits of a GUI
-/edit-

The license for it isn't clear either as we don't have seen code. We can only speculate if UzuEngine will do what TEmpire need.

Both Engines looks like useing OpenGL exclusivly. As XeryusTC pointed out atleast TRoS is fixed to it. The OpenGL experience on low end hardware may be crippled on Vista.

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Other Engines you may want to look:
Lightfeather http://lf.mmdevel.de/
Irrlicht: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
Ogre: http://www.ogre3d.org/
Linderdaum: http://www.linderdaum.com

Clarification.

UzuEngine is TE engine - ie, it aims to write the game logic. All the auxiliaries - like graphics, sound etc are pluggable by switching the interface class (I might go for dynamic linking). The only hard dependancy (ie - found all over the code) is boost::threads.

TRoS is the general purpose game engine. It has all the auxilaries, and leaves the core to the programmer. I am writing the core (hint, hint).

Both are not comparable, as thay deal with different things.

I see no problem with switching to another auxilary later.

eis_os wrote:Personally I don't know why an engine needs MySQL support.

Because there is a need for storage on TRoS' game server as it is a MMORPG.

And if UzuEngine is "only" for TEmpires logic and not a complete engine we could look into it using TRoS. I don't agree with the way uzurpator informed what UzuEngine is too us in that case as it was explained to be a complete replacement engine.

What I am working on is a complete package - but this package has very little hard dependancies - that is - i can throw away Ogre and use something else. I really have no objections that TRoS will be linked in instead.

This is also in the lines of my advice to you - if you already made an engine - make it as modular as logically required - Ie - if someone just wants to use the rendering pipeline, then he/she sould be able to just do that.

You are able to only use some parts, we have the core, graphics, network, database and sound currently. You will always need the core but all the others can be left out, TRoS client doesn't use the database part ATM and the servers don't use the graphics and sound parts. So it is (almost) fully up to the coder what to use.

XeryusTC wrote:

eis_os wrote:Personally I don't know why an engine needs MySQL support.

Because there is a need for storage on TRoS' game server as it is a MMORPG.

Same would apply to a TE server, I assume?

Purno wrote:

XeryusTC wrote:

eis_os wrote:Personally I don't know why an engine needs MySQL support.

Because there is a need for storage on TRoS' game server as it is a MMORPG.

Same would apply to a TE server, I assume?

No, because TE doesn't have to store any of it's client information into a database or sth. It only needs to be able to read savegames/scenarios. TRoS OTOH will fetch character and account information from a database.

XeryusTC wrote:

Purno wrote:

XeryusTC wrote: Because there is a need for storage on TRoS' game server as it is a MMORPG.

Same would apply to a TE server, I assume?

No, because TE doesn't have to store any of it's client information into a database or sth. It only needs to be able to read savegames/scenarios. TRoS OTOH will fetch character and account information from a database.

Wouldn't a account thingy be cool for TE multiplayer too? Eventually? At least that could somehow prevent the cheaters and noobs they have at OTTD multiplayer, couldn't it?

No, you can't cheat in *TTD*, as soon as you cheat in TTD it will desync... This doesn't mean exploiting game / design flaws to be able to cheat, but this wouldn't be solved with an Database either (I may be helpfull to reproduce the conditions)

ObjData in SQL? How should an user install and uninstall a new object?

eis_os wrote:No, you can't cheat in *TTD*, as soon as you cheat in TTD it will desync... This doesn't mean exploiting game / design flaws to be able to cheat, but this wouldn't be solved with an Database either (I may be helpfull to reproduce the conditions)

I rather mean annoying behaviour, like blocking ones railroads with the buy land tool, or crashing people's trucks with trains on purpose, etc.