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Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 11:03 am
by tilin
Excuse for there can be a foolish question.

Many people speak, that Ogre is very slow engine.
Why they so speak? You can compare speed Ogre to speed of graphic part Torque3D.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 11:38 am
by Azgur
tilin wrote:Many people speak, that Ogre is very slow engine.
These "many people" are probably doing something wrong :)
Performance largely depends on how the engine is used. This means Ogre can be dead slow or lightning fast.
On my side I find most developers start cursing when mentioning Torque 3D :)

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:06 pm
by DanielSefton
What do you mean by 'slow'? Not sure where they got that idea from...

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:25 pm
by tilin
Anything concrete do not speak. Speak only - do not look on Ogre, look on Torque3D, he is faster.

I shall pass your answers to them, that in vain did not chatter.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:39 pm
by Azgur
I think your translator isn't doing too well :)
I completely failed to understand your last post.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:51 pm
by tilin
Sorry :) .

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 1:11 pm
by jacmoe
Torque does what it does, and does it well.
I am amazed about the amount of hype GG has put into it - it looks hideous under the wraps - but if you need an engine for one particular type of game, Torque is there for you. It's got nice tools.
It's not as easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it, as it is using Ogre.
A more powerful weapon can blow your whole leg off, if you're not careful. :wink:

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 2:44 pm
by AticAtac
Also, don't forget that Torque is a game engine and Ogre a rendering engine, so they can not be compared directly.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 3:44 pm
by Tony Richards
You can't really compare apples to apples very easily with Ogre vs Torque 3D, even if you were only comparing the rendering engines.

I could make claims about how you can push animations off the CPU and onto the GPU, which is true of both Ogre and T3D, but you cannot do it on T3D without writing a whole lot of C++ code. With Ogre it's a cinch... all it takes is a vertex shader and a material script.

It's difficult making comparisons like this. You always get a GG employee or a fanboi saying "Yes, but you can do that with Torque too... you have the source code, all you have to do is write it." :roll:

I could provide dozens of comparisons, but in the end Ogre ends up being more powerful, more flexible, and it has a better design and implementation.

Looking at the source code, Ogre looks like it was written by an extremely talented professional. Torque looks like it was written by a variety of people of a variety of skill levels. Some are talented (Mark Frohnmayer), some amateurish but young and eager (Josh Englebretson), and a wide variety in between. But, the problem now is the bulk of the talent is gone, they've lost a lot of tribal history (pun!), and there's not a good strong talented technical lead holding the keys and performing the required code reviews.

One thing that makes Ogre so much better is because it gives you the ability to do more without modifying a bunch of high-entropy code. That's due to the fantastic Object Oriented Design that the Ogre developers use.

Torque, although it uses C++ and is designed with OO in mind, the design breaks many of the rules of OO. (Inheritance chains involving completely unrelated classes, broken encapsulation, unclear interfaces, and the development view of the architecture is a big ball of MUD... but then that gets into architecture and not design and that opens a whole other can of worms.... don't get me started. ;-) )

I used Torque for 6 years and I developed a significant number of prototypes with it but I got really frustrated with it and with Garage Games' attitude about certain things. I made many suggestions on how Torque's design could be improved over time, but all of my suggestions fell on deaf ears... so I gave up trying.

I've spent the past 2+ years helping the IndieZen.org crew write a game engine framework.

Using Ogre as the rendering engine / resource manager, and using good object oriented design for the rest of the framework, it is much better than Torque in every aspect other than tools. In a few more months we'll even have better tools.

So, Torque vs Ogre isn't apples to apples comparison.

When T3D and Zen Engine go gold, then you can do a comparison. :mrgreen:

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 6:39 pm
by lXciD
Well, fast or slow depends mostly more on your code rather than Ogre or Torque.

Unless you can write better code than them, and by then you won't ask such silly question as i strongly believe, you will know which one suits you more.

Notice I didn't comments which one is better.

Remember...

Its not the tools that matters, its the programmer... Most of the time...

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 6:42 pm
by jacmoe
While I can't agree with Tony Richards more, it is indeed the tools which makes Torque sell.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:19 pm
by FrameFever
Wolfgang Engel, the shader guy from Rockstar, has taken a look on ogre.
Ogre: the architecture and design is not very performance friendly. The usage of C++ makes the usage and re-design here quite difficult. An example: each material has its own C++ file and there is an inheritance chain from a base class ...
But unfortunately he did'nt say why it is not performance friendly, maybe it only related to his iphone port
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogs ... phone.html

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:38 pm
by nullsquared
An example: each material has its own C++ file and there is an inheritance chain from a base class ...
Wait, what? Clearly, he didn't take a very observing look...

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 10:35 pm
by _tommo_
nullsquared wrote:
An example: each material has its own C++ file and there is an inheritance chain from a base class ...
Wait, what? Clearly, he didn't take a very observing look...
He could at least have noticed the different extension of the files :roll:
Anyway we should consider he is looking for an iPhone engine, while the Ogre-weight isn't even noticeable in any gpu-bound game, it could make quite a difference on embedded systems where the performance is cut by just using std containers, so his objection on the speed makes sense.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 10:48 pm
by haffax
I wondered about Engel's comment too some time ago. He clearly didn't look at it properly or confused it with another engine.
Discussed here already: http://www.stevestreeting.com/2009/01/0 ... ent-248212

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 12:31 am
by jacmoe
From the looks of that blog post, Ogre was not the only engine he was confused about.. :)
Who cares what some graphics programmer from Rockstar has to say about Ogre?

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:08 am
by xavier
jacmoe wrote: Who cares what some graphics programmer from Rockstar has to say about Ogre?
Enough may take his word as gospel (he does after all edit the ShaderX series of books) that the misinformation could possibly be propagated as fact.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:46 am
by nullsquared
Not to disrespect wolf, but some of the things he says are ... debatable, to put it nicely (speaking from personal experience on gamedev).

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 2:12 am
by VictorMoran
He says “The usage of C++ makes the usage and re-design here quite difficult”
I wonder what language he uses to make redesign simpler.
He probably worked at Rockstar and he uses that as a bash of Honor. But that's only only a job.
I would not lose any sleep thinking what this self serving idiot thinks about Ogre.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 2:20 am
by jacmoe
Victor, I wouldn't go that far. I don't know Wolfgang. He's probably a nice guy. Don't judge a bloke by his blog.
I have a suspicion that he talked to Alex Champanard, who was the chief AI programmer in Rockstar before he went freelance.
Alex had some problems with Ogre a couple years ago, but ended up choosing it for his AI Gamedev sandbox framework. :wink:

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 3:50 am
by Kojack
Isn't having someone from Rockstar criticise another engine's performance a bit like having someone from 3dRealms criticise a project's release schedule?
:)

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 5:12 am
by xavier
I've never played GTA -- does it not perform well?

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:47 am
by Kojack
GTA Vice City wouldn't let you do wheelies on motorbikes if you had a dual core cpu, because all the physics and timings were slightly off (and one mission couldn't be completed). GTA San Andreas would often run way too fast if you don't set process affinity to single core (good if you want to run somewhere fast though).
But running too fast is something GTA 4 doesn't do. Do a google of gta 4 performance and find all the stories on how horrible the pc port is. People only started forgiving it a bit when Saints Row 2 came out and ran even worse on pc.

http://www.neowin.net/news/gamers/08/12 ... nce-issues
http://kotaku.com/5101687/grand-theft-a ... tle-broken
http://www.thunderboltgames.com/opinion ... or-pc.html
Etc.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:18 am
by Evak
I spent years trying to persuade the torque devs to add more than 1 UV to their engine, and improve the art pipeline. Being an artist I wasn't one of those people that could rewrite the engine to suit my purposes and every coder I knew bar one took a look and balked at the mess that was the source code.

One day Ben Garney, who was one of the Torque engine coders made me an offer, that he would work with me on making improvements. I talked him into trimesh collisions using coldet, multiple UV's, Blitz3d .b3d support with extra fixed function blendmodes and it turned out quite well. He got too busy and people didn't like him working with me too much. But he went on to add a bunch of stuff to torque including polysoup collisions, updated physics, Atlas terrian system.

Funny thing is just before he left GG he showed off his his physics solution for some game called block world or similar. And in the same blog mentioned how all the advances in the Torque engine stemed from his experimentation with the blitz3D loader he worked on with me. Kind of funny really.

I don't know if they ever got multiple UV's in. I know Torque Engine advanced was still stuck with 1. Maybe Torque3D improved and has an actual artist friendly pipeline without the broken map2dif compiler that all their tools seemed to use.

In the end politics, GG policy for employees on the boards and a lot of false advertising based on half realized features turned me away from Torque and eventually brought me here.

Re: Ogre vs Torque3d

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 11:36 am
by AticAtac
Torque is a game engine and comes with world editor and other things out of the box (with all its limitations, pros and cons). So its still not compareable with Ogre3d which is a rendering engine.
If you don't mind to deal with other middleware and write your own "game framework", tools (world editor), etc. then you will get with Ogre3D the much better rendering engine.
So torque should be compared with engines like Unity, Neoaxis, etc.