Got good idea, but no experiance or direction.

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That being said, I talked with some people already and have come to the fact that I need to create my own engine/get a open source one and expand greatly upon it.

How did you (or they) come to that conclusion?

To be more specific, why is it a given that you'd need to use an open-source engine (as opposed to closed source), and why do you think you'd need to 'expand greatly' upon it?

Really depends on all the features you want your game to have, have you checked out Ogre3D game engine it is free open source engine. As far as 3D Studio Max to get started there you would need $3,495.00 US, to purchase the program, since you plan on releasing the game legit I would recommend thinking about buying the program or going with a little cheaper program for 3D modeling, check out Blender, Milkshape. I am sure there are others out there just giving you ideas.

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Original post by jyk Quote: That being said, I talked with some people already and have come to the fact that I need to create my own engine/get a open source one and expand greatly upon it. How did you (or they) come to that conclusion? To be more specific, why is it a given that you'd need to use an open-source engine (as opposed to closed source), and why do you think you'd need to 'expand greatly' upon it?

The main reason being I cant edit a closed source engine, if I realize I want my game to do something the closed engine cannot I'm out of luck, But if I make it by scratch or use a open source that can be edited directly, then I could simply code in that missing feature.
I thought I would need to 'expand greatly' on one because I do not really expect an open source engine to let me do all the things I want to.

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Original post by wicked357 since you plan on releasing the game legit

I am not entirely sure about releasing it as some kind of indie game to appear on Steam or whatnot. The entire idea out of this is to create a game that lets me make my own sort of Zelda-esque universe for people to enjoy, I would imagine most of my money from this would come from donations. However, if it really does turn out to be THAT good then maybe I would consider hooking up a sequel or expansion or something on Steam.

EDIT: Also, I have a pretty defined idea of what kind of features I want in, so I would be happy to answer any kind of question

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The main reason being I cant edit a closed source engine, if I realize I want my game to do something the closed engine cannot I'm out of luck, But if I make it by scratch or use a open source that can be edited directly, then I could simply code in that missing feature. I thought I would need to 'expand greatly' on one because I do not really expect an open source engine to let me do all the things I want to.

Keep in mind that in order to edit and expand an open-source engine, you have to be able to edit and expand an open-source engine. This is no small task if you have little or no programming experience.

Now you said you're looking several years ahead, so maybe you're already factoring in the time needed to develop the required programming skills. Be aware though that that can take a while (years even).

In any case, I wouldn't assume that a closed-source engine wouldn't meet your needs. Unity, for example, allows you to essentially program your game in C# or &#106avascript, while at the same time taking care of most of the details (rendering, asset management, input, entity management, etc.) for you. Also, I believe with some Unity licenses you get access to all or part of the C++ source, so if you got to a point where you really needed to make modifications, you probably still could.<br><br>If I were you I'd start playing around with Unity (or a similar engine) a bit and see where it takes you. You could also try some other engines/libraries (Ogre, Panda3D, etc.), and just see what feels most comfortable.

Ok, and when it is time to learn how to make/edit an engine where should I start? Also, are there any tutorials or anything that specialize in things like RPG's as apposed to the 1000+ FPS tutorials I've see.

EDIT: Also, I've seen an engine called Torque and it looks neat, anyone have a opinion on it?

Nipah wrote:

>Got good idea, but no experiance or direction.
> I have a pretty defined idea of what kind of features I want in, so I would be happy to answer any kind of question

>I want to make a 3D free-roam action/adventure RPG
>I talked with some people already and have come to the fact that I need to create my own engine/get a open source one and expand greatly upon it. I was also suggested 3D Studio Max for models. I expect the actual making of the game to take at least 5 years, it is probably going to be little more complicated then OOT/MM.

>I would imagine most of my money from this would come from donations.

>I need suggestions on how the hell to get started.

1. Write a completely detailed game design document.
2. Make a realistic plan for how you'll publish/monetize the game when it's finished.
3. Make a plan for how many people are needed to make the game, including a technical director.
4. Make a plan for how much money that'll take.
5. Then figure out how to get the money.
6. THEN worry about what engine to use, together with your technical director.

No offense, but I don't think you really have any idea what you're getting into here. The type of game you're talking about here, created from scratch and done in 5 years, is going to take a team of a few dozen professional developers. For something like that to be created by by a single hobbyist working in his or her spare time... simply isn't realistic.

Which isn't to say that you can't or shouldn't try. But it'll be much more beneficial to you to be realistic from the start about what's involved. My advice? Learn programming, then learn how to apply that programming to basic game development. Assuming you're working on this regularly but in your spare time, that'll probably take you at least 6 months to a year.

As your knowledge develops, the ideas you have for your game are going to evolve. You'll (hopefully) begin to realize which ideas aren't possible, which are possible but not practical, which can be done better or differently, etc. You may very well reshape your ideas into something more realistic which could be completed as a long term solo project or with the help of a few friends. If your ideas are still on a large scale, then you'll be much better positioned to begin working on them and to start assembling a team to make them happen.

I'm going to back up Speedo_ here. I currently work for a company which has a dozen people working on the lighting models for a game engine.

"Assassin's Creed" had a team of 150 people. AC2 **tripled** the size of the team to 450.

Nintendo don't make a big thing about the size of their teams, but you can probably draw some conclusions from the fact they spend something in the order of $100M a year on R&D..


So. What do you need to do?

Go and learn either C++ or C#. No, really. You won't make AC2 in anything less. Not yet anyway.

Then go and write some simple games. Tetris, for example or Breakout -- to get used to render/interact loops. One of those tank-vs-tank 2d games for the maths and writing graphics code. Write a text adventure game to get used to the idea of puzzle systems. I wrote a kick-ass dominoes player to learn about AI..

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Original post by Nipah So, to give you guys a basic idea I want to make a 3D free-roam action/adventure RPG (ah-la OOT/MM, Assassin's Creed2 ect.)

Considering there are hundreds of exactly same things being either live out there, or in development right now - what makes this a "good idea"?


As a matter of fact, this is such a well solved and understood problems, there are frameworks out there which solve this problem completely. Just add water (content).

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I expect the actual making of the game to take at least 5 year

It will take on the order of man century, if other companies that did same thing are taken as a reference. So you can either get 100 people and do it in one year, or you can go solo and it will take 100 years.

The good news is that content production tools are improving fast, so that in 10 years, you'll be able to produce something like this solo in a matter of weeks. Of course, by that time, the concept will be no more appealing that making a pacman clone today.

If I had $3,495.00 to spare for 3DSMax, I would probably consider getting a commercial game engine instead (Torque3D, Unity, C4) and stick to Blender.

If I had free muscle (non-paid developers IE: lots of technical friends, but no money), and no time to spare, I'd probably take the Quake 3 source and mod the hell out of it, sell the game as "game assets" (models/music/pictures are copyrighted, executables and source are copyleft), and release the code as per the license.

Just thought I'd add my two cents in regarding the need to add new features to a game engine.

Game engines (both open and especially closed sourced ones) are designed to provide a set of features that by themselves would take research, understanding and optimal implementation knowledge to produce.

Couple that with that fact that the engine is probably being commercially used and what you are left with over time is bugs get fixed and code gets optimised. This element alone would take a long time both dedicated to maintaining the engine and using the engine in a real product.

If you total up the amount of resources spent both internally (engine development, maintenance, testing, optimisation) and externally (engine usage, bug reporting, case specific issues) it would take a lot of man hours and hence adding more developers would reduce the amount of time to develop, but unfortunately this reduction is not linear.

I'm sure if you ever wanted to add extra capabilities you probably could considering most engines are modular in design and some even provide enhancement capabilities should you ever (in most cases rarely) need them.

Most of your game logic will be coded on top of the framework provided and usually the engine is designed to allow you freedom to create whatever you want - the demos are usually just a small taste at what is possible.

Hope that helps.

Ok, I have a few questions, the first one is that if I ever stumble upon a part of my development that the current engine does not allow me to surpass, could I simply code my own plugin into something like Unity that could overcome it by adding in the missing feature?
The second one is I am wondering what peoples opinions are of Torque versus Unity, I'm was leaning toward Unity until this video threw me a curvball:

I can understand the point that you are at with this, cause I was at the point some time ago. In fact, I still ask lots of questions for different things here on gamedev.net. Anyways, since everyone has pretty much already said everything about your game idea and all, I won't reiterate. You were asking what is better, Torque or Unity. I'm not too familiar with Torque, but I would suggest trying both of them, both Unity and Torque, and just see which one you like better. Different people have different preferences, so you may like Torque over Unity, or vice versa.

Ok, got a few more.

1. Do you think I could make my own plugin to do something in Unity like that video displays in Torque?

2. Does anyone have any good starter sites/books for C++/C#?

3. What is the main difference between C++/C#?

and 4. My game is going to be about as complicated, if just slightly more then Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask I hate to keep mentioning that but it's true. Try and think back to those games and the stuff you could do, is this something easily accomplished with things like Unity/Torque with maybe the occasional plugin, or am I looking at something a lot more time consuming?

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Original post by Kwizatz If I had $3,495.00 to spare for 3DSMax, I would probably consider getting a commercial game engine instead (Torque3D, Unity, C4) and stick to Blender.

OP is talking the scope of N64-era Zelda - 4k should be petty cash.

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Original post by Nipah Ok, I have a few questions, the first one is that if I ever stumble upon a part of my development that the current engine does not allow me to surpass, could I simply code my own plugin into something like Unity that could overcome it by adding in the missing feature? The second one is I am wondering what peoples opinions are of Torque versus Unity, I'm was leaning toward Unity until this video threw me a curvball:

Something like this game? Sucks you have to look at the pdf to really see any images but its a 3D platformer like the game you linked.

You should really try them both and see which one you like more. Being a non programmer Unity might be a little easier since you only have to script the events you are interested in. Whereas I believe Torque is C++ all the way. To even do basic tasks like getting a plain screen up you will have to code that.

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Original post by Nipah Ok, got a few more. 1. Do you think I could make my own plugin to do something in Unity like that video displays in Torque? 2. Does anyone have any good starter sites/books for C++/C#? 3. What is the main difference between C++/C#? and 4. My game is going to be about as complicated, if just slightly more then Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask I hate to keep mentioning that but it's true. Try and think back to those games and the stuff you could do, is this something easily accomplished with things like Unity/Torque with maybe the occasional plugin, or am I looking at something a lot more time consuming?

1. Honestly, unless I am misunderstanding, I don't really think you will need to make too many plugins during development. Scipts and the engine's editors handle the content, and plugins are merely to extend the actual tools in the editors. I have never come across a situation where I need extend the tools I had available. However, I am not completely sure if Unity allows plugins if you really did need to make one, but I would assume it does. It is a full-featured engine at the Pro level.

2. Here is a good C++ tutorial that many people here have used to learn it. This seems like a good C# tutorial, although I have not actually used it.

3. C++ is a compiled language. You write your code, which is basically a text file, and send it to a compiler which turns it into the machine language for a specific platform. C# is a managed language, which means you write your code, and compile it into an intermediate language (sometimes called "byte code"). That file is then run by a host runtime on the client's computer. The runtime actually compiles it into machine language right before the code is run.

Honestly, either Torque or Unity could do anything that is in Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask. Those are old games that do not really push the limits of what is possible today, so you should have no problems there.

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Original post by Nipah Ok, got a few more. 1. Do you think I could make my own plugin to do something in Unity like that video displays in Torque? 2. Does anyone have any good starter sites/books for C++/C#? 3. What is the main difference between C++/C#? and 4. My game is going to be about as complicated, if just slightly more then Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask I hate to keep mentioning that but it's true. Try and think back to those games and the stuff you could do, is this something easily accomplished with things like Unity/Torque with maybe the occasional plugin, or am I looking at something a lot more time consuming?

1) I've never worked with Unity (or Torque for that matter), but for #1, I'd imagine you could get the same quality with Unity (although just to be clear, you need to spend a LOT of time with either of these engines to get something near the quality of that video).

2) I personally use C++ How to Program by Deitel and Deitel. It's really only decent for reference though.

3) Lots. C++ is a lower level language. You are responsible for memory allocation, deallocation, and you need to understand pointers. C# (and the XNA framework) are more beginner friendly, memory and addresses (pointers) is transparent to the programmer. The list goes on and on, but these are some differences.

4) OOT and MM are big budget games. There are few professional developers (by this I mean companies, not individuals) out there that can come close to competing with the attention to detail and depth of gameplay that Nintendo provides. These games are some of the highest rated games of all time. You will not be able to come close to these games without a lot of high end industry experienced talent (these guys don't come cheap). You can easily compete with the visuals (although the sheer amount of content is beyond your capabilities), but that is entirely due to hardware limitations at the time of those games.