What other game engines have you used

Sparkyidr

first up... hope it's not against the rules to talk about other game engines here.

Do you guys have any experience of using other game builders/engines? (Unity, Torque, shiva, cocos2d etc)?

I've recently watched a few tutorial vids of Unity, and it looks really good for the 3d stuff. I also built one of the tutorial games for my phone, and it's pretty quick and smooth too.

The other Mitten has been checking out Torque too....but that seems to not give us anything that we can't already do in GS, so seems pretty pointless for what we need.

Have been working with GS since around Christmas time, and it's given us a massively quick turnaround time (we have 3 apps out already), and we have also made back the initial investment of the GS license and the apple dev license, so that's all good.

so..anyone had a play with other stuff? If so, how did you get on with them?

Sparky/Mitten

ORBZ

iv used unity and torque..

torque is ok and unity is good too. but neither can compare to GS's speed of development

also the learning curve on them is STEEP!

SDMG

I have used unity... I have read for 2D games performance should be a lot faster when using cocos2d, but I didn't wanted to start programming with objective c... with unity and unityscript I was able to finnish my game with 60fps (with some workaround!)

While GS's speed of development is unbeatable ... i think the game performance could be faster to be competitive... but to be fair... unity iphone is v1.6 so i think its too early to compare these two...

@orbz

how fast is it to use torque script? I have read that you will only get decent fps when using c++ in torque?

cheers

sdmg

beaudoin_n

So here is the question...

If i focus more on 2D games will cocos2D worth learning if main main problems with GS is performance (load times specially) ?

Will making simple non-physics based 2D games in cocos2D be as steep a learning curve since i would be using "basic" functions.

Thanks

firemaplegames

GS is actually extremely fast. A blank scene starts at 60 frames a second. It's what you do to it that slows it down. This is true for any of these environments mentioned above.

GS does have slow load times, but I can only assume that the load times will keep getting better.

All of these environments have their issues, GS included.

NONE of them are anywhere near as easy to develop in as GameSalad.

For Unity, you will need to learn javascript or C++
For Torque, you will need to learn TorqueScript (which is similar to javascript)
For cocos2D, you will need to learn python, OpenGL, and XCode as well

Not that learning any of those things is a bad thing at all, on the contrary.
However, It is possible (and easy) to make a slow, unresponsive game in any language, no matter how fast the code runs.

Here is a link to the cocos2D Beginner tutorial page:
http://cocos2d.org/doc.html
There are several videos on the page.
To utilize any of these beginner tutorials, you will first need to know how set up your XCode project properly to handle the cocos2d Framework...

Programming concepts are pretty universal. If you are having any trouble with your game logic in GameSalad, you will run into the same problems in any language.

If you want/need a nice environment to learn programming, GameSalad is fantastic.

JamesZeppelin

I have used torque for a good test run before getting GS.
Has its ups and down.

Runs smoother and level design is pretty user friendly now but thats where it ends.

Once you have to start putting something together it gets pretty tough.

Downloaded unity a while back opened up and ran for cover

rebump

Anyone done anything with GLBasic??

If so, for an iPhone/Touch app?

Your thoughts (and I'm a programmer so the extra work doesn't scare me)?

CoIin

>GS does have slow load times, but I can only assume that the load times will keep getting better.

Joe, you should update your games using your brand new Pro license, or any 0.8.x version come to that. Kill the King loads a lot faster than Danger Cats!, it seems to start the loading as soon as the splash screen is there, whereas your games don't do any loading for quite a while.

I know that the spinning indicator might just be a cosmetic change, but it seems convincing that it also represents the point at which things start to load.

About Unity, it's C# you would use, not C++.

MrTAToad

rebump said:
Anyone done anything with GLBasic??

If so, for an iPhone/Touch app?

Your thoughts (and I'm a programmer so the extra work doesn't scare me)?

Plenty of people have used GLBasic for the iPod/iPhone and iPad - check out the forums...

AfterBurnett

CoIin said:

About Unity, it's C# you would use, not C++.

And you can also use Boo. I have a Unity licence. Unity's great!

Although scripting is involved, the rest of it is drag and drop, even assigning scripts to objects. Very user friendly. You can put basic stuff together without any scripting as there are a load of pre-built scripts/physics behaviours.

I've had a few demos up and running and the tutorials are excellent. Suffice to say, my next game (after the current GS project) is going to be a Unity title ;-)

EDIT: Oh, and if you want REAL ease of use... the Shoot'em Up Construction Kit is brilliant. Only available for Commodore 64 or Amiga, though. LOL.