Reality Factory

I tested BV and I was really tempted to start using it instead of RF. It's a great tool for creating games. However, I don't want to leave RF now that I've finally started to learn it. I also love the community.

Anyway, I prefer gameplay to graphics and I'm not an artist, RF can handle the graphical quality that I can produce. With BV, however, I guess I could get decent graphics AND great gameplay...

The idea of that starter kit is terrific, BTW. Letting people first create their game and then decide whether to pay or not is just great idea. I know that at least I wouldn't buy first and then start studying it and making games.

Maybe one day I'll move on to BV... but not today, nor tomorrow.

This are really good screens, expecially the outdoor scene. If you put this scene as demo example with a walkthrough for entities and features (like the last Quest of Dreams RF demo) and every game developper would join your engine, no doubt. The troubles about the engine slowness still remains. the problem is surely of the low hardware performance of the end-user but so, knowing the features, what are the requirements for a full engine functionality? (I understand that you can't write them down in your site...). By full engine functionality I'm meaning something like your outdoor scene with physics object falling, animated models, plus all the HDR stuff and related things you showed us.

Wow! BV has really grown up since the last time I saw it. Very impressive work, you should give your artists a pat on the back. After playing with the demo I've really started to like it. Hate to say it, but it seems so much simpler than RF. If I wasn't already commited to another engine I'd be tempted to join up with you guys. I may still be buying it out of curiosity in a few months.

Good to hear from you Gekido, glad to see you haven't completely forgotten us.

federico, there is a problem with the scripts in some of the templates that werent updated in the demos, mainly the cause of thatt marble games horrible framerate... error in scripting, sort of, the dynamicstep for the physics was set wrong.. simple fix posted on the forums over there

regarding system specs, it's really hard to say - the engine is designed to scale from low end to high-end, functionality-wise.

The engine supports HDR on a geforce2 for one thing - considering every other engine that i've seen, period requires a directx9 or higher video card, we are pretty proud of this ;}

A geforce3 or higher can pretty much get the full spectrum of functionality that BV supports in one shape or another - things will scale appropriately with better video cards, but you can get normal mapping, specular mapping etc with a geforce 3.

it's amazing what you can do with ingenious programming ;}

Here's a demo someone just posted on the bv forum - shows you a bit of the kind of detail & level size you can get with BV without much difficulty:

http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... l#msg10736

It's a pretty nice interior 'cave' world - visually it's on par with anything i saw in oblivion, personally, and it doesn't even have normal maps applied yet.

Here's a simple demo i'm working on as a part of my class at Pacific Game Design - it's a simple racing game based off of the Racing template included with Beyond Virtual:

http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... 154.0.html

There's a video of gameplay if you want to check out some 'in action' footage:

http://www.gekidoslair.com/gallery/Drivin.avi

So it really comes down to what YOU, the designer want your game's system specs to be. Steer Madness targetted super low machine spec - we had it running on 300Mhz machines and still as playable as 90% of RF demo's i've seen on machines 4 or 5 times as fast.

Or you could target a super high-end machine & throw hundreds of thousands of poly's at the screen if you want. This is entirely up to you.

The scripting syntax is very easy to learn, so it's not hard to develop your own camera control systems or player movement systems once you get into it. Since everything is scripted, any deficiencies that you may see are in the lack of time we spent creating the scripts for the templates, not in the engine itself.

Again, they are meant to be TEMPLATES - starting points for creating full games - much like when you hit 'new project' in visual studio - it doesn't automatically create you a killer application, but provides the skeleton for one.

Now that people have been using the engine for a few months, there are some demo's & cool screenshots coming out - the next few months should really prove interesting as more people put the engine through it's paces.

Wow, that demo is.... impressive.

Seriously, I have to ignore this thread or I'll end up paying that $150...
BV seems so perfect for my RPG.