Reality Factory

http://www.beyondvirtual.com

Hey, not trying to spam here and I dont think this is spam.

Beyond Virtual Indie is developed by GDGi, the team (company) who ran the RF project since the beginning I believe.

Beyond Virtual is a next gen indie game engine, programming free game creation system, it is currently in beta, but they have released the complete toolset for free with basically 2 restrictions, the game export button has been disabled, and you cannot capture video by pressing f12, other then that it is the same version the lisenced users have. You can still play your game by running it through the editor. Levels do not need to be compiled. It is completely wysiwyg.

It comes with a
script editor,
form editor,
a really cool fx editor,
game editor
object viewer

and some simple exaples and templates to help get you started.

It features ode physics, specular and normal maps, HDR, Bloom, a very nice terrain editor, a very slick road building system, enviromental fog, and much more. The game editor can even be skinned, to give it that personal touch.

There really is too much for me to remeber but I suggest you all go give it a try.

Not spamming at all. BV is a wonderful product headed by one of our own in Gekido (Mike Wuetherick). I'd encourage one and all to go take a look. It can do nothing more than help you on your way in learning to be a professional game maker!!

Yes very true, especially since they can get it free...

I forgot to mention also blur, stencil shadows. lightmaps, etc.

It supports natively .ms3d format, aswell as fbx, obj, 3ds, lwo/lws I think (not familair with lightwave)

It also has cube mapping.


One cool thing, no bsp, you create your worlds in your 3d modelling application of choice, and put it together in the world editor, you dont have to cut this brush and that brush... Though I have heard that someone has exported thier world from the rf editor and loaded it into BV, forget who that was...

It is a terrific learning tool with the free evaluation package. It never expires. You can create games to play through the editor, as Jim said, but you have to upgrade to a paid version to export a transportable executable file.

wow, so BV has stencil shadows now! might be worth taking a look at.

but havnt we had stencil shadows for some time? not to run bv down but what is so wow as we have it already?

Yeah, I dont use RF, but it does have stencil shadows... Maybe that was just the icing on the cake for GD1?

Just so people are aware, there was a bug that arose with the starter kit which may cause it to crash sometimes, theyre working on fixing it, but it never happened before with the silver version, so they will get it fixed asap... Just letting people know ahead of time so they dont get disapointed... It is something to do with the security software...

well, to be honest, one of my biggest turn offs with BV was its complete lack of a realistic lighting system. Otherwise I was quite impressed with it. For the indie developer who has no programming talent, BV is one of the best options out there.

Does BV take advantage of graphics cards? If it does then that is one good reason to use it. Then you can have higher poly environments and more scripts running. Looks like a very good package from my glances at it. I havent tried it. I just dont want to leave RF and this community. Also after two years of studying RF I dont want to swap out and try to learn a new game making system.

It can handle some polys:

http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... 783.0.html

I havent played with lighting in BV very much, but I dont quite know what you mean by complete lack? Theres lightmapping, shadows, stencil shadows, etc...

The lighting is all dependant on how you set the lights up... look at the lighting in this thread
http://www.beyondvirtual.com/smf/index. ... 997.0.html

Some times ago, Gekido posted here some news about the BV demos but there were some critical comments about the engine and the demos themselves, so it seemed that Rf users were "against" BV. Instead it was constructive criticism, but not all seemed to understand.
So I must say again that I'm saying these things without any envy at all. I grabbed the starter kit and I was disappointed. The engine runs really slow on my laptop p4 intel graphics. i think that I would need some better machine, yes I know, but it's frustrating (don't ask me what are my specs: I have this, I don't change my stuff to play games). The extra demos that come with the starter kit aren't impressive at all. The framerate isn't worse but the engine is slow equally, the movements are irregular. The third persons camera aren't well coded, the ai very bad. Also the user's screens in the forums aren't impressive. Yes, the engine is better than rf but I don't think it's better than doom3 or hl2 engine. It's simpler or more extensible than those? perhaps.
I know how could be difficult to code this thing but if the aim of this framework is have "zero pipeline", it should show some good game art, with great shadow, and lighting, an thing like these. Again, you open the FX editor and you think: wow! I could make great things with this tool! but where are the examples?
So my idea is: this could be a great dev tool but it seems that some re-work is needed.

Jim wrote:I havent played with lighting in BV very much, but I dont quite know what you mean by complete lack? Theres lightmapping, shadows, stencil shadows, etc...

for the first few months after BV started out i remember people saying that its lighting system didn't work right. if i remember correctly, gekido said that the engine had been originally designed without lighting since Steer Madness didn't use lighting of any kind.

glad to hear that its working now. those screens looked nice

As far as the engine running slow, I am not sure where the problem lies... If it is actually the engine then I am not sure, I am using a celeron and it works fine here... If you are refering to the marble demo or other demos, and not specifically the engine it is a problem with those demos, they needed thier scripts adjusted and this is not an engine thing...

Your complaints of ai and camera stuff is actually the demos and thier scripts and not the engine.

Doom 3 and hl2 have more funding and are not 150 dollars to lisence or free to use?

The fx editor was actually pretty easy to use and only takes a little playing around to get the hang of, the actual bv demo has many examples, but I dont think it's content was provided with the free release?

Anyways, I think that you may be referring to specific issues with the demos and not problems with the engine and tools. Just lack of familiarity. No offense, it takes a bit of time to learn the tools, but I like them and think there very powerful.

There is however some bugs, it is in beta, and I have a hard time with exporting some models to it, but this should be fixed soon I think...


Also for lighting, there is now HDR, bloom, stencil shadows, light mapping, linear area point directional and spot lights, intensity corona falloff and all sorts of neat things... but I havent experimented much

The starter kit 'example' projects are just that - example projects that are meant to help people, um ' get started' using the engine.

They are by no means meant to provide any kind of visual demonstration of what the engine is capable of.

I did realize that this was going to be a bit of an issue, which is why we're working on additional visual demos / tech demo's using the engine. This was always something that bit RF in the ass when we were trying to promote it - it's refreshing to see that some very talented artists have come into the community to help truly show what the engine is capable of. Some nice screens i've seen as of late showing truly what RF can do.

Couple things that I can say - purely my opinion of course:

- after using RF for 6+ years, I can finally create the worlds that I really want to with BV. No compile times EVER. This has saved years of my life already. I don't know how much of my life has been lost to waiting for level compiles ;}

- integrated game / editing environment. Being able to jump back and forth from the game to the editor with a single click is also a major time saver.

Most of the improvements you will see with the current version of BV are not visual or graphical improvements, but work flow improvements.

----------

For us the priority and our primary motivation was specifically to produce a flexible toolkit for creating games.

It is my spirtual 'successor' to RF. Everything that I learned using / helping out with RF for years has gone towards and into developing BV.

We have come a LONG way since the initial build of BV to now, and are really just getting started with the engine. It is only in the past 2-3 months that we've even begun looking at any kind of advanced graphical features.

So, yes we have normal mapping, specular mapping, HDR, Bloom, Stencil Shadows, blar blar...

But, what people don't mention on their 'game engine checklist' when initially analyzing BV are, frankly, the most important factors:

1) iteration time - no level compiling, auto-reloading of content (change a texture, the engine realizes it and reloads it, etc). Spend 2 years working on a game, and you have NO idea how much time you will waste 'waiting' for things to be done with a typical engine...

2) flexibility - everything from the time you double-click your game's executable to the final 'you are teh w1nnar' screen is scriptable. No pre-defined menu structure, no predefined number / limit / style of game menu's or in-game HUD types etc.

Every element of your game is under YOUR control, not the gameshell's. This is one of our fundamental principles behind every feature that we add. The engine makes NO assumptions on the kind / style / type of game you want to make. Yes this may make the first few steps of getting started a bit slower, but this is where the project templates that we've provided come in.

Most of the things that the 'RF2' discussions have been talking about as 'theoretical maybe' features are implemented, NOW, in Beyond Virtual. Not only this, but we are continuing to invest a signficant amount of money in programmers and artists to take the engine alot further than where it stands currently.

So, for visual 'demos' of what the engine is capable of, here are a few screens for you:

First, an outdoor jungle-type screen. Created in a few hours one day when I was bored & experimenting:



Next, an interior scene with close to 50 animated characters in it - each of which is between 1500-5000 poly's - this is from a while back, so there is no advanced lighting in this screen. Just to give you an idea of the kind of poly's the engine is capable of pushing:


Any game engine is what you put into it - all it can do is render what you tell it to - if you are capable of creating good art, then the engine will render it for you.

Hope this helps explain where we are coming from with the engine. The main reason we released the Starter Kit is to be able to bring the engine to the community at large. We are not able to open-source the technology, but our experience was that 99.9% of people using Reality Factory have no need for the source code, other than to say that they have it. We can provide the same kind of power to commercial and indie teams using the script-driven solution that is Beyond Virtual.

I hope that people will give the engine a test drive - and more than just loading up a project template and dissing it as 'teh sux0rs' because it doesn't look like Unreal 3.

That's YOUR job - to create the art, we just provide the technology ;}

Hope everyone is doing well.

Cheers
Mike W
GDGi
www.BeyondVirtual.com
www.GDGi.ca