Truth is that Indie tools are limiting. With blitz3D you can only do so much before you hit some kind of brick wall. It's not always the coders or artists fault. And neither is it always a lack of skills.
one big hurdle is time and the other money. If we all had both, there's no way we would be using Indie tools at all. And neither would we all be struggling at home to build something good.
From an artists perspective there are a ton of limitations in blitz3D's graphics engine that holds you back. Many of these things only become apparent when you start making an actual ambitious game that has a lot of interactivity.
As a stand alone graphics renderer you can optimize things enough to make pretty cutting edge shaderless graphics and have it run pretty fast. Great for tech demo's
Once you start adding gameplay, physics, collision, AI. Start trying to optimize culling and LOD and use fairly advanced materials you get a lot of limitations in how you can organise your scenes and draw them.
Another problem with working with blitz is that many more experienced people in the community are aware of blitz limitations and are quite willing to ignore obvious problems in your work because they understand that you had to do pretty clever optimisations and used innovative techniques to overcome them. Or hit a dead wall.
Show that same amazing blitz creation to a pro who doesn't know the engine limitations and they will rip it appart.
They won't understand that you have suface count hurdles to overcome that require you to build your level a certain way.
They won't get why your working around alpha sorting issues by creating things a certain way, or why you are using techniques in some placed but not using it as extensively as you should. Or why you can't have 600 seperate entities, fast dynamic shadows, alpha that sorts correctly. Use the same textures throughout your levels and combine same brush meshes to lower surface count at the expense of propper culling of your scene.
The lack of texture compression, and why your dynamic lighting look bad.
And are incredulous when something like intercollision between animated objects doesn't really exist.
I had to explain all these kinds of things at an interview recently in quite a bit of detail so they would understand why my work often looks the way it does.
And thats before you really start looking at the gameplay itself, and the demands your game makes on the CPU that hold back other areas that in a modern engine would be greatly minimized.
one big hurdle is time and the other money. If we all had both, there's no way we would be using Indie tools at all. And neither would we all be struggling at home to build something good.
From an artists perspective there are a ton of limitations in blitz3D's graphics engine that holds you back. Many of these things only become apparent when you start making an actual ambitious game that has a lot of interactivity.
As a stand alone graphics renderer you can optimize things enough to make pretty cutting edge shaderless graphics and have it run pretty fast. Great for tech demo's
Once you start adding gameplay, physics, collision, AI. Start trying to optimize culling and LOD and use fairly advanced materials you get a lot of limitations in how you can organise your scenes and draw them.
Another problem with working with blitz is that many more experienced people in the community are aware of blitz limitations and are quite willing to ignore obvious problems in your work because they understand that you had to do pretty clever optimisations and used innovative techniques to overcome them. Or hit a dead wall.
Show that same amazing blitz creation to a pro who doesn't know the engine limitations and they will rip it appart.
They won't understand that you have suface count hurdles to overcome that require you to build your level a certain way.
They won't get why your working around alpha sorting issues by creating things a certain way, or why you are using techniques in some placed but not using it as extensively as you should. Or why you can't have 600 seperate entities, fast dynamic shadows, alpha that sorts correctly. Use the same textures throughout your levels and combine same brush meshes to lower surface count at the expense of propper culling of your scene.
The lack of texture compression, and why your dynamic lighting look bad.
And are incredulous when something like intercollision between animated objects doesn't really exist.
I had to explain all these kinds of things at an interview recently in quite a bit of detail so they would understand why my work often looks the way it does.
And thats before you really start looking at the gameplay itself, and the demands your game makes on the CPU that hold back other areas that in a modern engine would be greatly minimized.