5 replies to this topic

[prattyy]

hey there i am searching for a 3d game engine which will run good on a low-end machine (probably 4 years old).
can some one point me towards it.

i have tried torque and unity.but they give me bad framerate.

[fireside]

Part of your problem might be that the demo's contain a lot of poly's and may use shaders. The first thing to find out is if your particular video card can use shaders, because a lot of engines use it. Mainly, then, you should be able to use the engine without the features that don't work on your computer. Try more of the Unity Demo's and see if there are some that work better. It will probably mainly be writing games with lower poly's and using more billboards for plants, and smaller textures, etc. There are a lot of games you can write along these lines, and are really more practical for a lone developer such as space shooters, puzzle games, retro shooters like the old doom or quake, etc. Another possibility would be to use the old Quake engine. I think it's open source now. I'm assuming you feel you have to use 3d, because you could also just write games in 2d. Perhaps Flash or Silverlight. Many times you can get a lot larger audience with those games than 3d because people don't have to download and it's more secure. Flash also has non-accelerated 3d engines such as Away3d. There are also small Java engines you might want to look at such as Jpct.

[prattyy]

thanks for the info fire side will try that
actually am at a very intial stage of game developement so right now choosing which engine to start with.but i want to target even those audiences who have low-end hardwares.thats the reason i am being so picky about the engine.unity is great to start with.
just that it shouldnt become unplayable on those hardware as my game with contain lot of fx.

[fireside]

Good luck with that. I also forgot to mention UDK, which is the unreal 3 engine and is somewhat dated and should run on older hardware.

[saymoo]

fireside said:

Good luck with that. I also forgot to mention UDK, which is the unreal 3 engine and is somewhat dated and should run on older hardware.

eh? Outdated? it's current gen/next gen. And it's updated monthly, with new features, bugfixes, enhanchements.
It has (added this year) e.g. Lightmass, unique approach to realistic lighting, very photorealistic.
No other engine has this.
And looking at the current games in the market, and counting how much is made with UnrealEngine 3 under the belts, i would conclude: no way somewhat outdated in perspective to current games.

Don't Confuse UT3 as the reference for UE3, since after that game came out, hundreds of updates where done on the engine.
(e.g. compare UT3 graphics with that of GOW 2, or Splintercell Conviction (yes, in contrast to what some people say, it's build upon UE3), or a bit older game: Vegas 2
quite a difference eh? that's because of the updates to the engine.

UDK cannot run without shader compatible cards. Current versions require SM3 or higher, the last SM2 compatible version was the may release.

[quark]

prattyy said:

hey there i am searching for a 3d game engine which will run good on a low-end machine (probably 4 years old).
can some one point me towards it.

i have tried torque and unity.but they give me bad framerate.

Go for Irrlicht, it is not a game engine but 3d engine, however you can find some game engines based on Irrlicht. It's user friendly, easy to start with and very fast on my 7-8 years Sony Vaio with Intel GMA graphics card I use for testing.

You can use IrrEdit or CopperCube editor or any other editor exporting to .irr scene and migrate to web using CopperLicht (more or less).