An interesting blog to make the point about engines....

[delerium10101]

I\'m gonna chime in here again, repeating the point the original blog post made. When it comes down to it, the skill, talent, and dedication of the artist matters far more than the engine involved. I\'ve seen truly impressive things pushed through Torque (Torque, not Torque Shader Engine, just your plain \'ol fixed function software T&L Torque) just because the artist was talented enough to create mind boggling scenes. TSE has been used to create some absolutely stunning upcoming games that I\'m really looking forward to (well, if I had a shader card that is). I mean, so what if your game utilizes the extreme power of OpenGL 3.0 and DirectX 11 in tandem with shader model 5.0 operating at a sub fragment level. If your art sucks, your game looks terrible. If your art rocks, the game looks great regardless of all the fancy buzzwords marketing can shove down your throat. All those weapons JoeB has made? We can drop those into Torque, they\'ll look great. Hell, some people have taken the Half-Life 2 textures, dropped those into Torque, and suddenly Torque looked almost as good as Half-Life 2.

And since I\'m ranting about comparing indie engines and commercial engines, have we looked at TSE lately? Its terrain engine can do more than Terragen can and runs in real time. Just last week TSE terrain got support for arbitrary poly-soup meshes created in Max. It works with both OpenGL and DirectX. Its networking model supports play between the XBox 360 and your PC. UE3 can\'t do quite a bit of what TSE does. For a $250 engine compared to a $... eh, no public amount, more than $750,000 though (I personally think it\'s around $1.25 million) this is a pretty huge accomplishment.

And under the careful care of Reno and I, its getting better. indieGrass (ya, that grass thingy that some people love to hate) is next-gen. No engine can claim being able to do that (hell, UE3 was bragging about being able to do stuff I\'ve taken for granted since getting TGE). Then there\'s the stuff I\'ve been working on, and the new projects on the good ol\' to-do list (the scary to-do list from hell). The research papers I have sitting in front of me weren\'t precisely meant for use in games, but that won\'t stop me. Admittedly, the fact that you need graduate level math to understand the prerequisites of the prerequisites of these papers mind hinder me a bit. But ultimately, TTR is a next-gen game. And I am sick and tired of hearing \"next-gen game\" and seeing pretty graphics (that were possible since 2004) with sub-par physics (that have been around since 2001). A next-gen game is a game that actually puts those dual 3.6Ghz cores to good use and makes that X1800 cry like a little girl. Of course, it can\'t *require* that kind of power, but who\'s to say that we can\'t let it use that kind of power if it can?

Are shaders useful? Oh hell yes. Shaders make all sorts of things possible that weren\'t possible before. Are shaders the be all and end all of good graphics? No, no they aren\'t. Are graphics the be all and end all of a good game? God I hope not.