Is Xors3D worth it?
Community Forums/General Help/Is Xors3D worth it?
| ||
| I am really thinking of buying Xors because of the shader abilities, multiple post-processing effects, and speed with many animated entities. Of course I am a little troubled by getting a new engine. I know a few members here have it but there are not many posts on either site relating to it. Is this because it has many bugs, or is everyone waiting until it is fully stable? Is it stable? I also saw this on the Licensing page. Licensing of Xors3d means purchase of a license key. If you have a license key, you'll be provided with updates of Xors3d until a totally new version (Xors3d 2) will be released. Does this mean that if you buy Xors right now, you are not entitled to version 2? Any input would be appreciated. |
| ||
| Hi, I use it with B3D. (can be used with BMax too.) You only need to buy it if you are releasing a product. There is also a utility which converts B3D to Xors3d. If you do try it, you have to get the most recent 'update' which fixes bugs. New 'update' every week. Jim |
| ||
| I am having tons of problems getting the samples to work though.. I figured if I buy it I will not have to worry about functionalities. And I would like to have Physx. |
| ||
| I had tried Xors3d on several occasions ( last year and more recently, this year ).. It seems like each time I tried working on a project in XORS3D - some kinda major problem prevented me from continuing. Little things didnt work correctly, entitybrightness was broke, the shadow system seemed really flakey, adding 2 lights ( even if the 2nd light didnt cast shadow ) would cause some massive graphpic glitches, and tons more. While the Xors3d team seemd to address a few of the problems/bugs I posted - when they ran into one they either couldn't fix or just didnt want to - they wouldn't reply. I quickly got tired of trying to write a project in Xors3d beta form and stopped using it. Not saying the Xors3d team aren't constantly updating the engine because they are it's just it has a super long ways to go before I would consider it useable/stable and the minor updates it recieves weekly aren't sufficent to deal with the massive problems the engines has. |
| ||
| I like Xors and use it for some stuff. Its the perfect successor to B3d, but it does have some issues. One big hangup is there are some bugs that developers wont even respond to. Deferred rendering is not usable at all. If you don't know how to program shaders you pretty much stuck. The biggest problem it doesn't seem to be much faster than B3d. after a certain number of entities are in the scene the framerate slows to a crawl even on high end graphics cards. |
| ||
| The biggest problem it doesn't seem to be much faster than B3d.. Don't think that's true - would need to see how you tested this to verify. One thing I have noticed - particularly with PhysX involved, is that a standalone compiled Xors exe runs much faster than running code in your IDE even with debug turned off. Not sure why. I'm currently using it for Tank Universal2. It's true that over the last year there's been a lot of basic bugfixes, but it's been brought up to quite a nice state. If you're looking for a Blitz3d + DX9 solution, this is a viable choice. The Xors team do answer queries but can sometimes seem to ignore the odd question that doesn't suit them. No argumen there. Updates for bugfixes are frequent however. Having said all that, I'm not stretching Xors abilities by any means - I'm not using shadows, shaders or animated meshes. I have looked into the deferred rendering etc.. but there did seem to be issues (non-shadow casting objects being transparent, shadows overdrawing fullbright surfaces). My game design doesn't call for extra fx like this so it hasn't really been a worry. <edit> looks like the Xors guys are doing something about this as there's been mention of a shadow/post process code rewrite on the way </edit> Really recommend giving it a whirl by downloading the latest beta. Regards the samples (if you're talking about code samples), I think the problem is that the Xors team don't update them to work with the latest beta (and possibly last official release version), meaning you can run into compile errors - which is confusing for a newbie. Not the best - but they're a small team I imagine. |
| ||
| Thanks for the responses, I have decided to wait until I finish my side project, a tower defense game, and continue on with the Pirate Game. I was really interested in the shaders, water, and advanced shadows but i guess i can wait a while. I wish a lot of luck to the Xors team. |
| ||
| Do any one here made a game which was made by using xors3d. What im most interested to know is. Is it in general works without getting stuck? im working on a project for a long time and part of it is based on xors3d now i know xors3d is concidred abit dead but what im interested to know is. is it usable as it is now. |
| ||
| If you're going to depend on it you really need to make your own assertions: build a test-farm. Gather several Windows systems, each with different OS versions and hardware configurations, and run your game (or at least a demo that can reproduce all the graphics, audio, physics and input features you're going to use in your game). Then see if everything works ok. Apart from the issues MadJack mentioned above (animated meshes are important, test them out), if you stick to the fixed-function pipeline (i.e: no shaders, only what Blitz3D could do), it's the safest bet with any engine if you want to support the broadest range of systems possible. Fixed-function is gonna be available for a lot of years to come, because even when it's not precisely available in a certain system, the graphics driver emulates it with shaders. When people install your game, they'll need to set "Windows XP SP3 Compatibility" in the executable properties as well. |
| ||
| is it usable as it is now? Yes, with caveats. Those being; no longer supported/developed. Sprite commands are incomplete (but can roll your own using quads to get around that), no real optimisation regards surfaces which means fps can slow down quickly on complex scenes with lots of actors/surfaces, shadows are very slow and can only be used very sparingly. I didn't find people were reporting a lot of start-up problems, so that's a plus. Was using Bmax + Xors. I've since moved to Nuclear Basic which has a much quicker engine. |
   |