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Comment by teamonkey | Hacker News Reader

From the whitepaper:

"As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine."

Really?

Perhaps they were not comparing the performance, but just trying to explain their product? However, it also says in the paper:

"Originally we created a technology demo using the Quake 4 assets. The demo created an FPS on top of the standard Turbulenz Engine but implemented a modern deferred renderer in place of Quakeʼs original forward renderer. Once we had this multiplayer demo running at over 60 fps with particle effects, full screen effects, character animations, a full physical environment, 3D audio, networking and the deferred lighting solutions, we decided that JavaScript was absolutely capable and suitable for creating modern games."

They showed this demo running live in Chrome, and to say it was awesome would be an understatement.

Sorry if we did not get the message across correctly, sometimes is hard to find a good simple example to explain what your product can do. As asadjb said it was just a way to say that our product allows development of complex 3D games, as we demonstrated by our game demos and our FPS demo.

While I understand the comparison you seem to be trying to make, your 3d engine compared with the Unreal 3d engine (not the tools), I think this is a mistake. You need to clarify more since at first glance your engine is not comparable to the Unreal engine. Most developers are going to see a statement like that as a comparison of the Unreal development tools, which I don't see anything like that on your site. The big sale for Unreal with developers is with their tools and pipeline. Unless you can match that in some way I would change that statement. I can download the Unreal Develoment Kit for free and start making a basic 3d game out-of-the-box with the tools they provide without needing additional programming or artwork immediately; can you claim that? Is there a level editor of some sort, scripting IDE, events IDE, and so on?

Go to unrealengine.com and poke around. I don't see the comparison. Now, if you could provide some things along these lines, tool-wise, then you got something.

If you need a way to describe that your engine allows for the development of complex 3d games then I would suggest you use the statement "Our engine allows for the development of complex 3d games". Nothing more needs to be said and comparing your engine with a far more complete and potentially superior gaming engine/toolset is misleading and inappropriate.

I would also suggest you allow people to download the SDK and try sample games without having to sign up for anything.

The comparison with the Unreal UDK and Unreal Engine was simply to help people understand how different parts of the Turbulenz platform compared to things they already knew about.

As a collection of tools and technology that we've worked on for the past 3 years we obviously don't have as wider range of features when compared to everything Epic has included in Unreal.

Different developers need different tools, and we will be adding more features as needs arise.

But I appreciate your feedback and will work it into the white paper when we next update it.

The Turbulenz Engine is also equivalent to Thomas the Tank Engine, for some sense of equivalence.

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