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Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

biz.turbulenz.com

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#31

From the whitepaper: "As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine." Really?

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.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#32
The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be nice to see some newer videos).

I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me and perhaps you could improve that in some way to attract more developers to use the engine (I can see you're following in apples footsteps but you really don't have the market power apple has).

Also when I went to the main website it's telling me Javascript is disabled even though it's not. I'm running Chrome V22 (the latest beta) on Windows 7 and have whitelisted the domain in adblocker to no avail.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to release it via their distribution platform - you're free to distribute it as you like. They only take the 30% cut if you distribute it via them, which I'd say is pretty reasonable. FYI I'm not in any way associated with Turbulenz - I'm just at a conference where they demoed it.

That's not what the website says... Games developed with the Turbulenz SDK will also be released and published on turbulenz.com at Turbulenz’ own discretion. No thanks.

The biz site had been updated:

4. Release your game on any web destination of your choice, including your own website or established online platforms such as Facebook. There are no royalty or license payments due to Turbulenz.

You can release your game anywhere by yourself and it would be free. Alternatively, you can also release it on turbulenz.com and we will get 30% from all the payments we process.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#34
post #4

This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide en…

Right. This model effectively caps all game prices to that of an ad-supported game, which can only be a few bucks at most. If a player can play for free on Turbulenz (with ads), then I'm going to have a hard selling my game elsewhere for $10. And if I can't sell a $10 game with this platform, then we won't see AAA titles either.

All the games are free to play, supported by in game payments. There are no plans for ads on the site. We want to allow developers to make a game that is compatible with the payment models that are being used successfully on other platforms on the web.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#35

The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be nice to see some newer videos). I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me and perhaps…

We've just discovered the issues with the beta version of Chrome and we're working on fixing it.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#36
post #4

This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide en…

[deleted]

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#38
post #36
post #4

This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide en…

[deleted]

This isn't true.

You can use the technology for free and publish the game outside of Turbulenz. You can use other payment options and Turbulenz is not asking for anything from these revenues. This is the free part.

But Turbulenz wants the option to publish the game on turbulenz.com and take a share from the revenues on the site.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#39

The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be nice to see some newer videos). I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me and perhaps…

It seems to be a bug in the latest beta of Chrome when using backbone.js (which we use):

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381

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