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Latest version: Why Tramway SDK [800x600]
Tramway SDK 0.1.0 [firefoxnow]
Github --------------------------------------------------- [hicolor]
Quick links [blender]
Home Tramway SDK (heavy metal spelling - Tramway SDK) is [wxwidgets]
Get Started a graphics package/framework/game engine that I [winxp]
have been working on for the past 3 years. [linux]
[hatemac]
In this article I attempt to turn you against [discord-no]
mainstream engines and I will explain, in detail, [winrar]
why Tramway SDK is not as awful as them. [sdblast]
[esheep]
Unreasonable system requirements due to Turbobloat [valid-bad]
[notepadpp]
--------------------------------------------------- [drpepper]
Unity needs very powerful hardware and consumes
enough power to burn down a rainforest. Godot is
slightly better, but you still need relatively
capable hardware.
But what if all that you really want to make is
just a lowpoly horror roguelite deckbuilder
simulator? 15 year old hardware is more than
capable of running a game like that, but not if you
use a mainstream engine, due to Turbobloat.
Tramway SDK can run on virtually any hardware from
the last 15 years, since it is not Turbobloated. It
doesn't even need a graphics card, since it can be
switched to use software rasterization, making it
perfect for displaying graphics on toasters and
fridges.
Some might say "just get a better computer". This
is why getting a better computer is bad:
1. Affordance
A lot of people, especially from 3rd world
countries are very poor and can't afford to buy
hardware to run Turbobloat.
2. e-Waste
Producing computer chips is very bad on the
environment. If modern software wasn't
Turbobloated you would buy new hardware only
when the previous hardware broke and wasn't
repairable.
3. Not putting up with Turbobloat
Why spend money on another computer if you
already have one that works perfectly fine?
Just because of someone else's turbobloat? You
could buy 1000 cans of Dr. Pepper instead.
Nodes are bad
---------------------------------------------------
A thing should be a thing. It should not be a bunch
of things pretending to be a single thing. With
nodes you have to pretend that a collection of
things is a single thing.
Also when creating things with nodes, you have to
go back and forth between node GUI and code.
In Tramway SDK you just subclass the Entity class
and write the code. After that you make a level
using the level editor. No going back and forth. No
nodes, just entities.
Monolithism
---------------------------------------------------
All of the mainstream engines have a monolithic
game editor. It doesn't matter how many features
you use from it, you still have to wait 10 minutes
for all of them to load in.
Tramway SDK has editors, but all of them are
optional. If you just want to use it as a
framework, you can use only the C++ runtime. If you
want to build levels, you can use only the level
editor and no other GUI tool.
Data files are stored as
whitespace-seperated-values, so you could even edit
all of the data files by hand, without using a
single editor.
Bad graphics
---------------------------------------------------
Most Unity games look like very bad, even with
fancy shaders, normal mapping and other techniques.
Look at what Tramway SDK can do with just
lightmapping and Gouraud shading:
[photoreali]
This could be rendered on a Direct3D 7 level
graphics card with a fixed-function pipeline.
Quake level editors
---------------------------------------------------
Brush based level geometry is very good and you can
prototype levels with it very quickly. Tramway SDK
has a .map file converter, which converts brushes
into triangle meshes.
[trenchbroo]
Level being created in the Trenchbroom map editor.
[leveledito]
Level being set up in the Tramway SDK level editor.
[inengine]
Level with lightmaps being rendered in-engine.
Wow! Look at this very fancy level. Not only can we
create brush-based levels, we even have an input/
output system like in Source to set up interactions
between entities in levels.
[signals]
Very fancy interaction editor.
In the future I will be implementing all of the
Source logic entities, so that you can do visual
scripting right in the level editor.
Framework for RPGs
---------------------------------------------------
I think that it is very interesting to see the
different kinds of games that can be created in a
tool like RPG Maker. There's also tons of mods,
even total conversions based on Morrowind. You can
do a lot of stuff by changing the data, even in the
RPG mechanics have already preprogrammed.
[kitchensin]
Editor for the RPG framework.
Since the engine was designed to support level
streaming from the very beginning, it should make
the creation of open-world RPG-ish games very quick
and very easy.
[rpg]
Everyone always says that you "shouldn't create an
open-world RPG", but that's just because they have
never tried using the Trawmay SDK.
TL; DR
---------------------------------------------------
Tramway SDK is a game engine based on Quake/Source
style entities, supports open-world streaming,
comes with optional extensions, like the RPG
framework that is sort like RPG Maker, but for 3D.
This project is still in very early development.
APIs are unstable, stuff breaks or just doesn't
work, a lot of things still haven't been
implemented, but it's getting better very quickly.
Click here for the Github repo!
Tramway SDK (c) racenis 2021-2025