Please Allow Indies to Have Imposters

[Merrie]

Please Dev's allow the Indie version to have the Imposters back, it will make things so much easier then manually setting up our models for LOD.

Thank you!
Merrie S

[Squat]

I would like to second, triple and fourthtruple this notion if it makes any kind of difference.

The truth is I didn't expect, nor require, imposters to be in the engine I was going to choose. When it was introduced, I had never thought it was possible and I thought it was especially cool and useful, especially in the development phase of the project. I could of easily done without it, and still can.

However, Now that we have been introduced to it and, much more importantly, been put under the notion it was ours to use and now some of us have it incorporated already into our projetcs, I feel it's a bit of a sham to pull it out of the version I'm pretty sure most of your customers are interested in and put it into the category that most of us aren't really all that able, ready or otherwise interested in pursuing. I would like to close in saying that the imposters feature is in absolutely no way, in any regard, reason enough to upgrade to a more expensive license. In essence, there's no reason at all to keep it out of the indie version. Lastly, I would once again like to encourage the notion that the more features that are shown in the games made with this engine, the more people will want to use it themselves. Thank you.

[Spaz]

Sorry for being stupid here, but what are imposters and what do you use them for?

[JimB]

Sorry for being stupid here, but what are imposters and what do you use them for?

Well the way I understand it is that it makes multiple copies/clones of an object without dramatically increasing the polycount, would probably be great for stuff like foliage perhaps.
One of my other engines has it as standard but so far I have yet to use it.

[pixel_legolas]

I think imposters also make automatic LOD objects so when a tree is far away it becomes a picture or low poly instead

[Albertus]

Well of course I  myself would like to have imposter ( whatever it is  ) for 400 usd but businees is businees 

I must say that I appreciate very much Game Core 2.0 licence structure

Pro version supplies only advanced features which can be of  use for commercial  games only
Other engines ask to pay 1500 usd or so,  for features which nowadays are quite common , for example dynamic shadows
You know whom I am talking about

The only black spot is the logo for the pro version 

[pixel_legolas]

Albertus, I know that you dislike the logo license but is it really a big issue? You can show your logo also. Often when you see huge games like unreal you see alot of logos before actually entering a menu. You will see the unreal logo, nvidia logo etc. I for one is proud of using gamecore and gladly show the logo. Hopefully we can get even more people involved in game making by shwoing it.

But of course there are different reasons for everyone to change something. Hope you can have a good discussion about it with "they who decide"

[Albertus]

well ok but it must be a choice,   not an imposition not at least for people who are willing to pay 1.500 usd
If you go through the the licence agreement  of all other engines you can see yourself that they ask to display the logo only for the economic versions

What you mentioned is quite common in the industry, not only in games

The point is that the companies pay for such  form of advertisement , they do not ask to be paid 
As an alternative they trade off publicity and special low price

Last , I agree that GC badly need to be known in the market  to occupy the place that this great engine deserves
The most powerful form of publicity are finished games

However as long as Indie developers display GC logo I dont really think that the few Pro users can be a serious issue

[gekido]

As I've mentioned before, we'll have some news on the splash screen front shortly.  I don't know if things have been finalized quite yet, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

[Architex]

Well hold on a minute, pardon me that I didn't know what imposters were either ( I assume it is primarily for making copies and duplicates for characters, right?  Like civilians on a city street?  Could be wrong. ), but couldn't you just use the spawner tabs and use an opr?

[Squat]

Imposters basically turn any full 3D model into a sprite with a picture of the model on it from that angle. Make sense? It's like you have a million trees and the ones in the distance are just single sprites. You get settings to determine what distance it drops to an imposter and how often it updates the sprite image (because if you walk around the object, its angle would change...so it does that). I'll admit, the angle updating part actually makes the sprite look jumpy and kind of ugly. It would "almost" be better if it didn't update the sprite, rather it set it to simply billboard. Of course, that's good for maybe a conical tree, but any kind of structure that's off in the distance will need updating. Catch 22. Imposters are great performance enhancers, but at a slight penalty of quality of image.