Why Tramway SDK

Tramway SDK (heavy metal spelling – T̈ra̦m̊ẅa̦ÿ SD̈K) is a graphics package/framework/game engine that I have been working on for the past 3 years.

In this article I attempt to turn you against mainstream engines and I will explain, in detail, why Tramway SDK is not as awful as them.

Unreasonable system requirements due to Turbobloat

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:

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.

Level being created in the Trenchbroom map editor.

Level being set up in the Tramway SDK level editor.

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.

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.

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.

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.