Its been a bit hectic lately. I've been meaning to put up this post for a while and I can assure you that I've been delayed by atleast a week. (some people might argue that its much more than that).

Anyway, this Blog was meant to put forth a couple of really big announcements, as the title suggests. So, here goes.

Announcement #1

First, an update on one of my projects. FLAT Tryals :Unleashed, which I introduced a little earlier, has made it to the finals of the Intel Game Demo Contest 2008! That means that the demo that I was originally planning to release last week will now be delayed by a bit. It will undergo more feature-addition and polish. If you haven't checked out the game yet,
I suggest you go to the temporary website

The site is being updated, but is mainly a repository of gameinfo right now. The final website will hopefully be done in 2 weeks' time.

FT:U has been through a hectic development process and once its done, I'll probably put up the entire process as videos or on TDN. There's definitely a lot of stuff that I'd like to give out to the community after its done. Going from the original FLAT Tryals game, (which was not written with torque) to the next version was a very interesting challenge, and I hope to share the story with everyone. For starters, it was more than just a game-port. I stripped the original game down and started from scratch, though trying to keep the same basic philosophy in mind.

A couple of screens from a very early build, just to give you a hint of whats in store: (you might have seen some of 'em before)



This one is a very, very early version of a car shader I was working on. I can't quite show you what the shader looks like now (that would ruin the entire surprise now, wouldn't it?).

Now a few screens from in-game.









The above shots use a color-tone shader, and a fullscreen post-process bloom.

And of course, like the saying goes, a racing game without motion blur is like a racing game without racing (yeah, I know, I just made that one up) Here's a video showing motion-blur in game (I figured that getting a screen shot of it wouldn't really convey the idea)

Motion Blur video

Nothing fancy here. The effect is achieved using the accumulation buffer (its basically a buffer you can use to store stuff). I based my work on another resource. I was initially hoping to have a post-process blur with GLSL, but unfortunately my GPU couldn't handle it, and as one of the main requirements of a racing game is a very-good framerate, I decided to keep it off a bit, until I get a new GPU.

I would presume that the next announcement is of consequence to a lot of people.

Announcement #2

I have been working with shaders and TGE for a bit now. I initially sought to apply my OpenGL experience to TGE and get some sort of shader functionality. Since then I've got some stuff going, before I came across the Modernization Kit. To be very honest, the MK is a fantastic addition. It does a lot of neat stuff and it does it pretty well. I had been in touch with the original author of the MK, talking about improvements to the source. I've realised that the MK in itself has come to symbolize a lot of stuff. By managing it, I would remove some stuff from it, delete some functionality and replace it with my own, which I think goes against what it was originally intended for. So, I'm going to work on a fork-off of the MK - So, here's announcing the the Torque Render Package (TORPA)!

So how are the two announcements related, I hear you ask? Well, TORPA is basically a compilation of the framework behind FLAT Tryals: Unleashed!

The first version actually inherits a great deal from the modernization kit, especially its material system. Some key features:

- Slightly revamped material system, with a more powerful material script structure, including support for specific GLSL structures.
- Multi-pass shaders!
- Refraction/ Reflection effects on static and dynamic shapes
- Screen-space effects - post process effect manager
- DTS shaders
- Sample shader library with documentation on getting your own special effects
- Directly from FT:U - carpaint shader! Single and multipass for covering a larger range of hardware
- Non-photorealistic rendering!
- More stuff that I think would make for a good surprise!

I hope that is enough to look forward to. I've been meaning to release this stuff for a while but something seems to come up always. I guess the time is now come, hence the announcement.

Watch this space for more info very, very soon and good luck with your projects!