Getting back into Torque and GameSpace Exporting

Getting back into Torque

Since my last blog, I've been getting back into Torque. Over the last few days I've been getting my dev machine setup with all the latest Torque stuff. What I'm really waiting for is TSE MS4 but till thats here I thought I'd start off with TGE. I haven't really done much with Torque since 1.2 so I set about downloading 1.4 and the latest lighting kit. Also installed Visual Studio C++ Express 2005.

I must say things have progressed a long way since I last built Torque. It used to take a couple of days of messing around with CVS and Visual Studio etc. to get up and running. Within a couple of hours I had everything I needed installed and had everything compiling nicely. With all the new documentation and tutorials, getting back into things was so much easier than I expected.

Exporting

A couple of years ago my team was having a lot of trouble learning to export to .DTS. Our modellers had no trouble in creating great models but getting them in game gave us serious headaches. Now I'm a programmer and struggle like mad with anything art related and our lead modeller told me that I had no chance at exporting so I decided I needed to give it a try :)

I couldn't afford MAX so decided to purchase GameSpace as I'd previously had a little success with modelling in TrueSpace. Armed with GameSpace and the DarkIndustries exporter I decided to start simple to create and export a textured cube. After several hours of messing around I got my cube running in the old show tool and then in game. I was rather pleased with myself, this exporting stuff was easy! ;)

Several months went by and I'd progressed from simple primitives to more complex shapes and had them exporting with collision and detail levels. Next up I tried a vehicle and a weapon and eventually got those going too. It was all going well until I tried to export a tree that one of the team had made. I could get the tree to export but no matter what I tried I simply couldn't work out how to get transparency to work on the leaves.

Here was my best effort:



Anyway, I've tried to export this tree on and off for the past couple of years with no success. Yesterday I decided to take another shot at it and after a couple more hours I think I finally got my head around what I was doing wrong because I finally did it!



If anyone else has been having trouble with something similar in GameSpace feel free to contact me and I'll do my best to help.

I must say I'm loving ShowTool Pro so much better than the old one. The only things I need to learn to export now are characters and animations, hopefully they will be easier than trees with transparent textures but maybe I'll just quit while I'm ahead :)

gameCMS

Thanks to everyone who tried out my gameCMS software (see last blog for more info).

I've had some great feedback on it and since then I've rolled out a new patch (1.0.9) and have also released the first public alpha build of gameCMS Studio. Here's a screenie:



See this thread for more info.

-Greg.