Plan for Matthew "King Tut" Langley

Torque 101 update

Held the second Torque 101 session this last Saturday. The first session had about 20 people, the second session had about 5-6 people. I bit less than expected, though not by much. Heard that some that didn't show up purchased the engine however (even heard one might pick up TSE), so glad to hear they got a good impression of Torque. I figured running a session on Saturday would definately weed through a lot of people lol. It went much smoother this week with less people, (A lot less questions lol). We made good progress, got a resource disk to them with Torque script files, Quark, Blender, Quark video tutorials, Blender video tutorials, as well as various other exporters.

We dove into Quark for a good couple hours, then breifly introduced the GUI editor. Starting to get a feel of how much can be done, how long it takes to go through things, etc. Since this is just a three hour session on Saturday's, I'm trying to teach a lot in a very limited ammount of time. I think I'm going to go over Quark more next week and step people through making a building and exporting it. We only made a very simple object before, we didn't get to portals (at least implementing them). Want to ensure people really understand how to make efficient Interiors and bringing them into Torque. This week I'm going to work on some step-by-steps for Torque, Quark, and possibly Blender(though might wait a week on that).

Through this I'm slowly modifying the course flow, which is great. I might end up holding this session again afterwords and see if anyone has an interest, then I will have a much more streamlined work flow (trial and error right now).

I'm still planning on taking the sessions beyond just 101, though depending on interest.

All in all it went pretty good, going to do some refinements for next week, change the outline a bit and go from there :) Those that showed this week seem very interested and dedicated (one person hasn't even had any programming or 3D classes yet, so a lot to digest).

Unfortunately between doing this, working on Snappy some, as well as a few other things, I didn't get to participate in this GID. I highly recommend anyone whose interested in doing a GID, go for it. Its a blast and a great learning experience.

On a couple other notes, I've started looking at some video capture programs for doing Video tutorials. Any recommendations are welcome.

Next plan I'll have some pics of a alien bug create I made in Max and exported to Torque also. Getting animations over as well :)