turrets, turrets and more turrets...

Rantings and ravings...

It would appear that even with a nice fast computer, I'm still pretty woefull when it comes to finding time to work on my own projects. A relationship and the stresses of working in the big bad games industry sort of leave little time and little enthusiasm for coding in the evening and weekends.

But that has sort of changed. I'm still in a relationship and still stressed at work, but I have my enthusiasm back. I actually feel motivated to get stuff done in my own time, and tackling parts of Torque that before seemed intimidating is now a fun challenge.

In the last week or so, I've achieved a lot given the time I've spent working on stuff. I've finaly gotten my head around the scripting language (typeless languages can be confusing for us good ol' coders who know the joy of writting self-modfying code in 68k assembler), I've gotten my head around the GUI framework, as well as querying the simulation.

So what have I done exactly?

Gotten familiar with blender

This is a big thing for me at the moment. I had a colleague and friend who said he would help out with concept art, as well as modelling & texturing. But he had to drop out because of work pressure (given that we work for the same company I can understand this) as well as his desire to work on his own stuff.

So...I made programmer art! It's amazing what a couple of boxes stuck together can represent if you imagine hard enough ;o) I can model, texture and rig geometry now, not to mention gettng to grips with the export process.

Implemented turret emplacements

I found a turret resource by Paul Dana here on GG about implementing turrets in Torque. It served as a guide as I went about implementing my own version, helping me learn a LOT about the low-level (cpmpared to script code) workings of attaching to control objects, netowrk replication and a whole load of other things.

This used a skinned and textured turret model I had built in Blender.

A big thanks to Paul Dana for the Turret Tutorial, which is as relevant now as it was three years ago when he released it

Unit selection dialog

I got to grips with the GUI stuff. Over the space of three evenings (about 9 hours work in total) I had created the dialog resource from scratch and learning as I went, written the interaction code in Torque Script (becoming more competant working in TS as I went) and also got the dialog working as intended.

As long as objects are added to a specific set of SimGroups, I can now switch player control to any selected Unit in a mission.

Stuff still to do...

* Check to see if a selected unit is in use by another player via the server
* Work out how to spawn an object to a specific SimGroup
* Build a better APC stand-in model (the current one sucks big time...that's programmer art for you)
* Check out the cost of one or two art houses...
* Implement the weapons for the turrets, as well as mountable objects for the APC