ModMaker, TGB, TorqueX and More

Wow, it has been over 6 months since my most recent blog entry. I have been meaning to write this entry for about the past 3 months but with constant projects, I was always putting it off until I had finished up my most recent. So I am finally coming to some conclusion on my recent projects so I thought I could finally write about them all. So this blog covers my Torque endeavors for about the past 6 months!

ModMaker Weapons, NetGeos LLC

Mike Pearson contacted me explaining how his company was creating a high quality weapons pack with the Torque engine in mind. He was also interested in creating a tool that users could use to easily import new weapons into the Torque. The trick was that this was supposed to work with the stock torqueDemo so only script modifications could be made.

Because of the weapons that Mike had in mind, we needed the editor to be capable of varying types of weapon. This included everything from a sniper rifle to a rocket launcher and everything in between. One of the more humorous moments of development was when testing the capabilities of the editor and easily creating a multi-projectile (shotgun-style) rocket launcher with a scope. Ridiculous yes, but it had proven our design.

All of the ModMaker Weapon packs come with the ModMaker Weapons Editor as an added bonus and is now available in the content pack store.



Pirate Island and River Racer, Giant Campus

I got in touch with Giant Campus, who provide technology training, back in January. They were interested in developing a variety tutorial series based around Torque Game Builder, TorqueX and Game Engine. The target audience was to be summer camp students ages 11-14.

Our first project was creating Pirate Island, a Mario-style platformer tutorial series using TGB. The first step was creating the actual game, then going through the game, breaking it down for a step by step tutorial for Giant Campus's web-based learning tool. Topics covered included building levels, user interfaces and TorqueScript.

Once completing the above project, we created the River Racer tutorial series, basically TGB's ScrollerDemo, however this time using TorqueX. This was actually my first real taste of C# and TorqueX but having my experience of Torque Game Builder it was easy to work in to. The most difficult part of getting into TorqueX was changing to the component programming style but after going through other TorqueX game code, it was just about changing some of your thought process.

Lastly, we created a set of tutorials based on making modifications to the Torque Game Engine. Topics covered in this tutorial included using the World Editor, Particles and TorqueScript.



Myrmidon (Personal Project)

Myrmidon is a sci-fi top-down shooter similar to Gauntlet. Ever since I purchased Torque Game Builder, I have had this game in the back of my mind. It is actually a remake/port of a DOS game developed by William Lachance between 1996-1998 in DJGPP with the Allegro game programming library.

As the original game was open source. I will be releasing all original TorqueScript files to the community upon release, which should be sometime in the next week or two. I also want to thank Phil Shenk for his A* (A-star) pathfinding code and also David Higgins for his modifications and also helping with some performance issues I had.