Migrating from T2D 1.0.2 to T2D 1.1...

Trying this again as it looks like my first attempt got routed to /dev/null...

I have finally begun to transition my game (Harmonic Convergence) to T2D 1.1 Beta 1.1 and boy are my arms tired... Um. Sorry. Wrong joke. Anyway, this entry is a massive braindump -- badly organized, poorly thought out, and waaaay too long. Sorry in advance. :)

It's a long and arduous process and a whole lot of stuff is different. I have gotten the following working: Menus, all skins, all animation effects, all particle effects (recreated from scratch). I have NOT gotten the following things working again just yet (all worked in the last version, more or less): Text displays (score and such), preferences (persistent state stored by the game -- which skins you've unlocked, not what video mode you chose...), pausing of audio.

And of course I'm developing new capabilities at the same time: I've begun feasability testing of using Ogg Theora for skin backgrounds (more-or-less works on the Mac except for the odd crash bug here and there), and I've begun work on integrating GLSL shader effects into the engine. On top of that, I've begun working up particle effects for the skins -- a task I had basically postponed having heard that the particle effect file format was changing and old particle effects would not work.

Then of course there's the work involved in taking advantage of new capabilities in the engine, like the keymapping stuff...

My graphic artist has 2 more skins almost ready to go (bringing the total to 8) and I'm finally -- FINALLY -- managing to get her thinking in terms of what she wants, instead of what she thinks is *possible*. This has been a tremendously difficult endeavor! Before, the skins were fairly static and I had to say "wouldn't it be great if we animated this" or "wouldn't it be great if this shot steam out as it spun around". Today, she came to me and said "This skin is gonna be kind of animation intensive. I want to have these objects falling from the sky and making a splash as they hit the bottom." Instantly a chorus of angels started singing "Hallelujah!" in the back of my mind. I can do this -- I just need to modify the gglogo particle effect, and the rainsplash particle effect.

The real challenge will be coming up when the composers working on scoring these skins begin to get back to me with music. One of the key components of this game is the interactive audio experience. Right now the code to support this varies from very rough to not even written yet. I look forward to bashing my head against a wall trying to understand the proper usage of the ITickable interface.

So my remaining tasks for this tiny little project (hah!) are:
-Implement more skins.
-Work with contract artists to refine and polish the skins my graphic designer comes up with.
-Patch the engine to support pause/unpause of audio.
-Implement audio system so that music is partially arranged based on the user's actions.
-Implement shaders in the engine, and add shader effects to add more of a "wow" factor to the game.
-Produce new particle effects for every skin to help differentiate them.
-Add text displays (score and such).
-Fix, or work around a few engine bugs (see below).
-Implement nifty animated menus that make you go "Ooh! Wow!" (just basic, boring menus right now...)
-Make skin transitions smooth, fluid, and pretty. Right now the game just "snaps" to the next skin with a very very slight pause as resources are loaded from disk.
-Modify Theora support to support pause/unpause.
-Create demo version, and add anti-piracy mechanisms.
-Modify the engine store preferences files in the user's preferences directory so that different users playing the game don't share state about which skins they've unlocked.
-Fix two very annoying, very hard to reproduce bugs in my code related to the behavior of the game when the system is loaded, or during skin transitions.
-A whole bunch of biz-side stuff that I won't bother listing here.

For every task I complete, another pops up. Fortunately I haven't actually *completed* too many tasks -- I've simply *made progress* on many of them. I imagine once things begin to gel and I start completing some of these tasks I will unleash a very large can of worms.

Another challenge I face is engine bugs. I've got two that have me kind of nervous right now (WARNING: I am using this on MacOS X -- the Windows version may or may not suffer from the same problems): 1) T2D seems to crash with remarkable reliability if I resize a GuiTheoraCtrl while it's playing. I don't actually intend to perform this action in-game, but depending on the nature of the problem it's possible that this is a symptom of a deeper issue that may cause me some headaches. 2) T2D no longer detects available screen resolutions properly. It tells me my laptop is capable of 1280x1024 (I wish), and my 24" LCD no longer includes anything ABOVE 1280x1024. Another problem is that it doesn't gracefully fall-back to other video modes if the default mode is unavailable (use case: I play the game full-screen on my 24" LCD, then quit, unplug my laptop, take it home, and try to play on the laptop's screen). This one concerns me because I can see having to deal with a lot of tech support issues with it.

I'm also looking forward to the upcoming T2D bootcamp. I've paid my dues and will be driving up to OR on sunday 3/5 for this event. I look forward to being able to annoy and pester Melv et al in person until my pet problems are addressed. :D Actually, in all seriousness, I look forward to getting a "big picture" overview of the Torque platform and Torque2D in particular. I'm sure I'm abusing things horribly right now and I don't want to make life hard for myself with my next game.

Are you still reading this? Wow. You're patient! I shall reward your saint-like patience with a screenshot:



The above shows off my newest particle effect -- "gamma rays". It looks more impressive when animated. It's a point-style particle effect where the particles don't move -- they just spin randomly as they "grow in", then "shrink out". Like a bunch of beams of radiation shooting out of a reactor. Each skin will require at LEAST 2 particle effects (I've got one that will require at least four!). I'm considering bundling up the particle effects, or variations thereof and selling them as a content pack once things are done, assuming they turn out well. I think there's a real need on that front -- I'm not seeing a lot of original particle effects in the screenshots or demos of T2D based projects. Just a whole lot of use of the (quite excellent) example particle effects. This is perfectly understandable -- the concepts behind how an effect works are pretty hard to wrap your brain around, especially if you're not a programmer. So my graphic artist is left frightened and confused by the particle effects editor and while I'm much further along the learning curve, my artistic ability just plain sucks (programmer by trade -- been programming for about 15 years now, 10 of them professionally). I don't imagine the situation is much better for other teams either...

Well, that's the state of my game. Thanks for listening!

-JF