some random thoughts

Engine
Finally, I successfully merged our project (based on TLK1.4) with TGE1.5 and TGB.
The only use of TGB now is an effect:

short overview video, 450kb DivX
some TGE+TGB integration hints you can find in a separate thread.

AI. In our project we need "mobs" to behave as animals in real world. It means no use of path or similar. So, I sit down, and made a quick structure:


After implementation (a bit different structure, it's an old diagram) of this I've found that it "eats" a lot of processor time, so decided to cut off the support of attacking mobs each other. To reply your future questions - Yes, I have plans on releasing it as a resource. Not sure when... Just need to find some time.

OS. This is my last day working on Windows as my main developing OS. Few days ago openSUSE 10.2 was released. Right after 24 hours of release I downloaded fresh ISO DVD image, recorded, and it's waiting for use right now. I'm getting really nervous of my Windows XP SP2. Yeah, I know, it's cool OS, but just not fits all my requirements. I'll better run Windows in a virtual machine inside Linux. Anyway, lucky we, Torque is multi-platform engine, so it's doesn't really matter what OS you are using...
Actualy, I have SUSE running for a few month already as my "game and database server" with no even single problems.

TorqueX and TGEA. I'm not into C#. I don't have plans to use it in a close future, so moving into Linux is "okay" for me. But, I'll keep my eyes on it, as it's really great stuff GG doing with Microsoft.
TGEA (aka TSE aka Torque AT) is getting closer to release. That's good news. Hope it will be released with full OpenGL support, so I can play with it on Linux... Very possible that our project will be moved from TGE to TGEA. Will see...

Collada File Format. That's the thing I'm interested in. Anyone tried to make Torque to work with it? Or, may be TGEA will support this format? If anyone used to work with it and have plans to make it work with Torque drop me a line. It's not urgent, but I'm looking forward for this.

Great Games Experiment. Cool idea, nice implementation and huge perspective. That's what I think about it.

Bad I don't have enough spare time to submit more games like Transport Tycoon by Microprose, Descent (Interplay), Descent 2 and Descent 3, etc. It's still in beta, but it looks as a really nice portal for gamers, developers and publishers.


The AfterWorld project is going quite well. So far we have about 150 regular players (members of alpha-test team). Not so long time ago we have got our 1000'th registered member on forum. So, taking into account that we didn't made any advertisement it's not bad. People do like what we are doing and how the in-game world is growing.

Some WIP screenshots on game developing from our artist:









About the last image. Is here any artists who are ready to model, texture and animate this for use in Torque? Drop me a line. Possible that we can work more, as we will need lots of different models.

Programmer's Art. I'm not an artist at all. I'm programmer. So, anything related with GUI in our project is "P-Art". But, having a good artist who makes item icons for us makes it looking really nice:


Inventory is still WIP. On the "My avatar" window I plan to put the players avatar (with skinned meshes, showing same as in-game). So, the player can just drop an item from inventory into the avatar and it will automatically "mounted". Taking an item off will be done by moving item to inventory. I've done some big modification on guiObjectView, so it can show/hide meshes, apply different skins on different meshes, appying scale by node. Same as Player object in game. But it's for a future.
Now I need to work on multi-server communication and player transfer from one server to another.

Till next time. Good luck.