Truespace and Torque - A Study in Four Year Old Technology

Where have you been?

So it's been quite a while since my last post. (I wonder, offhand, how many blogs start that way, lol. I'd wager quite a few). But contrary to previous absences, I haven't been idling away my time playing this MMO or that one. Quite the contrary, in fact.

No, I've been working my ass off on Windstorm, my code name for the MMO Proof of Concept. See, after I got a working scenario, complete with quests, combat, and abilities, I decided it was time to take it to the next level. But for that, I was going to need some real live honest-to-god content, and most importantly, I needed to be able to generate animations for that content. That is -- I wanted to design and develop a new avatar (as well as townsfolk), and have their rigs in a modeling package, and be able to create new animations for them, if need be. The next level of content was going to require some custom animations, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to find stock stuff out of a content pack for this.

Only one problem. I'm not an artist. Not even a little bit. But no worries, I've never been afraid to tackle new information, and being a one-man show that's doing this in his spare time, I decided I'd learn to model. And texture. And animate. Can't be that hard, right? Yeah.

Why Truespace/Gamespace
So the first decision was which package to use. I spent a lot of time gathering as much information as I possibly could on the various packages -- all with an eye towards making sure they could get my content out in the .DTS/DSQ format. For Torque, once you look over all the options, there's pertty much four choices. First, Max/Maya, which I consider to be *one* choice -- they're both owned by the same company these days, and both fall into the "$3000.00 and up" price range. This places both of them out of the running for me. I just couldn't see spending that kind of money for what is essentially an experiment in one-man MMO shop. At the other end of the spectrum there's Blender, which is free. I downloaded Blender, and tried to use it. Just.. Oh.. mah.. gawd. I'm sure I'll get some hate from the Blender lovers out there but you'd be hard pressed to design a MORE esoteric and obtuse ass-backwards interface than what Blender has. Besides, I've never been a fan of open source technologies. No seriously. Anything put together by everyone means for the most part it's not exactly right for anyone. That old saw about "What's a camel" and all that. ("What's a camel? A camel is a horse put together by a committee..")

That left LightWave XSI and Truespace. XSI is around $800.00, which made it kind of pricey. Do-able, but still on the high end. Gamespace, on the other hand, could be had for less than $200.00. It had an exporter.. the Dark Industries DTS exporter, and there was even a pack that allowed you to create .MAP output, so you could theoretically create your level content in Gamespace as well, and then use MAPTODIF to convert that to .DIF format. So.. I'm thinking.. I *might* be able to only have to learn *one* crazy 3D program interface, and be able to make .DTS files, .DSQ files, *and* .DIF files. Wouldnt' that be sweet! What can I say.. I knew better, but I wanted to believe it would work.

So I bought Gamespace, and started going through tutorials. I installed the .DTS exporter from Dark Industries (which, mind you, was built over four years ago, and the company that built it has long gone the way of the dodo, so you're not going to get anything by way of support, near as I can tell, unless Matt Summers is still lurking around here. ;) ). The exporter is a bit of a beast to figure out, but I struggled through it, and was able to, using a tutorial, model a blaster, texture map it, and wrangle through the settings to get Gamespace to succesfully build the output file, complete with mount points. Here's the prerequisite screenshot for this post, of the gun I modeled in game. Woot!



About that same time, I read that Truespace 7.5 had some rather advanced animation features, including the ability to add physics impulses to an animation and then keyframe them. This would be perfect for things like recoil effects, knockbacks, death animations etc. And everything I could read on the plugins for Gamespace said they would work with Truespace 4.1 and above. Soo.. I could get Truespace 7.5, use their advanced animation feature set, and export them into the Torque game engine! So I upgraded to Truespace 7.5, for another $300.00.

Well some of what I had hoped for was true, but a lot of it wasn't. And that's what I'm here to share with you today. Because this is exactly the kind of information I needed to make my purchase decision six months ago, and if I had had this kind of information, I might have made a different decision. And it's not just about the purchase.. it's about architecture and the pipeline. You're committing a lot more than just money when you decide to go with a particular package. You're committing to months of learning, experimentation, and just large volumes of sheer work as you wrangle with your new tool set and you want to know, beyond any doubt, that at the end of the day you can get what you need out of the package.

So for those of you whom are still considering a modeling package, I'm sharing.

I'm going to put the next part in a second post though, because I don't want to go over the post length, and further more I need to get back to work before finish this beast, lol. Next part coming shortly..