New guy playing with Torque, initial thoughts.

This is my first blog post and I thought why not share some of the things I discovered and learned. It's been about a week so far since my inital purchase and feeling guilty spending more money on expansion content packs than actualy producing anything tangable.

I picked up Torque game engine and Torque Game Builder together to save some money. Both seem interesting at the time and there was a combo pack if you bought them together you save $20 bucks. This was the first step down a road that would consume me in purchasing more and more content packs :)

Each content pack is a learning experience how to do things, and each provided insight and vauleable resources to fiddle with in the engine. I'll write about my experiences with the content packs a bit further down, but first I'd like to comment on building a toolbox.

It became clear that I needed to start putting togther a toolkit of programs to help me facilitate making something. Here is a short list that I discovered that seems to work for me, and possibly save someone else new to Torque some time and money.

DIF (Interior Creation Tools)

Quark (quark.planetquake.gamespy.com/)

It's a bit fustrating to learn but you can't beat the cost. It crashes on me and it lives up to it's name being 'Quarky' Adding Textures you will need to 'import' them first which took me some time to get the hang of it. The 3D view when creating an interior looks poor and doesn't resemble what you actualy will see in the engine but for a free tool I can not complain.. It's a free tool! and you can't beat that. It also seems to have the most tutorials and documentation out there.

3D World Studio (www.leadwerks.com)

I liked this software very much. It seemed more stable and easier to pick up. I haven't had it crash on me and adding textures is straight forward copy them into a directory. The 3D view when creating something looks a lot better, closer to what you expect in the engine. However this package costs about $80 bucks and seems a bit steep and I stuck with Quark.

GTKRadiant (www.qeradiant.com)

They just GPL'ed this tool. I spent about 30 minutes toying with it and hated it. I'm not sure why, It's now free and apparently works with both Linux,Mac, and Windows.

Valve Hammer Editor (collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?go=hammer)

There did not seem to be much documentation dealing with this editor, and it seemed clunky to get working with Torque. I spent like 5 minutes with it and went back to Quark.

Of the three, I suggest slugging out with Quark until Gas powered games releases their world constructor kit. I think that would be the best choice in the long run. The constructor looks promising, plus viewing the interiors in the same engine that will be using them would be a big plus.

DTS Object creation

The next quest for me was to find a decent 3D modeler program. This seems important as almost every object in a game you create comes from a mesh model someplace. This is also one of the most expensive tools that you need as well. It seems to me, almost everything is created in 3D Studio Max, and this tool costs over $3k. All of the content packs you see out there seem to come in this format. There are other packages out there, less expensive like Maya and Lightwave studio. I use the term less expensive lightly. These packages cost around $500 or so dollars.

Being a new guy hobbist those packages I mentioned above are just unrealistic to purchase and a complete waste of money for someone who has never created 3D art objects. I settled on using these two modelers below. If your like me, starting out as a hobbist, they seem to make sense.

Blender (www.blender3d.org)

This is a free :) modeler that is very powerful and there is a plugin available so you can export in DTS format. There is a lot of documentation on this guy. The drawback? This thing made my head explode when I first loaded it up. There are so many features and things it will take serious sessions getting up to speed on it. Another issue I have with blender, is that I can't seem to be able to import many of the objects created in the content packs with it. 3DS importer seems broken, I had better luck importing using .lwo objects. I wish more content pack providers had .blender sources included. It would make me happy.

MilkShape3D (www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/)

This is a low poly modeler that costs $20 bucks. It also seems to be able to do animations. I think I am going to pick this up. Many of the content packs come with milkshape sources, and I seem to be able to import a lot of meshes from other sources such as models people created for Quake, Unreal, etc.. There are MANY tutorials out there on Milkshape. Free Trial for 30 days.

Paint Programs

GIMP (www.gimp.org/windows/)

There are a lot of commerical paint photoshop programs out there, but I really really like GIMP. And best thing is it works on Windows and Linux and Mac. It's free. I didn't bother going too deeply looking for other paint programs, but I think this one will suit me fine.

Content packs

Now onto Content packs, These are the ones I picked up and toyed with and my first impressions with them.

Tim Aste: Content Packs Combo (www.garagegames.com/products/50)

I liked the demo video from this pack, and unfortuantly this pack does not seem to live up to the quality of Tim's second content pack in terms of being easily installable. It took me a while to get the environment part of this pack working and installed. The documentation was not very good in the README.TXT file. The art however is awesome but your going to have to tinker a lot just to get to see any of it in action. I wish he would re-release this pack and bring it up to newbie friendlyness as the 2nd one.

Tim Aste: Content Pack Combo #2 (www.garagegames.com/products/69)

This content pack is right on the mark. What you see in the video you get with a great installation and demo. It installed and I was able to simply click 'demo' torque app and walk around and see this pack in action. The art is great! I suggest saving the money and purchasing this pack before getting #1.

Frogames Dungeon Pack (www.garagegames.com/products/81)

At first I didn't know what to make of this pack. It looked cartoony and 'out there' but I am VERY happy and surprised with this pack. It comes with EVERYTHING source wise and gives a great insight on how to put together environments and mission maps. It comes with textures and even the skin for objects. If your starting out with Torque, like me buy this as your first pack. It will teach you a lot before moving on to Tim Aste's packs. It comes with a good installer and demo app/mission. I'm using this to learn a lot about using DIFF pieces together to make something larger on terrain maps.

Synapse Gaming: Torque Lighting Kit for TGE (www.garagegames.com/products/54)

This adds to your engine Lighting. It makes a big difference, I mean a BIG difference in creating atmosphere on your maps with lighting. Bite the bullet and purchase this. I am still learning how it all works but it looks great.

CubixStudio Human models (www.cubixstudio.com)

For $15 bucks you can get a very good human models for your games. I picked up the female and male models. They come with all the sources and animations as well as two skins for them. It's way worth the money just picking up one of these so you can play with them in Milkshape.

Future Purchases

I have my eyes set on my next purchase most likely something from www.arteria-gaming.com or messing with the RTS Starter Kit. But honestly I'm feeling a bit guilty spend this money on content without producing anything.. I am having a blast simply creating virtual terrains and using the editors in Torque.

My current Project

For my first project I have been working with TGELobby1.2 and tinkering with that and InspIRCd (www.inspircd.org) which is a free C++ Open Source IRC server that module support for mySQL databases. My goal is to learn the GUI editor through TGELobby and create an account creation backend so only people who have registered accounts can join a irc lobby.

So far I ran into a nasty bug with TGELobby when you click the button for the ROOM list. Apparently this button is a toggle button and it triggers TWO LIST command to the IRC server giving you a nice list of duplicate rooms to choose from. Top if off, some IRC servers will kick you for flooding since the TGELobby is sending Two /LIST commands and two /NAME commands. I'm hopping to solve this problem by changing the Room button to pop up a dialog box with a push button called [UPDATE] to fetch a list of rooms.

I know what I want to do, but learning the language and trying to speak it is fustrating at this point. I wish there were some better documentation on the engine was online.

I'm off to pick up Kenneth's book at the store today. Wish me luck!