Getting Feet wet with Torque

I figure I would continue with my experiences as a newbie with Torque with another follow-up article in my blog. This way a year from now I can look back and see how far I've come. Perhaps these entries will even help other people starting off :) In any case here is what I've been up to.

Bought two books last week that are Torque specific and that I recommend reading:

3D Game Programming All in One Amazon

This is a very good overall view of Torque, the editors, scripting, and tools for art. This book gave me a larger understanding of the tools needed to create art and modeling objects and animations. It covers modling using Milkshape 3D, which is perfect for me right now.

The Game programmers guide to Torque Amazon

This book seems to be the "one source" of information strictly on the engine itself that I've been needing. It doesn't cover any of the 'art' creation tools that the 3D Game Programming All in One book covers. It's right down meat and potato torque. I was a bit worried about purchasing both books if there would be a lot of overlap. This isn't the case, and I suggest both for newbie like me.


More content pack reviews

Content packs are like 'Lego kits' for me. At this stage I want to focus my learning on the engine and not dealing with paint/modeling programs. The more 'lego kits' I have the more assets I can use to my advantage to make some sort of believable environments and game worlds.

www.arteria-gaming.com

I had my eye on this site for awhile. They offer a nice selection of 'Lego pieces' of art for all sorts of natural environments. They also offer 'mood' music tracks with their packs. It was the "Tropical Pack" I had my eye on first, but all the other packs looked great too. I knew sooner or later I would most likely collect them all, so I went for their Gaming Membership. Membership gives you 12 month access to ALL their content packs which for a guy like me would be a good investiment down the road. It also gives you access to any new packs they release in the future, and they plan on releasing a lot packs this year.

So far I've been working with the Tropical Pack, and I am happy with the art. Steve of Arteria and his associates always seem to tweaking the packs to make them work great depending on what engine you use. I was very happy to see the objects for Torque were scaled correctly when placed in the world. I had some problems with other art not scaled correctly (not from Arteria) that looked like skyscrapers when placed in the world map.

Their member section is a bit rough around the edges, as in not existing yet, and there is no central area for the pack downloads. Downloads were handled via e-mail exchange of URL's. Their membership area is 'under construction' and it was not a big issue for me, as Steve was pretty quick in providing me with DL URL's. They seem to be a small outfit, which I like to support, being an indie myself.

First pseudo project

After lightly reading over both torque books it became clear that a lot of time in creating "a game" is devoted to just having art assets. My goal is to leverage the 'Lego' content packs of art I have assimulated, and build environments around them. Hopefully giving me a more rounder experience with the engine.

My first pseudo project I wanted to start off simple with creating a tropical island with the terrain/mission editor and making it look somewhat decent. I scribbled down some minor things this fantasy island should have.

1) A cool raised volcano that dominates the island.
2) The island is surrounded by water
3) The island has tropical plants and tropical feel.

Sounds kinda simple no? Well Let's talk about the first thing. Generating the terrain for this island:

Generating Terrain

It took about half a day pulling and kneeding the Terrain Terraform editor to understand that creating a halfway decent island is just plain fustrating. It also dawned on me that having a waterline around the island being '0' meters was a bad idea. So I had to scrap my first attempt. I started to look for tools to help with terrain generation using greyscale bitmaps. Terrain generation was way too fustrating for me to start fresh in the terraform editor.

Using random hightmaps off the internet rebel13.com/SimCity/100/trinity.jpg

I tried first being cleaver let mother nature do my dirtywork and use already generated hightmaps. Well, it sorted worked.. I had to do some image magic with Gimp to get the heightmap 256x256 so I could import it into the terrain editor. I got eh results.

Terragen www.planetside.co.uk/terragen

I started off with this little program. Tweaking with the output running about mashing stuff lower and higher to make it look like an island. I got it to something I could use and exported the heightmap as a TGA. Converted the TGA to PNG in Gimp and played arround with it in the terraform editor in torque. It wasn't too bad, but the land did not feel very real to me. It was however, easier than kneeding the terrain in the terriform editor, and a better result that mother natures attempt.

L3DT www.bundysoft.com/L3DT

This last program I gave it a shot. Seemed a lot of people are using it for the TSE engine and though 'eh why not'. This program gave me the best results so far, and exported what I wanted in the correct PNG 256x256 heightmap without having to deal with GIMP. These greyscale images imported nicely in the terrain terraform editor. This was the best program so far with results.

I suggest using L3DT and then pounding around the ground with the terraform editor with the resulting bitmap. I was very happy with the results. Seems the terriform editor works great for touchups and taking something good and making it better than working from scratch.

Waterblock, how I despise thee

After getting something looking like an island pounded out, the next step was to create a waterblock and have the land I made surrounded by water. Well, there are some things to note about waterblocks..

1) Don't have the 'ocean' at 0 meters. I got better results making the 'sea floor' at around 20 meters. Gives you lots of play making some dimples and valleys for anyone going swimming.

2) There is a bug with the Waterblock gizmo's and gadget. My inital fustration was creating a waterblock and not seeing on the screen or being able to manipulate it. This took me about a half of day to discover this is a 'feature' in Torque. This 'feature' was fixed in GPTG book's provided lesson editor. This threw me for a loop. The book didn't mention any 'patches' it added to the lesson engine or suggested bugfixes once you purchase the engine license. Luckly Alan James gave me a hand describing the fix located in this post www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=37015

Around like 399 in waterblock.cc comment this stuff out.



3) I got the best results making one giant scaled up waterblock and then locking it to prevent it moving if accidently selected.

Once I did that, it worked like a charm. Waterblocks were now under my control. My island now is starting to look like an island with water around it.

The island has tropical plants and tropical feel.

I'm using Arteria's tropical pack to help me out here, and I'm dabbling with using fxFoliageReplicator and fxShapeReplicator to make the island a bit more life like. I'm at this stage right now. I'm not sure how crazy to go with adding tree's and 'tropical stuff'. It seems fxShapeReplicator is giving me some trouble right now. I don't think this function uses collision detection. Should I plop down an army of objects? I better start using simgroups for my junk ;)

That's it for this week. I think I will add the waterblock fix to TDN later today. It will save someone else a headache :)

- Dennis