Divorcing from TGB in search of nicer TATs

This is taken wholesale and lazilly from the Mode 7 blog but I thought it might interest a few people here. I should state that I was using TGB 1.1 (I don't believe in porting unneccesserily. Or spelling it) and that I'm currently very impressed with TSE 1.7


The original Frozen Synapse prototype was written on Torque Game Builder. After a lot of talking we've decided that we're going to make it more PC-centric than previously thought and to use the shaderific Torque Game Engine Advanced (previously TSE and the hilarious TAT) to do some interesting new stuff with dynamics-led art.

I was putting off the port for some more gameplay dev, but finally last week I found a crash in the TGB FS prototype. It was one of TGB's internal systems barfing at the unusual strain FS was putting on it. In other words, time to separate egg from incubator.

Luckily I had always wanted the core "simulation" aspect of FS to be separate from rendering of any kind (making it more portable), so this wasn't as hard as it could have been. However, writing my own 2D collision engine in three hours and porting FS to it still makes me quite happy. I also got it debug-rendering just using GL calls but consdering it's all rotated bitmaps that's not really the hardest thing in the world.

Frozen Synapse is now ready to move to TGEA. I'm very excited about the process of getting it to look good.