Starting out

I am writing this to record my experience with learning Torque and writing a game I have been wanting to write for a long time.

I am running Ubuntu 6.10, and have just successfully got Torque compiled using help from a post on the forums, all be it not working properly, something to do with the version of the SDL library supplied with this version of Ubuntu is broken.

I previously tried to get Torque running on my Dapper installation, I did manage to compile it but the performance was dire, serious mouse lag, I blamed it on the rubbishy drivers I had to use for my ATI 200M graphics card, it could have just been me though but I'm not too bothered anymore as it works for me, only problem I have now is the USB mouse keeps freezing after 5-10 minutes of use and I have to resort to the touchpad (Yuk!).

The game I am planning on writing is ultimately a remake of Hogs of War for the Playstation released a number of years ago, but with a few added ideas of my own to make it more tactical ( I hope ).

The game will be turn based, each player controlling each one of there team members in any order they want, but once they have used that player ie moved and or performed an action they cant then go back in the same turn and do something else. If something goes wrong in your turn, ie you injure yourself, walk over a mine etc it is end of your turn immediately.

At the start of a round before anyone has there turn each player gets to have an artillery round, similar to controlling there characters, but with artillery pieces, ie big noob smashing guns which are effective against ground troops (but not vehicles or artillery), but when you fire them they do not impact, the game will register all of the fired artillery shells.

Next everyone takes there turns as described above, then once all teams have had there turns the artillery shells fired at the start of the game land.

I thought this would make the game more interesting as you could setup kill zones at the start of the turn where if you left any characters there by the end of the turn then they will be annihilated, you could also fire your artillery at troops camping out in cover forcing them to move out or be bashed up!

Ive got a lot of stuff to do for this and I have no idea where to start with such a complex engine, but I will slowly chip away at it until I understand it enough to be comfortable using it so I'm sure I will be appearing all over the forums very soon, so you have been warned! (If anyone is actually reading this lol )