Plan for Ben Garney

Ogg Theora video playback in Torque, and some status updates on 1.4 RC2.

Howdy guys.

Wow, nearly a month since my last .plan. Don't worry, onoez zombies is no further along than it was. :P It's been a busy month. I got to sail around the San Juan islands with Jay and Josh one weekend. I highly encourage anyone with access to a sailboat to use it to the greatest extent possible. We puttered around on the water, saw some INCREDIBLE scenery, and generally unwound. Josh slept a lot - he had a lot of sleep to catch up on, since he's often in the office all day and all night, helping to make GarageGames happen. I'd get on his case about it, but I'm still at the office at 1am, so...

So, what's up with Ben and GarageGames?

The biggest change from my last .plan is probably that I'm working on TGE again. 1.4 development is coming along nicely, as I'm steadily knocking down bugs from my list. Maybe you've seen the influx of posts from me saying "Fixed this." on all the threads that I said I'd get to someday. ;) Just today, I fixed a lot of long standing ParticleEmitter issues, as well as implementing crossplatform video playback.

We're using the excellent Ogg Vorbis and Theora codecs. They're fast, free, and cross-platform. Thank you, Xiph.org! All the decoding and streaming happens in a background thread, rendering via an optimized YUV->RGB converter to an OpenGL texture, so the core functionality can be applied to any GL-rendered object - which for Torque, is everything from GUI to grenades. That code is an exercise for the reader, of course, but the hardest part is done now. ;)

Let me show you how easy it is to use the new video stuff:



Here's a shot of placing a GuiTheoraCtrl in the Torque GUI Editor.



Shot of a Fatboy Slim music video (Push The Tempo) playing in the GuiTheoraCtrl. You might not be able to tell, but the sound is actually very much in synch all the way through the 3-4 minute video. That took a lot of painful messing about to get to work reliably. There are still some cases where it doesn't work quite right, but overall it's good. I'm sure once the community gets their hands on it they'll polish it up a bit more. :)



The GuiTheoraCtrl is fully integrated with the OpenGL GUI renderring system, so that GUI elements blend properly. Notice how all those transparent bitmaps blend right with the video. In fact, you can even place a TheoraTexture on a GL-rendered object, if you like, though there's no code to get the renderers to use a TheoraTexture.

And, even on a fairly modest system (1.5 GHz), it still runs at 100fps or so.

How does all this get out to you, the community member?

Well, I'm going to spend a few weeks more squashing issues from my list, then TGE 1.4 RC2 happens. A few weeks of the community pounding on that, then it'll go final and we'll update the installers.

Don't worry, I'll let you know when RC2 goes out. :)

TDN: The Next Step

Meanwhile, TDN is advancing nicely, as Adam deGrandis is managing the day-to-day wrangling, leaving me free to sip martinis and lounge on the beach. Too bad it's the Oregon beach. ;)

Adam is doing an awesome job, and I'm excited to have enough of TDN off my plate that I can focus on TGE 1.4. We're bringing more and more people onboard to help out with writing docs, so you can look forward to a lot of really awesome docs written by your favorite community members... I'll let Adam name names and pimp the pimpin' folk who are working on this project. ;)

I might even write some docs. We'll see what happens. ;)

There is another round of technical tasks to be done on TDN before it goes live - more on those when we get into the thick of doing 'em. Rest assured, TDN is going to be fantastically well suited to hosting Torque documentation. We'll have the Google Mini pointed at it, so you'll get the best searching imaginable, as well as a lot of other goodies.

Other Projects

After all the TGE 1.4 and TDN stuff gets done, I'll be swinging back around to work on Atlas some more. It's pretty good, but I've got some ideas on how to make it a lot better (like WYSIWYG editors and runtime texture blending :) that I'll be implementing when that time comes around.

What comes after that? Well, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. And I'm much too tired righ now to kill everyone who reads my .plans. ;)

I also got to help Stephen Zepp a little bit with the Torque Boot Camp GG put on last week. It's fun knowing stuff about Torque - I got to wheel into the classroom, get asked questions, and speak extemporaneously for an hour or so on whatever they wanted. I enjoy public speaking, so I had a good time. And I think they may have ended up leaving knowing a little more about Torque (I certainly learned interesting things from them :)!

In Closing...

Torque and GG are continuing to rock. I'm very excited to see what the next year brings to the Torque community, and where the engine goes in coming months. More and more cool people are coming on board to make things happen, and seeing projects come to life is awesome.

Keep on Torquin'! ;)