Game Development Community

Torque 3D Development - Beta 3!

by Brett Seyler · 06/24/2009 (8:45 pm) · 130 comments

www.ggbetas.com/brett/header_blog_t3d_dev-1.png

Thanks for your patience everyone. I know this was a longer stretch than expected between Beta 2 and 3, but wow, we've been busy!

Download Torque 3D Beta 3 from your Account


Again, we have an enormous list of new stuff (see below), improvements (~200), (fixes (100+) and known issues you'll find posting in the Torque 3D forums.


New Stuff in Beta 3!


Shape Editor - This new feature allows you to apply various changes to a mesh after it is loaded. You can merge animations, define nodes, rename meshes, and more. Tutorial video and extensive docs on this are forthcoming, but it's pretty intuitive to play with, so have fun!


                      


Decal Editor - This allows you to quickly paint and edit decals in the scene. On the engine side, we've done a major rework of Decal-related source code, so it's now much more efficient and significantly easier to understand. As with the Shape Editor, we'll have a tutorial video and extensive docs available soon.


                      


Mesh Road Editor - This allows you to quickly prototype a 3D mesh road. We're stressing the word "prototype" here because there's a lot this tool is not yet wired to do. For example, applying an arbitrary mesh profile (for different shaped roads with curbs for example) is not yet possible. This would be an excellent community project if someone want to give it a go, but we're going to leave this as a prototyping tool in this release.


                      


Beta 3 also includes...

  • Major reworking of the Material Editor to improve flow and usability
  • Material Selector and tagging system for Materials


    •                       



  • Full pureLIGHT support including improved Tonemapping and the new Vertex Color Lighting (allows you to bake lighting into the vertex colors...more efficient for small/dense meshes) as well as support for mixing with Advanced Lighting


    • purelight_t3d_demo17



  • A new pureLIGHT Demo with several new example scenes


    •                       


  • Portal and Zone objects and exposed them to the World Editor
  • SFX now supports streaming sound
  • Switched Glow to be a new PostFX
  • Improved TerrainBlock rendering
  • Normal mapping and Parallax mapping for TerrainMaterials


    •            


  • Added Parallax mapping to mesh Materials

    • Mac / OSX Support for:
    • Basic Lighting
    • TerrainBlock
    • Water
    • ScatterSky
    • CloudLayer
    • Toolbox
    • pureLIGHT
  • Interiors can now be exported to Collada via the World Editor


    • farm4.static.flickr.com/3308/3638056486_ecf7fc6eae.jpg



  • A Toggle Visibility tool to World Editor which allows for toggling on and off various debug rendering modes as well as toggling the visibility of various game classes


    •                       


  • Vastly improved Reflection handling
  • New 'soft snap' capability to the World Editor (hold down CTRL while moving selected objects to activate it)
  • New PhysX Cloth object and exposed it to the World Editor (video from last week if you missed it)




    • PhysX 2009-06-17 Cloth 3           PhysX 2009-06-17 Cloth           PhysX 2009-06-17 Cloth 2



    For the full monster list of improvements, fixes, and remaining known issues, see the Torque 3D forums for details.

    If you're ready to move to Torque 3D, you can still get your $100 OFF pre-order discount right now. This discount will be reduced to $50 OFF at the end of June. If you're already a Torque 3D owner, congrats! Don't forget to post your Beta 3 feedback in Torque 3D Private Forums. We need your help to get to the finish line!

    We've still got a ways to go to fully catch up on the Mac / OSX side, but we're moving quickly. Full feature and stability parity with Windows is our goal for Beta 4.

    More development blogs to come. This is post #25.

    Torque 3D development blogs:

    Brett Seyler's profile picture
    Employee Brett Seyler

    About the author

    Since 2007, I've done my best to steer Torque's development and brand toward the best opportunities in games middleware.

    Recent Blogs

    • Torque 3D Development - 1.1 Alpha!
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    Torque 3D Owner Andrew Brady
    #41
    06/25/2009 (3:28 am)
    OK, this looks really great guys! I applaud your work. But I am somewhat confused on something, I and need someone to clear this up for me please.

    Here is a statement from the post linked below:

    link: Click Here

    Statement:
    Quote:If you're ready to move to Torque 3D, you can still get $100 OFF pre-order discount right now. This discount will expire when we've released a final version of Torque 3D.

    Here is a statement from this post linked below:

    link: Click Here

    Statement:
    Quote:If you're ready to move to Torque 3D, you can still get your $100 OFF pre-order discount right now. This discount will be reduced to $50 OFF at the end of June.

    now.. how can the first one be true if the second one makes it false?

    Torque 3D Owner Jackie Hayes
    #42
    06/25/2009 (3:29 am)
    Looking good guys!!!!!!

    Torque 3D Owner eb
    #43
    06/25/2009 (3:31 am)
    Pure gold Sir Brady!

    How hard is it to keep track of a discount amount and endline...seriously.

    Edit: I do believe Mr. Brady will be joining me on the "GG can barely stand us list". :P

    Torque 3D Owner T Loos
    #44
    06/25/2009 (3:35 am)
    Um. Erk. Um. Er. Um... Wow.

    A bit short on words, but ... I thought all of you were slowing DOWN on features? Some serious engine upgrading. Sheesh... Anyone at GG remember this thing they call 'sleep'? Not so much?

    Just as long as everyone doesn't burn out over there, keep the good stuff comin'. This is top notch work from where I sit...


    Torque 3D Owner Joshua Halls (Xerves)
    #45
    06/25/2009 (3:39 am)
    @Brett: It is IE. Looks fine in Firefox, it is center aligned in IE (7 and 8 both).

    Sean H.
    #46
    06/25/2009 (3:43 am)
    @Brett- I'm using IE7. Everything looks OK now.

    Employee Brett Seyler
    #47
    06/25/2009 (4:07 am)
    @Sean: I think it's fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.

    Torque Owner Thomas Bang
    #48
    06/25/2009 (7:24 am)
    Quote:
    # Portal and Zone objects and exposed them to the World Editor

    Can someone explain the workflow and say something about the efficiency?
    Are there several types of zones/portals?

    Like

    - remote portals ( for mirrors )
    - direct portals ( for doors )
    - transition zones
    - occlusion portals ( negative portals to exclude objects from the render pipeline )
    ...


    Associate Tom Spilman
    #49
    06/25/2009 (7:35 am)
    @Thomas - The Zone and Portal objects are currently just for improved culling of the world.

    They are not for jumping the player from one part of the scene to another or for mirrors.

    That said if things go well we will expand it to support these concepts.

    Torque Owner Thomas Bang
    #50
    06/25/2009 (7:48 am)
    OK, thanks.

    If i place a portal inside of a bigger DTS, are the invisible polygons ignored? Or can portals only handle the complete mesh?

    Torque 3D Owner Szzg007
    #51
    06/25/2009 (8:42 am)
    Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome .....
    Wa...hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah........
    welcome in beta3......
    I has waiting long time.....................

    Torque 3D Owner J
    #52
    06/25/2009 (2:20 pm)
    WOW! That shape editor is totally awesome!!! Messed with it last night...What a nice addition and a huge time savor! That rocks!
    Got a nice speed boost; a plethora of improvements! You guys are kicking some serious butt!!! Keep up the good work!

    Employee Matthew Langley
    #53
    06/25/2009 (4:49 pm)
    @J: We kinda ninja'd the shape editor in there, we haven't been talking about it hardly at all publicly. It really helps round out our art pipeline with the Collada pipeline (both the Shape Editor and the Collada pipeline are great work from Chris Robertson) and the material editor (the latest workflow has really improved the material editor in my opinion).

    Torque 3D Owner Edward F. Maurina III
    #54
    06/25/2009 (5:21 pm)
    In a word: Awesome!

    Torque 3D Owner Bone
    #55
    06/25/2009 (5:38 pm)
    @Andrew - The two quotes are talking about different states of the engine: Final and Beta.

    The first quote is talking about the "final version" which doesn't have a public release date. Once the final version is released the discount disappears.

    The second quote is reminding us the discounts only last while T3D is in Beta and will decline over time to $0 when the final version is released.

    Glen "ThaBonadingus"
    #56
    06/25/2009 (6:31 pm)
    Once again being ignored... T_T.

    Anyway, nice job guys. I look forward to seeing T3D

    Torque 3D Owner Andrew Brady
    #57
    06/25/2009 (8:40 pm)
    @ Bone

    If that's what was meant, then the sentences need really re-worked because that's NOT what he said. Granted, the difference is small but the way it's written.. it more looks like moving the goal posts so to speak, which bothers me because I know Brett didn't mean it the way it reads.

    Anyway, more importantly the Beta looks awesome guys, and either way I will be purchasing it soon. Nice Job!

    ~LK~

    Torque Owner Mike Rowley
    #58
    06/25/2009 (8:43 pm)
    Holy Cow. I go away for a single day, and...and... Awesome work guys. That's a ton of fixes and addons.

    Torque 3D Owner Henri Aalto
    #59
    06/25/2009 (9:50 pm)
    T3D is really shaping up!

    However, my puny little Mobility Radeon X1600 is a bit starved of resources, specially in the Advanced Lighting mode ;) This was to be expected, gladly the Basic Lighting works decently.

    Also, I suffered from some serious terrain transparency and fog issues during Beta 1 but they were fixed in Beta 2.

    Now the issues are back with some reinforcements, like failig to load the Warrior Camp mission (spits out a termination error) until I run one of the simple mission (like "Blank Room") first.

    I recall reading something about renderstates, buffers and Radeon cards when the bug was originally analyzed, maybe someone accidentally left those fixes out (or broke something with the new optimizations).

    Anyway, the results for the normal mapped terrain are still great, gotta love that side projection as well!

    Associate Chris Robertson
    #60
    06/25/2009 (10:10 pm)
    @eb

    Quote:Concerning the Shape Editor, can someone elaborate on "You can.. ..define nodes.. ."?

    The official docs for this should be coming soon, but basically the Shape Editor lets you add, rename and delete nodes from your shape. This is useful for adapting a non-Torque model for use in Torque by renaming or adding the 'eye', 'cam' and 'mountX' nodes.

    Same deal with animation sequences. You can use the editor to add sequences from external DSQ or DAE files, rename them, split them etc. Great for Collada exporters that munge all the animations into a single sequence, or for adapting a non-Torque model to use the standard 'root', 'run', 'back' etc sequence names.
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