It’s been about a month since I posted a blog, so we all agreed that I would take some time to post this blog instead of our normal monthly product update in the forums. We are a heads down right now focusing on Windows Phone 7, so writing one big update will free up the others to keep things rolling. So instead of blogging on a single big topic, I’m going to cover a lot of smaller developments.

Torque 3D Binary

We developed the business case for our binary offering a little over a year ago. At the time, the idea of updating a binary with the final release seemed reasonable. One of the assumptions that was made at the time was that a final 1.1 would be available sooner rather than later. Well, the final release hasn’t happened. One reason that 1.1 final hasn’t arrived is that we have increased the bar for what we consider final. We introduced beta 3, and from what we are hearing from you, we are indeed approaching a higher bar of quality. The numbers of bugs we are now finding and recording are significantly less than the time after our beta 2 release. And while the pro users have benefited from the quality improvement, the binary users sat patiently waiting for 1.1 so that they can get their hands on the fixes and performance increases.

We decided that the binary users have been waiting too long and since beta 3 is such a quality and performance improvement over the 1.0 binary, we came to the realization that it’s only right for us to change our stated policy and give the binary users a binary version of 1.1 beta 3. Your 1.0 and 1.1 beta 3 versions are now available in your account.

Web Site Updates We are continuing to work on our web-site. Right now we are in the middle of big update of our payment processing system in order to accommodate the tax laws both in the US and overseas. I would rather be spending our time on features for our community, but this work is part of doing business correctly. During this update, we’ve been adding some small features to the site and we are continuing to fix bugs the best we can. Two improvements we are working on include Studio Profiles which gives you a place to promote your studio on our site; if this is a popular feature, we will continue to increase the functionality. In addition to the Studio Profile, Resource Filters simplify searching for resources by engine type.

Game Distribution

There are two big challenges a game developer faces. The first is finishing a game; the second, and often overlooked challenge, is distributing your game. These days, it’s hard for you to get your game noticed. Web-distribution is one avenue for bringing your game to the people. We currently have a web-based plug-in for Torque 3D that many of you are using. In addition to that implementation, our company has been working for years on a high-end distribution system. We aren’t ready to make that system available to the masses in the near term, so I’ve been given the company “OK” to start working with third parties who are also developing similar technologies. What this means to you is that we are working towards partnerships so that we can integrate these technologies into our products so that you can more easily take advantage of their offerings. We have started working on a Torque 2D 1.7.6 that will hopefully make it easier for you to distribute your games via the web. More to follow later in blog dedicated to the topic.

TorqueX

GS 3.1 is entering into the sun setting phase and from what we’ve read in public forums, it appears as though games that are submitted using GS 3.1 will be rejected three months after GS Connect 4.0 is released , That means we have x+90 days of 3.1 publishing with x being the number of days until GS Connect 4.0 final release. That put us and our TorqueX developers working towards XBLIG in a bit of a pickle.

To further complicate issues, as you know, we are working on a new XNA based engine that we feel is significant architectural improvement over that of TorqueX. The focus for our initial release is for Windows Phone 7; however, I can tell you that we’ve done XBox tests on our Windows Phone 7 code and it runs on the Xbox 360. This doesn’t guarantee that the Windows Phone 7 code will run on the Xbox 360 at launch; but at a minimum it’s foreseeable that it won’t be far from running on the Xbox 360.
So how are we reacting to this news?

Frankly, we haven’t decided. We are measuring a couple of factors before we make a final decision. Those being:
1) The date of the release of GS 4.0 Connect
2) The state of our Windows Phone 7 Engine at that time
3) The market demand for XBLIG publishing with TorqueX 3.1.5

Here’s what we do know:
1) TorqueX users are allowed to upgrade to 4.0 themselves and publish on any XNA platform ( including the phone)
2) We are dropping our price of TorqueX 3.1.5 to $99 as of tomorrow
3) We added a warning to the check-out so that no one purchase TorqueX without knowing the current situation.
4) Community members (graciously driven by Pino ) have undertaken the job of porting TorqueX 3.1.5 to XNA 4.0 today.
5) TorqueX owners will receive a discount towards our Windows Phone 7 engine.

iTorque 3D

We are continuing to work hard on iTorque 3D, but we have run into some delays. We are currently forecasting a release in Q1 with the hopes of delivering a beta as soon as possible.

iTorque 2D

The news for iTorque 2D 1.4.1 is simple. We’ve been continuing to fix bugs and we’ve updated everything so that it is compatible with the last iOS updates. This version will be going to QA soon. Depending on the results of our testing, we could have an update in weeks.

Closing

I just returned from the MAX conference. For those of you who don’t know, that’s the Adobe annual developers conference. I felt out of my element, but their 3D hardware accelerating API caught my eye. As game developers, we need to keep an open mind about the next big platform. It’s a crapshoot.

I stumbled upon Jeff Tunnell’s last blog at GG where he states that Windows, OSX, and Linux are not enough. Jeff’s statements were spot on. And while it was more plausible to hit all of the major platforms two years ago, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish considering the explosion of platforms ( and the looseness of the definition of a platform ). Consoles, phones, tablets, web-portals, thin clients( i.e., OnLive ), and now TVs. Developers should realize that there may be some real potential to supporting 10 to 20 different “platforms” in the not so distant future. The ocean is big -we are preparing.