Where's the beef

#21 @David: Vertex Selection in Milkshape's Perspective Viewport can be achieved by holding Shift + alt and then box selection of the vertices with the mouse.

Why don't you see more stuf? It was answered a few times in the above posts, "it's hard".

It's hard when an artist goes asking for scripting/code help and they're told quite often, "you got the Source, do it yerself". When you ask WHY? something seems weird or doesn't do what you'd expect[like the spinning player, and when exactly does headSide play??], answers don't exist outside the SDK Private Forum. Perhaps more experiences from teams, demonstrating the process towards successful completion may help those flailing??? just some thoughts.

One of the best Threads I've seen in the few years of visitation was recently and by Stephen Z, I think. The thread entered into the conceptualization of the scripting process instead of the usual answer, "d'oh, I fixed it...". I seem to learn better when problems I don't understand are broken down and conceptualized[graphic images help a lot], which in scripting, I need some assistance.

I'm hoping TDN can be a place to go 'learn' what's going on with the engine and better enable me to 'help mysef'....

#22 Awesome plan - I think the machine gun is not documentation itself, but the inability to find documentation.

Yes, the Google search is great, but me personally - if I want to learn something I don't really want to do it by reading someone else's code. If you lookup a function at php.net they give you the technical definition of a function, a small block of text explaining it in English, and then a few minor examples that achieve very little in themselves but focus solely on the function you are looking for.

If I want to learn how to make a keymap and bind the movement keys to my character, that's all I want to learn. I don't want to have to read through someone else's code on making a Tetris-clone just to figure it out.

Hopefully the TDN will straighten this out, but holy crap - how long does it take to make a wiki? It's not very hard... get it over with so we can use it.

#23 I think one of the problems that stops games from being finished is a "Hobbist" versus "Indie" mentallity

I think of Hobbist as those who are happy coming home after work and playing around. A demo satisfies them.

I think of Indies as those who are serious about making games. They set goals. Plan their lives around coding. If you want to be an Indie, then you are gonna have to be persistent. If you aren't, the game wont get released.

But, I wonder if the label "Indie" is granted too often after somebody releases a game, so what would you call those serious developers who haven't?


I also think it would benefit Torque in the future to transform the tutorials into a training lessons. Its not good enough just to say, "here's how to mess around with some of the features, now you're own your own". It should be, "here's how to build the FPS Starter kit from the ground up, Step 1, Step 2,.." then, "now let's modifiy it into the Racer Starter Kit". And make it detailed, each lesson only applying 1 new feature at a time. That has got to help somebody. I know it would have helped me when I bought TGE 3 years ago.

#24 Another thing, the Art has been my biggest obstacle with Torque. I'm not a modeller. I dont have the time to make my own models. And, I dont want to pay for an Art Pack unless I know it will work for me. Just think back to when you modded Doom,Quake, Tribes, or Half-Life. You didn't have to add new art resources that often because you had a cd's worth of them to choose from.


I think GG needs a "common art pack" that covers enough models that we can make games from. FPS, Racer, Flight Sim models. It ain't got to be the size of a cd, but enough
for us to get going. Since we have to sell our games thru GG anyway, they can control the art licenses for us till we're able to buy some ourselves.

#25 Well, I don't know about anyone else's projects... but my team has been working for 4 years on just the deisgn of an adventure series. This included religion, history, species of animals and plants, laws of science...

4 years of our lives, and the main people behind the series have all said they are not giving up.

The thing that bothers me, GG doesn't have a publishing platform for large games beyond the size of an arcade style game. If you guys offered a comparable service for adventure games, long engrossing ones, with some high sales numbers, we'd be all for it. Because right now, dealing with the likes of Nintendo, Ubisoft, and T2 is going on, but it's very slow.

Also... it woud help if, as a publisher, you guys would help with costs of development for projects with pomise. I mean, the Orb team only needs about 30,000 to get everything we need, and yet, we're having to turn to the state for grants.

#26 And still thinking about it, it's not easy to rewrite games from one game engine to another. Period. Just because I can get most of my Quake levels into Torque, doesn't mean I can import the scripts just as easily. I myself have several games I've released over the years, but I dont want to spend time to rewrite them, and some of them are not suited for a 3d engine. Its just not worth the time spent as a lone developer. OK, random thought, but its one I've already faced with Torque.

I also think there should be more starter kits to build from. It would be nice to be in a project maker tool, click "new project", select the "FPS Game- Stand Alone, No Server" or the "FPS Game- With Server" icon, and my boilerplate starter kit gets written to my drive. And it would run and play without me editting it. This would give me a working game that all I need to do it change the maps/mission around to have my game idea ready for release. Its not for everybody, more serious games would still need serious work, but its enough for the lesser skilled or time crunched developers.

I think I'm done thinking about this now... stepping down off milk crate...

#27 @Mathew Langley - You can lead a horse...

#28 I know this sounds like an excuse but the biggest hurdle for me has been art. I'm a very creative person but I cannot make a respectable art asset to save my life. So if I was to ask GG to give me another free game creation gift it would be a way to attract artists to a project. Maybe I'm just not using the community well enough, I'm not sure, but I've got to figure something out.

So yeah Pat, code me up a artist locater bot that I can set loose on the Intur-web to find a couple hot lady artists that are willing to work for future profits. :)

#29 The #1 problem for me is also finding art. I've bought all of the art packs, but that can only get you so far without project specific artwork.

#30 My problems when i startedd out with Torque were (wich was back in 2001? or was it 2002 when torque was released first?):

-me being a total newbie in gamedev (even tough i worked on some MOD's etc)
-choosing the wrong people to work with
-seeing it all too big
-documentation


Now all those problems are behind me, I'm finally set to start producing some games. And that's what i'm doing, altough lately, little bugs in Torque have been "bugging" me, and they're really slowing us down (!).

Now, to all those people in need of art. If you have solid code and present a fun demo you should have no problems finding artists. If you can't find any interested artists it most likely becuase you are not presenting the idea good enough (can't present a playable demo, can't present the idea properly, etc). Most artists in this community have spend waaaay to much time working on just another failure, they want to make sure if they do something it gets out there (in the form of a finished game). And by the way, artists have an even harder time finding programmers (i've been there, but i just learned to program).

The problem is not that games aren't being made. The thing is games aren't finished up to the quality GG wants them in order to publish them. So, maybe people should put their game up for free download instead of abandoning it. What is happening waaay too often now is people finish their game up to 70-90%, then see how much work is left to "finish" it (publishing quality), and decide its not worth it. I believe at that point you should just release whatever you have as a free download and see how people react to it. If you get lots of repsonses like"please don't stop working on this", then get your act together and go for that final run.

#31 @Chris: Ain't that the truth, lol. *shrug*

#32 @Pat Was that supposed to be inpirational or something?

Quote:Is it just a waste of time and resources to continue to keep our primary focus on the indy community?

What kind of question is that? More of a slap in the face than anything else.

Many of the TGE license are probably owned by people like me who are like indy-squareds. Just 1 guy trying to hack something together in between demands of job and family. It could be years before I produce anything worth looking at.

I would say it's also discouraging seeing advertisements or .plans about things like the XSI dts exporter, and Torque Constructor, peope get all wet about it, and then nothing is heard for another 6 months afterwards. Give us a timeline at least.

#33

Quote:Every year adds a large amount of resources...

I have complained about this in the forums, but if you actually surf through the Resources that are listed on garagegames.com a significant % of them are broken links, or defunct projects. Webmaster has some work to do.

#34 I have been working with Torque for a year now and I have to disagree that the documentation and tools are all shipe shape. Just read the forums: The documentation is AWFUL and incomplete - even the link to the 3ds max documentation is broken right now!

Yes, almost all of my problems are able to be solved by reading the forums, but the time it takes to locate the answers or wait for responses is time spent NOT making our game.

As an artist, it is obvious to me that the tools are created from the programmers perspective: something that is obvious and intuitive to them can be a real pain in the @ss for me. Perhaps that is why artists are hard to find working on Torque projects; I spend most of my time trying to figure out why my stuff doesnt work in the engine, and not doing the ART. My game co partner and I just spent a week trying to get transparencies to work right and finally gave up -- oops week suddnely gone for nothing.

Now that I said that, however, I think Torque is a pretty great deal for the price. And the community can't be beat. THanks for all the help guys.

#35 My key problem has been in delegating time. It's the reason that I decided quite a while ago that I was in the hobbyist category rather than the indie category. I neither have time to dedicate hand's down to game development (as I have a local film group that I work with and dedicate similar amount of time to) nor time committments for a team. If I don't have time to dedicate to a team, I don't waste people's time. Period. I wish more people would realize that.

The next hurdle is getting "the idea" and then prototyping it. Prototyping is a bitch, and it's extremely disheartening to realize that your big idea (or in my case right-sized ideas) just isn't fun. You can give it the best story, captivating characters, a huge background, support for millions of players, but if it's not fun, there's no reason to play it. And the "fun factor" is not some universal concept. It's a slippery concept. For an adventure game, coherent and well designed story, wonderfully integrated puzzles, and intruiging characters create the fun factor. In a vertical shooter, those elements would get in the way of actually playing the game. I watched the intro to Radiant Silvergun probably twice. I play it more than most games in my collection, but I skip the intro because it doesn't matter (and was added for the console port).

For artwork in the past, I've often taken Kork's UV map, reversed it in photoshop, and applied it to my "enemies". That gave me a visual distinction so that I didn't have to get caught up in the "I don't have art, oh woe is I" programmer art mentality. I create base levels in Quark that do what I need. They're not pretty, but they work. Once the basic gameplay is in place, they can be prettied up. I don't consider myself a good 3D artist by any means, but anyone can create functional art. You just have to get past the "how it looks" block.

It's like when I took a class on stone tool analysis. The major component of the class was learning to knap (banging rocks together to remove pieces suitable to make functional stone tools). My major block at the beginning of the class was that I had a preconceived notion of how my flakes were supposed to look. I felt that I was supposed to see an arrowhead or a spear point or some other functional tool in the flakes and so I reduced a large amount of obsidian and flint to rubble trying to get "the perfect flakes". Then the professor and a couple of graduate students set up a trampling exercise for a paper at a conference. They took off a number of flakes (which looked like 90% of my discarded ones) as perfectly good flakes. Seeing that, it broke down my preconceived notions of what they had to look like.

I think that a number of new developers want to see the final image of their game at the beginning, and if they can't get beyond that block, it doesn't even get started, let alone die at some indeterminant point before the project ends. The great thing about prototyping is that you get over this block, but the horrible thing is often realizing that your "really cool idea" isn't that much fun and having to make the choice whether to work to make it fun or table it and work on one of the other hundred thousand ideas. Making that decision is painful.

But it's worth it when you find that fun idea that works and can develop into something good.

#36 Gah! Not good when my comments get eaten. Just posted a lengthy comment and it's GONE. *poof*

Ah well. It was a ramble anyway. Here's the punchline instead.

You've only been around 5 years. Experienced and fully funded game developers in the commercial world can easily take 3-5 years to produce a game. So be patient. Indies have neither the time nor financial resources (or human resources quite often) to produce on the same sort of schedules. For most it's a hobby not a full time job, it's funded by what can be delegated to it after the family has been fed and the bills have been paid, and the people working on it have to be organized and get along naturally without the incentive of a paycheck.

With this in mind, I'm a bit shocked that anyone has produced anything so far. Period.

I know I'm going to take another 3-5 years at least working on my title. I'm sure others are in the same boat. It's way too early to be calling for the beef. In all honesty you've only really just gotten started. Believing any differently will cause much disappointment.

#37 Here's my struggling viewpoint from a guy who's had the engine for a year (but only been developing on it for a few months - half of which I've been in crunch mode during my "day job" so I haven't been able to focus as much as I'd have liked).

I've been involved in several game development projects. I've worked on major retail games that have sold well over million units, and I've been involved in small indie projects that sold considerably less. I've worked on older console games, but nothing more recent than the Sega Dreamcast. I'm currently working on a Torque project, and I want to state for the record that I *AM* a fan of this engine. Any criticism I offer here is out of a desire to see the engine improve - for my own selfish purposes, as well as for others in the community.

So here's my take:

#1 - 3D is HARD.
It's at least an order of magnitude harder than doing a 2D game. And that's if you DON'T have a game with complex animation requirements (like human characters) - then it's even worse. Top that off with the fact that audience expectations of a 3D game are much higher than expectations for a 2D game, and you've got yourself in a pickle. This has already been addressed, but it bears repeating.

#2 - Multiplayer is HARD.
Kudos to Torque and the GG team for building a framework that is multiplayer throughout - if you are going to do a multiplayer game, using this framework and sticking to that foundation makes it about as easy as it's going to get --- but it's still anything from easy. It's also an order of magnitude harder than doing a single-player game. It has a major impact on design, coding, testing & maintanance, and even art assets (if you have a single-player game, you can blow your polygon budget on your main character, because you know there'll only be one... not so for multiplayer).

Of course, Torque encourages people to make multiplayer games because - well, it's THERE, you know, why waste it? But if someone chooses NOT to do a multiplayer game, they are still locked into the multiplayer paradigm from a code perspective. You still have to figure out what's being handled on the "server", what's being handled on the "client," and handling the communication between the two - including interpolation, synchronization, creation & cleanup, etc. There are additional problems that develop when working on a single-player game --- little stutters or timing issues which are completely forgiveable in a multiplayer game that are difficult to accept or correct in single-player.

This isn't easy for ME, and I've been doing this kind of thing for over a decade. Now, as I develop my familiarity with Torque, it keeps getting easier, but it's incredibly frustrating when you are trying to figure out why something is NOT working and realize it's because it's only being moved on the server.

#3 - Torque is a collosally complex beast, yet feels "unfinished" in certain areas
I don't know how different this is from Torque 2D. I heard comments about keeping the focus on just using the scripts in Torque2D to make the games, rather than touching the C++ code. In Torque, TorqueScript is quite nice, but that whole "order of magnitude" thing comes up again and again. There's a lot more complexity and behavioral requirements the players demand, let alone the developers. It's almost impossible to avoid touching the underlying engine - and it's a beast.

There are many elements of Torque that feel "incomplete" - like they are more there for demo purposes than usable for a finished game. The sound, vehicles, and lighting are probably the most obvious examples. The WheeledVehicle probably comes closest to being universally applicable (for cars), but even that won't let you do, say, a motorcycle. You are GOING to have to go in and create your own class, or do some massive modification to an existing class to make it work for any particular game you have in mind, unless you tightly restrict your concept to what Torque already does - and most people won't recognize those restrictions until they've been playing with the engine for several months. The Synapse Lighting Pack goes a LONG way to helping the lighting issues in Torque, but like most source-code patches, it's not trivial to merge into existing code (or to merge updates into it).

You really CAN'T do AI without reaching into the source code - that's not really a criticism, because AI requirements are extremely game-specific. But I think that represents a wall for some developers.

You can have power and flexibility, or you can have ease-of-use. Or you can offer both in a very structured, heirarchical manner. Torque attempts to do this, currently, by having two levels - the TorqueScript level for ease-of-use, and the underlying engine itself. One is too restrictive for most purposes, and the other is REALLY complex. Some kind of abstracted middle-layer would be REALLY useful. It sounds like there are some good ideas for how to do this on the roadmap for TGE 1.5, but that won't help us in the meantime.

[continued next post]

#38 [continued from previous post]
#4 - Tools Paths
This is a problem in game development across the board - from the 100-developer EA teams to solo indies. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Torque Constructor, and I hope that it will clean up some of the issues related to level-building. I haven't played with the DIF-style issues too much, but I'm hearing reports of issues with rotation, with having two DIF maps joined by portals, etc. Some of these issues need to be resolved in the exporter, tools, or the engine itself. Whatever works. Anything to make it less frustrating for artists and level designers.

Some areas where I see the biggest deficiencies (for indies) is animation tools & paths, texture animation, interiors maps (like making a Quake / Doom-style interior-focused games). There may be others. I don't see these being insurmountable problems, and I wouldn't say they are unique to Torque.

#5 - Tutorials
There are some great tutorials on the GG site. This is something we need MUCH MORE OF. The tutorials seem to cover a lot of the basics pretty well, but we need a lot more resources focusing on some more specialized topics. This is something the COMMUNITY needs to be primarily responsible for, but GarageGames needs to be involved to organize & make these accessible, to officially 'sponsor' these tutorials (as they have DONE, I might add). But they also need to help edit, oversee, and in some cases maintain this information.

I know one of the things preventing me from writing a tutotial is my own self-consciousness about my ignorance. I don't know if I have solved things "correctly" - I just find some way to make things work, and many times I just figure I've hacked it up horribly into some kludge that should be handled differently. It would be REALLY nice if we could have some sort of structure in place where someone with greater knowledge could act as reviewers or editors for these before putting hem in place.

Maybe GG could assist in "organizing" the community this way - designating certain members of the community as community leaders, and deligating certain responsibilities to them. In exchange for their free service to the community, so long as they remain active they could perhaps be elligable for discounts on GG products or something.

#6 - Better-organized assets?
The "resource" section is a WONDERFUL area with lots of amazingly cool sources of free and cheap content, as well as code snippets and so forth. But a lot of it is hard to find (much better with the new, improved Search capabilities of the site, I should mention...!), has dead links, or is not incredibly appropriate for Torque users.

What would be "nice" is if GarageGames could also have some kind of a "sponsored resource" section, nicely organized, with very specific categories. DTS models, Maps / DIFS, Code Snippets, etc. Sort of like the Tutorials, but with a bit more maintanance, and with a bit more oversight, and possibly pulling those resources fully internal so that we don't have dissapearing content.

Organization of links for shops that specialize in selling indie game assets and tools might be handy too. Yes, this might be giving additional attention to competing products - but if some company is supporting Torque even indirectly, it's in some kind of partnership to help sell GarageGame's products. Places like 3ddiggers, ledwerks (if I spelled it right), etc. help GG. Yes, longstanding community members know of these places and can find them, but it woul be nice to have them front-and-center.

Gee, is that all?
Well, I've kinda moved from stating problems to suggesting less important improvements. This .plan seemed to invite brutal honesty. That's my assessment at this point. There is no such thing as a "perfect" solution out there, including Torque. I chose it after evaluating a lot of other engines (including the possibility of extending my own engine), and it was really the best solution out there for me. But I'd like to see it improved.

I am sure as time goes on and I go from "early development" into "production" stages I'll have a whole slew of new obstacles.

If I had to pick the ONE thing that is the most difficult thing to work with, it's the difficulty of creating a single-player game. You still have to treat it like a multiplayer game, and that's significantly more tricky.

#39 If you ask me, it's the learning curve marked with poor colaboration efforts. On top of that is time.

3D games take a lot of time. You take that and the fact that you need to find a bunch of people to pretty much work for free and then on top of that, the fact that there isn't much low cost solutions for project management.. Well, you have problems.

I think thats why 2D is getting done more then 3d. Smaller teams with faster result time.

I mean, look at Source and Unreal mode tools. They are free, and in a lot of cases offer better tools and more options and there isn't crap out there for mods. You have free access to shaders, facial expression tools, all the art bells and whistles and maybe 2 half life 2 mods.

I'm not making excuses because I never had any intention of making a 3D game. I'm just telling you what I've learned by myself and talking to others.

#40 @Pat...at point pricing this low[with TONS of doin' it yersefin'], I'm curious as to what you were expecting to see on a Quarterly basis??

I have to agree somewhat in the comparrisons above to engines that distribute/package the 'tools', that make the process simpler. I know there'll be those that rant about 'you can't release anything' with the engines that are used mostly for MODding, and if you want 'ease of use' go there. Well, that seems to be another answer as to, "Why?". If the Mission Editor isn't friendly enough to allow for more of point/click structure and simply Everything needs scipting, don't expect to see things rolling down an assembly line...

...I mean, it sounds as if the profit margin on licenses isn't enough, or a saturation point has been reached in sales. And the next 'vein' of revenue stream was planned to be distribution and that's not developing??

I'm sorry if you feel as though time is being wasted...