Just another month gone by
by Alex Scarborough · 11/10/2006 (1:07 am) · 11 comments
And another month goes by. I've been using Torque for almost two years now, and I still feel like a noob.
In my last .plan I mentioned a fair number of resources I intended to release when 1.4.2/1.5 came out. I'll get to those, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. I've been too busy moving all of my other code up to 1.5 to work out those resources and such.
On a related note, I am extremely happy that I decided to encapsulate all of my shader code in its own files outside of Torque proper. That made the upgrade much smoother. It also made it easy to put shaders into TGB, not that I'm planning to do anything interesting with that.
It's doing... something. Don't ask me what. It requires a Radeon 9500 to do it though!
Also in my last .plan I discussed creating a Torque based shader IDE. It's come a fair way since then. It actually works now.
Oops, made a typo
It also works with Cg as well.
I said it works. I didn't say it looked pretty.
While I still don't intend to develop this into a serious IDE, I am reevaluating my previous idea of just stopping at being able to write some simple shaders. On one hand, there are plenty of nice shader IDE's out there that are amazingly good at what they do. On the other hand, there isn't a single shader IDE that is crossplatform or supports GLSL and Cg, or supports the OpenGL assembly shaders. Therefore, while I still don't want to create an application that does everything FX Composer or RenderMonkey does, I am considering putting in some more advanced features to help even the playing field a bit, so to speak.
Anyhow, enough serious talk, let's see some shiny pictures!
More here.
All said and told, it wasn't my most active month ever. In large part, that's been because of the 1.5 release, which forced me to go back and look at all of my old code. A pretty decent chunk of it is getting an overhaul to help streamline it, document it, and improve overall readability. In other words, it finally occurred to me to actually document that shader subsystem I wrote.
Oh, and the Cg runtime environment drives me insane. Just wanted to throw that out there. See you all next month!
In my last .plan I mentioned a fair number of resources I intended to release when 1.4.2/1.5 came out. I'll get to those, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. I've been too busy moving all of my other code up to 1.5 to work out those resources and such.
On a related note, I am extremely happy that I decided to encapsulate all of my shader code in its own files outside of Torque proper. That made the upgrade much smoother. It also made it easy to put shaders into TGB, not that I'm planning to do anything interesting with that.
It's doing... something. Don't ask me what. It requires a Radeon 9500 to do it though!Also in my last .plan I discussed creating a Torque based shader IDE. It's come a fair way since then. It actually works now.
Oops, made a typoIt also works with Cg as well.
I said it works. I didn't say it looked pretty.While I still don't intend to develop this into a serious IDE, I am reevaluating my previous idea of just stopping at being able to write some simple shaders. On one hand, there are plenty of nice shader IDE's out there that are amazingly good at what they do. On the other hand, there isn't a single shader IDE that is crossplatform or supports GLSL and Cg, or supports the OpenGL assembly shaders. Therefore, while I still don't want to create an application that does everything FX Composer or RenderMonkey does, I am considering putting in some more advanced features to help even the playing field a bit, so to speak.
Anyhow, enough serious talk, let's see some shiny pictures!
More here.
All said and told, it wasn't my most active month ever. In large part, that's been because of the 1.5 release, which forced me to go back and look at all of my old code. A pretty decent chunk of it is getting an overhaul to help streamline it, document it, and improve overall readability. In other words, it finally occurred to me to actually document that shader subsystem I wrote.
Oh, and the Cg runtime environment drives me insane. Just wanted to throw that out there. See you all next month!
About the author
#2
11/10/2006 (6:40 am)
Good Job Alex, awesome work as usual.
#4
11/10/2006 (10:14 am)
Awesome! Any chance you release the shader stuff for TGB?
#5
11/10/2006 (10:20 am)
oooh! Excellent ideas and work. Please keep working on it and release something for us greedy Tork-ists!
#6
STef
[edit]I'm already married, too bad ;-)[/edit]
11/10/2006 (10:51 am)
Alex? would you marry me?STef
[edit]I'm already married, too bad ;-)[/edit]
#7
The resource is splendid, although it took me some time to figure out in the console the right values and what values are available. You can check more updates on my blog;
I think I'll figure out a way to put all the needed commands in a gui.
11/10/2006 (6:08 pm)
Let's try an img/img trick:The resource is splendid, although it took me some time to figure out in the console the right values and what values are available. You can check more updates on my blog;
I think I'll figure out a way to put all the needed commands in a gui.
#8
11/10/2006 (9:00 pm)
looks great. you did it once again alex. so quit with the picture. show us code!! :)
#9
I was thinking about it last night, and I'm interested in checking out your improved and syntax-hilighted text control and seeing if it would be very hard to make a decent little script editor to integrate directly into Torque Game Builder to make it more friendly for new users to get into Torque Script.
Thanks!
--clint
11/21/2006 (1:39 pm)
Alex, great stuff!I was thinking about it last night, and I'm interested in checking out your improved and syntax-hilighted text control and seeing if it would be very hard to make a decent little script editor to integrate directly into Torque Game Builder to make it more friendly for new users to get into Torque Script.
Thanks!
--clint
#10
11/21/2006 (11:18 pm)
Alex, really looking forward to the fixes you said you had towards the CG bump mapping code. Really great work. 
#11
11/13/2007 (11:51 pm)
Great work!! Have you posted the mod to the engine to include Shaders with TGB? Need help to incorporate shaders (CG/HLSL) with TGB. Thanks 
Torque Owner Philip Mansfield
Default Studio Name
Excellent work :)