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Torque 2D : On The Road To 3.0

Our first blog post concerning the upcoming release of T2D 3.0 was posted over a month ago, setting the stage for the next chapter in the development of T2D MIT.

The steering committee has been quite busy preparing the next chapter in the journey towards 3.0 and we are happy to announce many new and important developments with this blog update.

Android

The much-anticipated Android port mentioned in the last post is seeing some progress and should be made publicly available in late September at which point the community can jump in and help test it on as many Android devices as possible.

A new Steering Committee member appears : Mike Lilligreen!

For anyone spending time on the T2D forums, Mike Lilligreen needs no introduction. His contributions to the wiki and his helpful nature made him a natural choice for the steering committee.

After a brief introductory meeting with the other committee members, Mike did not run away from the crazed ramblings of Simon and Charlie, which was the first real test of his commitment.

Instead, he hit the ground running and published 3 invaluable guides to the Wiki

- Particle Asset Guide
- Particle Player Guide
- Triggers Guide

Mike will help us with the documentation effort and additional/reworked modules for the Sandbox. I will let Mike introduce himself in the comments to this blog. (That's your cue Mike...). Please join me in welcoming Mike to the steering committee!

Paul Jan's GFX updates

Paul Jan is another awesome community member who has been extremely busy in the past months, most notably in the creation and refinement of a GFX update for T2D.

In human speak, this means that his engine fork completely overhauls the graphics part of the engine, implementing a modern architecture and giving us access to Shaders. I strongly suggest that interested community members help Paul with testing as this upgrade will definitely be considered for inclusion in the official repo somewhere down the line.

You can find Paul's repo here.

Steering Committee Progress

If you pay attention to the forums, every 2 weeks the committee writes a short post to keep tabs on who's working on what.

- Simon has been fixing issues and evaluating pull requests in order to make T2D as stable and bug-free as possible for the upcoming 3.0 release. He has also written a brand new Tiled map Asset for the engine. So far, the parser is completed and basic importing works; the branch will be made available to everyone as soon as it is 'feature complete'.

- Charlie has been helming the gigantic task of refactoring the engine to facilitate Doxygen documentation. This will make it easy for any user to grab a copy of the engine and have the ability to instantly generate comprehensive docs regarding every function of the engine, explaining return types and expected parameters in a slick, hypertext-enabled format.

- Mich has temporarily been pulled onto another project for GarageGames as technical lead. His main T2D involvement has been keeping up with the steering committee, forum activity, and facilitating the Android port. The main goal for Mich is solidifying the effort and release of Torque 2D 3.0.

Improving Community Interactions

Many of you have pointed out that having to dig through the GG forums and github repositories for information is quite tedious. Mentioned as well was the fact that it is hard to interact with other community members using nothing but the forums.

While we will obviously keep our base of operations on the GarageGames website, the community now has new options to share and interact!

Trello Boards

Trello allows us to easily visualize what's being worked on, who's working on what and allows you guys to comment and vote on features. It allows anyone to easily view the progress of the engine at a glance.

Think of it as a visual roadmap for T2D MIT's future. We will be using this board to synchronize our efforts and to democratize development.

You can find the Trello boards here. Note that you can either sign up for a free Trello account or log in with an existing Google account in order to view, comment and vote.

T2D Google+ community

Out of all the social media platforms, we think that a Google+ community served our intended purposes best. We will be actively using the Torque2D G+ community to bring you news, tips and useful links.

This community is public : anyone can join and chime in. This will allow us to easily share screenshots of our projects, video tutorials and progress updates, and even maybe host community hangouts (video chat) from time to time!

We truly believe that this will make community interaction much easier and engaging.

All we ask is that you treat this space responsibly; we have no problems with self-promotion or more generalized game development discussions but please keep it on-topic as much as possible and post in the appropriate sections. We will moderate this space as we would like to avoid filling up everybody's G+ streams with off-topic subjects.

You can join the community here.

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Keep in mind that we welcome your (constructive) criticism. The whole point of these efforts is to make it more convenient and easier to communicate with each other so let your voice be heard!

Community involvement : A Call to Arms!

As you know, T2D MIT is your engine as much as it is our's; the steering committee cannot realistically accomplish all of the required tasks all by itself. The new community tools (Trello, G+) are set up so that we can collaborate and combine our efforts to really push T2D MIT at the forefront of open-source game engines.

Here are the three areas where we need the most help from the community.

Documentation

This is the big one folks. There will always be more documentation than engineering tasks. The great thing is that anyone can contribute to documentation. If you are using the engine, then you are a prime candidate to help with docs. There are two parts to the documentation efforts:

Guides
First, we need guides to cover every aspect of T2D, from engine features to workflow, how to use other programs to export to T2D, etc.

One really awesome example is Daniel Buckmaster's 'git for Torque users' guide.

You may follow the forum thread on the above document here.

Google Docs, Wiki articles, personal website articles, it's really up to you as long as you make it known to T2D users!

When visiting the Trello boards, if you find anything that's Missing or Labeled as 'Coming Soon', you can take control and tell us that you plan to take charge on a specific guide. That way, we can add the task to the Trello board and avoid having having several individuals working on different versions of the same thing.

This would also be a great opportunity for community members to collaborate on such docs.

Doxygen
The second documentation effort will be centered around the Doxygen refactoring. Charlie is hard at work on documenting the process so that anyone can contribute. A blog will be posted once we're ready to organize that particular effort.

Modules

The best way to showcase the engine and to test it (see 'Testing' below) is by creating new modules. Since they are by definition modular, it makes it really easy to build projects by picking and choosing what modules work best for our purpose. With the advent of the G+ community, it will be easier than ever to show off these modules and share them.

Here are a few ideas of useful modules we would like to see

- Behavior Collections
- Editors
- Inventory system
- Asset collections

We are looking for ways to be able to share user-created modules. The most common solution seems to be a public drop-box but that seems a bit convoluted; we are looking for a more centralized solution. If anybody has ideas on the subject, express yourself in the comments!

Testing

While fixing some of the reported Issues, Simon has noticed that several of the bugs are trivial changes which are really hard to track down just by scanning the code for 'obvious' errors. Most of the bugs were found by community members while playing around with the engine; we cannot stress how important your contributions are in this department.

Whenever you encounter bugs or weird behavior, please take the time to raise the issue on the forums or on Github directly. Even if the bug is later disproved, it goes a long way towards understanding how users tend to approach problem-solving and might help us tweak the engine to be more user-friendly.

Amjad Yahya has been a tremendous help in this regard, testing the engine in real world scenarios and pointing out well-hidden bugs. Keep it up, Amjad! We believe that the engine should not only be functional, it should also be intuitive to use.

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There you have it! Today marks the start of a new chapter in the development of Torque 2d MIT. Hopefully you are as excited about this progress as we are! Let us know what you think in the comments.

Regards,
Mich