Something to look forward to...

Hey, guys. I realized I haven't written a .plan in a little bit, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to let you guys in on a little bit of what I've been working on. And this time: more pictures and less complaining about being sleepy! First up, the top-secret project I've been working on...

A lot of you guys in the community know about it already, or at least know it's been in the works, but it's just about out the door so it seems safe enough to officially let you guys in on it. Without further adieu...


That's right, a full-blown platformer starter kit for Torque X. Too good to be true? Yes! But it's still true, and it's pretty sweet if I do say so myself. Some of the highlights of the kit are: full state-based platformer physics, pickup and inventory systems, actor control layer and AI foundation, a simple checkpoint system, parallax scroller manager, a simplified sound management system that's integrated with the actor animation manager, a nearly-full-game demo built on the framework (art and sound assets included), and of course full source.


For those of you are already in the throes of Torque X development, rest assured that all the functionality in the kit is put together using that sweet TX component system we've all come to know and love. Starting a new platformer project will be as easy as selecting it from a list.


Other than the starter kit, I've also been working on polishing off some sweet feature additions to the 2D side of Torque X for the post-1.0 release. Most exciting are the additions of cell and key materials to Torque X, the addition of TGB-like animation controls for the camera, and the expansion of some of the animated sprite controls.


Above you can see a static sprite, tile layer, animated sprite, and several particle effects all using the same celled material.


And here you can see the results after a few calls to the camera to animate its position, zoom and rotation.

Unfortunately the changes to animated sprites all have to do with how they animate, so pictures wouldn't really show off the changes very well. Basically, you'll be able to interrupt an animation with another temporary animation and let it resume from where it was (or at any point) once the new animation is over. You can also queue up an unlimited number of animations on a single sprite. It's also possible to generate a cue to represent the current animation state of a sprite at any time which you can later use to reload that animation as it was being played.

That's about all I can really talk about for now. If you want a closer look at the platformer kit, there's a somewhat boring video on youtube of some out-of-box level building with the kit slightly sped up to be slightly less boring.