EPO Update #3
by Keith "Kilo" Watt · 06/26/2007 (7:37 pm) · 1 comments
As those who have been following my weekly blog know, I've spent most of the past month working on a course designed to teach the basics of mission design to new Torque users (both TGE and TGEA). It's been an interesting experience and very useful to gather all of my notes on the various aspects of the mission file into a form that is actually usable to someone else. I've always known that the best way to cement your own knowledge is teach someone else -- it forces you to organize your thoughts into a coherent whole. It's one of the challenges that originally drew me to teaching in the first place.
So, that's tying up most of my time into mid-July, but it's time well spent. Having all my notes in one place will save huge amounts of work (particularly in looking up valid parameter ranges, a big debugging gotcha). It's also the sort of work I do for a living, so it's been nice to be able to get paid to work on game-related material full time! Stay tuned for more on the course in next month's update (or follow my weekly blog at www.ExodusProject.com/EPOblog for sneak peak updates).
As far as the game goes, I'm moving away from using TITAS at this point, but since I'm still in the content development stage, I'm not really tied into one particular package yet. I'm still considering using the new Torque MMO Kit from Prairie Games, but of course without the source code I couldn't do everything I want to be able to do -- nor am I certain I could do it anyway since I don't fully understand how much of the TMK is in Python and how much is in Torque. Still, for rapid prototyping -- which is perfect in a contest situation such as this -- TMK may be a viable option. It's almost as easy as Realm Crafter and slightly more flexible, so it definitely has some potential. I'll likely "roll my own" and start from scratch with the production version, though. Being able to demonstrate the basic game mechanics with TMK may be a good overall strategy, but it all depends on when the "professional" version (i.e., the source code) is finally released.
Stay tuned!
So, that's tying up most of my time into mid-July, but it's time well spent. Having all my notes in one place will save huge amounts of work (particularly in looking up valid parameter ranges, a big debugging gotcha). It's also the sort of work I do for a living, so it's been nice to be able to get paid to work on game-related material full time! Stay tuned for more on the course in next month's update (or follow my weekly blog at www.ExodusProject.com/EPOblog for sneak peak updates).
As far as the game goes, I'm moving away from using TITAS at this point, but since I'm still in the content development stage, I'm not really tied into one particular package yet. I'm still considering using the new Torque MMO Kit from Prairie Games, but of course without the source code I couldn't do everything I want to be able to do -- nor am I certain I could do it anyway since I don't fully understand how much of the TMK is in Python and how much is in Torque. Still, for rapid prototyping -- which is perfect in a contest situation such as this -- TMK may be a viable option. It's almost as easy as Realm Crafter and slightly more flexible, so it definitely has some potential. I'll likely "roll my own" and start from scratch with the production version, though. Being able to demonstrate the basic game mechanics with TMK may be a good overall strategy, but it all depends on when the "professional" version (i.e., the source code) is finally released.
Stay tuned!
About the author
Community Manager Michael Perry
ZombieShortbus
As tech lead for our current project, I'm exactly where you are in regard to the new Torque MMO Kit from Prairie Games. Sure, it would be fun to play around with it right now, but without the full source code I feel like I'd just be "spinning tires" when I could be focusing on other accessible parts of the project.