Big Update to TGEA on the way!

Hi GarageGames Community! I know I have been awfully quiet recently but trust me...it was worth it!

Ever since I handed off community management to the supremely capable hands of David Blake, I have been jamming away on the next big update to Torque. As many of you know, we spent much of 2007 merging the Torque C++ engine products into one code base which we've been referring to as Torque Juggernaut. There are big opportunities here to update both TGEA and TGE. I focused on TGEA 1.0.3 as a start here, but as you'll see below, we've made some *big* moves.

Huge credit goes to Clark and his team working on the core engine for all their hard work on Juggernaut over the past year. Juggernaut includes lots of updates, bug fixes, and feature additions to the Torque line up. What we're looking to release here will look a lot like TGEA, but it's really another stepping stone to our longer term goal of a fully componentized Torque Engine.

TGEA...more is on the way
What you'll see:

All the features of TGEA 1.0.3 PLUS 99% of TGE 1.5.2 PLUS:

• 1. A brand new completely abstracted sound system (SFX) with a DirectSound and OpenAL implementation (credit to Tom Spilman).
• 2. Major reworks of GFX layers and the addition of a D3D8 layer
• 3. All of the rendering objects should now support fixed function fallbacks for non-shadered video cards
• 4. Introduction of the Project Generator - a system that automates generating up-to-date Visual Studio projects files based on which "modules" of code you want to include
• 5. Significant directory reorganizations with an eye towards making it easier to work with for both experienced and new users
• 6. A ton of bugfixes done by the internal development team as they worked towards a fully componentized version of Torque
• 7. Lots of refactoring and general code cleanup
• 8. Port of some of the missing TGE classes including Lightning, fxShapeReplicator, and RigidShape
• 9. The famous Ben Garney's OPCODE polysoup collision implementation
• 10. Support for multiple legacy terrain tiles (including full editor support) - this should make building a paging terrain manager for massive environments a lot easier and will support realtime editing

Multiple Terrain Tiles (with full editor support)

• 11. Ports of the TGE demo and starter.fps with performance tweaks

Stronghold (starter.fps)
TGE Feature Demo

• 12. A couple unreleased demos! A small team is slaving away to bring you a never-before-seen feature demo that will knock off those socks.

Tim Aste's Forge demo

Shhhh... early yet, but this new demo is going to be BEAUTIFUL

• 13. Previously unreleased Player models bringing the total count up to 6!

Release will include SpaceOrc, TorqueOrc, Elf, Forge guy, Spacesuit guy, and BoomBot

• 14. Clipmapping support for legacy terrain allows higher resolution terrain textures and gives a general performance boost
• 15. Jeff Faust's fantastic AFX Kit should be updated for compatibility with this new version and he's already brought over most of the excellent bugfixes he posted on the TGEA forums including multiple particles per emitter
• 16. Reworked Material system is easier to use and performs better
• 17. Improved functionality in the Mission Editor with work from Dave Wyand, with a few new features that make it much easier to use
• 18. GUI Editor improvements making it easier to use
• 19. TGB-style offline docs and tutorials for better / faster accessibility

TGB-style Offline Docs

• 20. Abstracted Lighting allows you to plug in different lighting systems of your choice. Current built in options include:
• a) Basic Lighting System (really simple)
• b) John Kabus' Synapse Gaming Lighting System

I wanted to greatly smooth the transition from TGE to TGEA, so making sure that TGEA supports nearly all of the same features (no OpenGL or Mac support) you have come to expect from TGE, converting over most of the TGE content and mission, and including a lot of tools and functionality that will greatly ease porting a pre-existing TGE project have all been a primary focus. Right now this update will automatically handle unmapped textures and converting older file formats of things like TerrainBlocks and Waterblocks. I have also spent time working on pulling together the best of the Torque documentation and getting it far more organized. The goal here is to make getting started with this next release of TGEA to be comparable to getting started with TGE, if not even easier. TGEA is still a powerful and complex game engine but we're working hard to make it a lot more approachable.

At this point I am sure that there are a few questions on everyone's mind!

How much will this cost? This is a free update for TGEA owners. It doesn't get much better than that!

Will this include OpenGL? Sadly, no, this update will not include OpenGL. All of the work we have done on OpenGL is still not ready for release.

When will this update be ready? As always, this is a hard question to answer. GarageGames is more committed to high quality releases than ever before so this update will not go out the door until it is polished and ready. The Associates are already participating in a closed Beta and have been giving great help and feedback. I expect to have a fairly complete version of it demoing at GDC next month but I will not hesitate to put in a couple of extra weeks on documentation and bugfixing if it needs it (please email me if you would like to help with docs). There is still a lot of ground to cover but we are making rapid progress on it!

Hopefully everyone reading this is as excited as I am about this update! Be sure to go check out the awesome things that the game teams are doing with it in Fallen Empire: Legions

Fallen Empire: Legions