On Cursors and Code, and Mickey Mouse
by Dusty Monk · 07/08/2008 (12:02 pm) · 2 comments
So summer vacation was a blast. If you're planning a family trip to Disney World, I have two recommendations I would absolutely make:
1.) Wait until you're children are at least 5 or older. Seriously. If you're like us, and you try to do four Disney Parks and one Water Park in five days, you do *not* want to be pushing anyone, or carrying anyone by the end of the day. Plus, your children will be old enough to actually enjoy and remember the occasion.
2.) And this is a MUST -- Buy this guide: The Unofficial Guide to Disney World This thing is basically a Jame's Leveling Guide to Walt Disney World. Seriously! Worth it's weight in gold in giving you the the *best* plan for managing each trip to each of the Disney parks. Crowds at Disney are impressive. But if you manage your trip, you can totally still beat them -- even in peak season hours. But if you just walk into the park around 11:00 am all wide-eyed and open mouthed.. well, expect EPIC FAIL.
So upon returning, it was time to integrate Torque 1.7.1 into my project. If you recall, I'd just upgraded from TGE 1.5.2 to TGEA 1.7.0, and lots of things were pretty broken. Before I could finish though. TGEA 1.7.1 was released, so before I spent too much time fixing things, I figured I'd integrate that version as well.
It went.. surprisingly well. The entire project was integrated in less than half a day, which, as those of you that have done integrations before know, is not too shabby. One of the main reasons I think things went as smoothly as they did was that this time, when I set up my project in perforce, I went to special lengths to set things up to facilitate integration later on. And, surprisingly enough, it worked! It worked so well, that I thought it might be useful to share. I've leeched plenty from this community, so I figured it was time to give something back.
So while I know it's not terribly sexy, I've submitted a resource on setting up a Perforce depot to work with TGEA. I have no idea how many people may or may not find it useful. But I do firmly believe two things. One -- You absolutely should be using some form of revision control, and two -- the decisions you make early with how you set things up will greatly affect how easy (or difficult) it will be to integrate changes later.
The resource is still awaiting approval, so once it's approved I'll add a link here pointing you to it.
And here it is: Setting up a Perforce Depot to work with TGEA
Enjoy, and if you find it useful, please rate it/pass the word!
So once the integration was complete, well heh.. all my bugs didn't magically go away. I know, right? Go figure. The first thing I tackled was my software cursor, which had mysteriously disappeared. Big thanks go out to Rene Damm for posting up mods to the engine in this thread for returning the use of software cursors whenever you want them. Thanks Rene!!!
And Dear GG - Please integrate this (or something like it) in a future release. Lots of us are still making games that would like a software cursor. A global flag enabling or disabling such is exactly the kind of things that makes it easy to do. Love, Devon.
That's all I have for today. I fixed lots of other bugs, including porting the texture layering system over to use the new TGEA Material system. I also found and fixed a small bug in TSMaterialList::setMaterial. I'll post up something on this later, but I've expended my blog breath for today.
Cheers!
Devon.
1.) Wait until you're children are at least 5 or older. Seriously. If you're like us, and you try to do four Disney Parks and one Water Park in five days, you do *not* want to be pushing anyone, or carrying anyone by the end of the day. Plus, your children will be old enough to actually enjoy and remember the occasion.
2.) And this is a MUST -- Buy this guide: The Unofficial Guide to Disney World This thing is basically a Jame's Leveling Guide to Walt Disney World. Seriously! Worth it's weight in gold in giving you the the *best* plan for managing each trip to each of the Disney parks. Crowds at Disney are impressive. But if you manage your trip, you can totally still beat them -- even in peak season hours. But if you just walk into the park around 11:00 am all wide-eyed and open mouthed.. well, expect EPIC FAIL.
So upon returning, it was time to integrate Torque 1.7.1 into my project. If you recall, I'd just upgraded from TGE 1.5.2 to TGEA 1.7.0, and lots of things were pretty broken. Before I could finish though. TGEA 1.7.1 was released, so before I spent too much time fixing things, I figured I'd integrate that version as well.
It went.. surprisingly well. The entire project was integrated in less than half a day, which, as those of you that have done integrations before know, is not too shabby. One of the main reasons I think things went as smoothly as they did was that this time, when I set up my project in perforce, I went to special lengths to set things up to facilitate integration later on. And, surprisingly enough, it worked! It worked so well, that I thought it might be useful to share. I've leeched plenty from this community, so I figured it was time to give something back.
So while I know it's not terribly sexy, I've submitted a resource on setting up a Perforce depot to work with TGEA. I have no idea how many people may or may not find it useful. But I do firmly believe two things. One -- You absolutely should be using some form of revision control, and two -- the decisions you make early with how you set things up will greatly affect how easy (or difficult) it will be to integrate changes later.
The resource is still awaiting approval, so once it's approved I'll add a link here pointing you to it.
And here it is: Setting up a Perforce Depot to work with TGEA
Enjoy, and if you find it useful, please rate it/pass the word!
So once the integration was complete, well heh.. all my bugs didn't magically go away. I know, right? Go figure. The first thing I tackled was my software cursor, which had mysteriously disappeared. Big thanks go out to Rene Damm for posting up mods to the engine in this thread for returning the use of software cursors whenever you want them. Thanks Rene!!!
And Dear GG - Please integrate this (or something like it) in a future release. Lots of us are still making games that would like a software cursor. A global flag enabling or disabling such is exactly the kind of things that makes it easy to do. Love, Devon.
That's all I have for today. I fixed lots of other bugs, including porting the texture layering system over to use the new TGEA Material system. I also found and fixed a small bug in TSMaterialList::setMaterial. I'll post up something on this later, but I've expended my blog breath for today.
Cheers!
Devon.
Employee Kenneth Holst