Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more

It's time, yet again, to brush off the cobwebs and give the GarageGames kit another go.

I must admit I haven't had a great deal of success in the past and at first glance it doesn't really look like much has changed. I'm still finding it difficult to work out exactly what needs to be done to install and setup an environment for Torque development; and the doco still seems pretty sketchy.

This time I'm going to embrace the open information age and prepare some information that may help others to follow the path I am now taking. I really hope this could be a catalyst for some new content on this website:

I've purchased a few of the GarageGames products over the years but I'm going to focus on getting a TorqueX Pro, TorqueX Builder and Platformer Starter Kit environment up and running. Running some code on my XBox360 seems like a pretty sweet thing to do.

This is my experience.


Getting Started
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From the GarageGames home page to the TorqueX pages all I found is a link to XNA, Visual Studio and the XNA creators club in the system requirements section. I was a bit lost/directionless. In turns out that the XNA creators club has the best information that I found.

- follow the link to the XNA creators club website (http://creators.xna.com/) and select the 'create' icon on the left side (you can also get to this through the home menu, then the quick start guide, then create).
- follow the instructions to download XNA, Visual Studio and the service pack.
- I found it best to login as a user with administrator privileges before doing any of these installations
- install Visual Studio
- install the service pack (and then Vista update, if necessary)
- install XNA v2
- install TorqueX v2

If you are using Vista, like me, then there are a few things to be careful about. I am using Visual Studio 2005 Pro; I'm not sure if this happens with the express edition. During the Visual Studio install Vista will tell you that Visual Studio has compatibility problems. Download the Vista update from the link that is provided.

When you finish installing Visual Studio go ahead and install the service pack. Make sure you run the installation program 'as administrator'. When that is installed then you need to install the Vista update. Once again make sure you run the installation program 'as administrator'. Finally run Windows Update to pickup any security updates. I had another 2 that needed to be installed.

I installed TorqueX v2 Pro; I'm not sure if this happens in the other versions. When the installation finished and I started Visual Studio my fist show stopper hit me. Only 2 game templates are installed: starter game 2d and starter game 3d.

This is definitely going to slow me down. I've checked the forums and the problem seems to be known by a lot of people but I haven't found any solutions. I've posted a couple messages to see if someone knows how to solve this problem. Hopefully I'll be able to continue my 'getting started' blog soon - cross your fingers; but don't hold your breath...