Torque 3D Development - Light Rays & More!
by Brett Seyler · 05/09/2009 (6:23 am) · 64 comments
I hope everyone is well on their way to enjoying the weekend...working on games of course! There's a lot of new stuff popping up in Torque 3D since the beta. First, we have Logan Foster's post about creating Undercity for the FPS Genre Kit. Most of you probably know Logan from the community, Max Gaming, and their game Lore, currently on InstantAction.
For people not yet in the beta or Torque 3D fourms, I wanted to post a little about this level, and some video of it. The first video was captured by Max Gaming gaming about a month ago. The second video (watch in HD) is a fly through of the level as it looks today. The style and texturing have changed some, but what you'll notice most is that the shadow quality has improved dramatically.
Undercity, 1 month ago
Undercity, today
What else is new? Last week we also had Tom Spilman's post about Ross Pawley getting a Light Ray screen space shader working earlier in the week. The whole Sickhead team has put in an incredible amount of effort into Torque 3D, and it shows. I thought I'd take some time here to share a little more info with you about Ross and his work on Torque 3D.
Ross' Bio
"Prior to joining the team at Sickhead Games, I worked in the general business software/system industry. At Sickhead during the past year and a half I've worked mainly on the Be The Dinosaur project, in which I wrote much of the PhysX implementation, an inverse kinematics system and various miscellany."
"I've been working on a new decal system, improvements to the physics plugin system (we ported many of our internal PhysX systems to be part of a PhysX plugin) as well as a new system for the Player class which allows the Player to work with a given physics plugin automagically. I also created a new "noise painter" tool for the Torque 3D Terrain."
I put together a short video showing this new Light Ray shader as captured in Undercity and Warrior Camp.
Cool stuff, no? That's not all. Lara put together another fine video last week showing how the new Material Editor can be used to quickly tune content inside Torque 3D. Some of you who lurk our Vimeo Channel have already found this, and racked up a few hundred views. For the rest of you, enjoy...
Gaslight Studios' Dave Calabrese did the original work on Torque 3D's Material Editor, and Steven Garcia's been tweaking and tuning it for the last few weeks. More about Dave...
Dave's Bio
"I've worked in the game industry for over 7 years, having worked on a number of recognized projects including award winning titles and console games. Now I'm working as producer and president of my own production company, Gaslight Studios. I'm also continuing to produce top quality games and development tools alongside my team of engineers, developers and artists."
"The new Material Editor for Torque will allow an artist to quickly create materials for their game without ever touching a line of code. Preview materials on the included standard mesh shapes or load your DTS models, see a list of materials used on that model and edit using all of the included material properties of Torque 3D - all in real time, all within your game. Materials are categorized for ease of organization, and the editor is designed to be backwards-compatible with your existing materials.cs files."
That's all for this week. We should see Beta 2 here pretty soon. Please keep the great feedback you've provided on Beta 1 so far going. It's a big help.
More development blogs to come. This is post #19.
Torque 3D development blogs:
- Post #1 - Kickoff
- Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
- Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
- Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
- Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
- Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
- Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
- Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
- Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
- Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
- Post #11 - Depth of Field
- Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
- Post #13 - Soft Particles
- Post #14 - World Editor
- Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
- Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
- Post #17 - River & Road Editors
- Post #18 - Beta is UP!
- Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, Material Editor
- Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
- Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
- Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
- Post #23 - pureLIGHT
- Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
- Post #25 - Beta 3!
- Post #26 - Coming Soon!
About the author
Since 2007, I've done my best to steer Torque's development and brand toward the best opportunities in games middleware.
#2
05/09/2009 (7:25 am)
So i'm confused by lumas video. Does that mean we can only have 4 textures on an object?
#3
An object can use as many textures as you need. One for each polygon, if you want. The material video shows how to use layered textures, and the "+" box can be used to add more layers if you really need.
BTW, the material editor really needs a picker tool.
05/09/2009 (7:32 am)
@Neill:An object can use as many textures as you need. One for each polygon, if you want. The material video shows how to use layered textures, and the "+" box can be used to add more layers if you really need.
BTW, the material editor really needs a picker tool.
#4
05/09/2009 (8:23 am)
Two big thumbs up! Excellent work guys and gals. 
#5
05/09/2009 (8:50 am)
light rays look awesome!
#6
05/09/2009 (10:41 am)
Looking good. Can't wait to see more :) 
#7
05/09/2009 (10:59 am)
Nice! And the clouds look good too! 
#8
05/09/2009 (12:24 pm)
Amazing...glad Torque is now up to par with the other "big-time" engines out there. 
#9
Best of all the T3D team just keeps pushing out even more cooler and unexpected bonus items, so if anyone that has worked on the T3D stuff is reading this, you have my thanks for a job well done! Torque3D is going to be an incredible engine at the end of the day.
@Brett,
I hadn't really done a before and after comparison between the two versions of the level in quite some time, it was quite eye opening even to me to see how much it has advanced in such a short time thanks to all the feedback it has been given and how the new tech has really helped push it forward.
Great job on the video BTW!
05/09/2009 (12:28 pm)
As an artist I have to say I really love Torque3D. The sky is quite literally the limit for what I can do to make an incredibly awesome world that meets the vision that I have in mind with it, so much so that we are even playing around here on the side on our own private demo idea with T3D. Best of all the T3D team just keeps pushing out even more cooler and unexpected bonus items, so if anyone that has worked on the T3D stuff is reading this, you have my thanks for a job well done! Torque3D is going to be an incredible engine at the end of the day.
@Brett,
I hadn't really done a before and after comparison between the two versions of the level in quite some time, it was quite eye opening even to me to see how much it has advanced in such a short time thanks to all the feedback it has been given and how the new tech has really helped push it forward.
Great job on the video BTW!
#10
It is a pleasure to work with all the talent on Torque 3D. I'm really looking forward to Beta 2 getting out!!! :)
05/09/2009 (1:09 pm)
Best Torque 3D blog yet, and that is saying something!!! Very cool videos!!! I boot up Undercity every few days to gawk at improvements... awesome work! :)It is a pleasure to work with all the talent on Torque 3D. I'm really looking forward to Beta 2 getting out!!! :)
#11
@Logan: Thanks. It's really fun to see how quickly and effectively you're incorporating new tech and suggestions on the style too. Watching what good artists can do is always fun =) It's really coming along.
05/09/2009 (1:45 pm)
The scatter sky stuff (animated clouds) was done by James Ford. First I saw of it was about a week ago, and it already looks pretty good. @Logan: Thanks. It's really fun to see how quickly and effectively you're incorporating new tech and suggestions on the style too. Watching what good artists can do is always fun =) It's really coming along.
#12
Anyway, props to DaveW for adding this stuff in.
05/09/2009 (2:01 pm)
I've been meaning to add another thing too...that flythough is manual, not scripted. Torque 3D has a bunch of new camera modes that Dave Wyand created. There's standard free cam, player cam, and player 3rd person, just like in TGEA, but Dave added an option for ease-in / ease-out camera movement ("smooth camera" in the drop down) and an option that combines this with smooth camera look ("smooth rotation" in the drop down). The latter too aren't very popular for editing with most people, but I used this last one for the flythough stuff and it makes it SO much more natural. Previously, the only way to get this kind of result was to script smooth camera paths, as was done in Barricade. Anyway, props to DaveW for adding this stuff in.
#13
05/09/2009 (4:21 pm)
All looking very nice. Appreciation to Ross for the terrain noise tool, I've been having so much fun just playing around with it. 
#14
You are talking about different camera styles...will there also be an option for an RPG style control scheme like what AFX offers, because something like a few different camera/control options instead of just FPS style would make T3D AWESOME...mind you it already is!
From Max
"Torque 3D just keeps getting better!"
05/09/2009 (4:53 pm)
@BrettYou are talking about different camera styles...will there also be an option for an RPG style control scheme like what AFX offers, because something like a few different camera/control options instead of just FPS style would make T3D AWESOME...mind you it already is!
From Max
"Torque 3D just keeps getting better!"
#15
Thanks,
Colin
05/09/2009 (4:56 pm)
"Torque 3D's new Persistence Manager"? I have no idea what this is. Did I miss the discussion about this or are details still yet to come?Thanks,
Colin
#16
GG employee (Michael Perry) also referenced new camera stuff (http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/17169/1#comment_form), but not any detail there.
I am also very interested in seeing what is the cleanest way to do a action-RPG (Diablo-2 style) camera/control and an RTS-style (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer series, etc) camera/control. That post I referenced shows one method... But I'm not sure yet if it's cleaner to do it with this new Torque 3D camera stuff instead.
I'm definitely excited to either (find out more about the new Torque 3D camera stuff) and/or (just try implementing that add-on Advanced Camera tutorial thing)
05/09/2009 (5:33 pm)
@Maximillian (and Brett)GG employee (Michael Perry) also referenced new camera stuff (http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/17169/1#comment_form), but not any detail there.
I am also very interested in seeing what is the cleanest way to do a action-RPG (Diablo-2 style) camera/control and an RTS-style (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer series, etc) camera/control. That post I referenced shows one method... But I'm not sure yet if it's cleaner to do it with this new Torque 3D camera stuff instead.
I'm definitely excited to either (find out more about the new Torque 3D camera stuff) and/or (just try implementing that add-on Advanced Camera tutorial thing)
#18
Entirely based on the video (from Lara) in this post. Excellent tutorial video - made it easy to get that part working :-), and shows off the work-flow to people who currently don't have Torque 3D access. And I love the new lighting stuff, huge graphics improvement from TGEA... And also new materials editor and new Torque 3D editor, huge improvements from TGEA usability/flow too. (Gotta do the animations part next) :-)
05/09/2009 (7:05 pm)
@Edward: I've only skimmed the actual text doc so far. The first thing I actually am doing right now with Torque 3D, is just doing a simple for import a 3d model dts and its dsq animations (I did this earlier with the TGEA Demo), so I can send the model artist a screen shot.Entirely based on the video (from Lara) in this post. Excellent tutorial video - made it easy to get that part working :-), and shows off the work-flow to people who currently don't have Torque 3D access. And I love the new lighting stuff, huge graphics improvement from TGEA... And also new materials editor and new Torque 3D editor, huge improvements from TGEA usability/flow too. (Gotta do the animations part next) :-)
#19
05/09/2009 (9:17 pm)
Wow. Looks amazing, this is looking more and more closer to the C4 engine or next to the big time game engines out there. Now, get a new SKY System!!! Maybe dynamic clouds? oh and maybe normal map terrains? =) keep the good work up guys. 
#20
05/09/2009 (11:41 pm)
Simply amazing.
Torque Owner Taylor Petrick