Some news from the frontline...

Quite a long time since the last blog of our current work. First of all, we revamped completely almost all our websites and take benefit of the OnePress community plugin for WordPress which proves to be a very easy and powerful plugin in order to setup quite quickly interactive website.

So our first website being revamped is Darkhand Studio. For the one here remembering of something called V12, Darkhand Studio was our small indie group flag name.

It turned out that quite recently some people asked me again to put back our Dog of Prey demo online, so it is done and you can find it right on Darkhand Studio.

Dog of Prey was beta release in 2002 and was done with one of the earliest release of Torque (starting in fact with V12). Idea came after my best friend and I had a funny multiplay test where both of us were flying a cartoon plane inside V12 going backwards (as there were some camera issue) and colliding with all the environment models. We then thought, why not trying to make a game with cartoon planes? And then started the story of Dog of Prey.

The demo has all the flaws of a first indie game: clumsy controls, lack of finishing and some inconsistency; but also all its enthusiastic spirits: many models and weapons, crazy ideas, cute models and environments... To be noted, that Dog of Prey is running also on Linux platform which was at that time a very nice spirit too. There was never a follow-on of this beta release for some dark reasons. I still do not remove from my todo-list to have DoP running on T3D one day or the other.

You can find also on our website, a technical demo that was done in two days of coding with the main intention to help me get a grasp on T3D architecture. This is a short demonstration of Pylos board game on your PC. There are still ways to improve it, and we have in our design some interesting elements to make the transition from board game to computer game more entertaining.

As we will try new ideas and also put some of our development news on Darkhand Studio blog, do not hesitate to go there from time to time (or subscribed to its RSS news).

What is TorqueLab? You may have recently downloaded some of my T3D / TGEA resources (TheoraCtrl, CurlLib...) and ended-up to this website.

TorqueLab was setup with an intention to share my current development on Torque engines (mainly TGEA and T3D), with a second goal to propose also some of the plugin / extension that we are working on. You will find on this website many ideas, projects.. some will fail and some will succeed. As an example, I did some test to introduce a stereoscopic display canvas (see small picture on the side) which can be used with any dual-input head display to have stereoscopic feeling when playing Torque. This new canvas works only with TGEA for the moment; but as all my devs moved to T3D; I will soon adapt it to T3D as some friends are asking me a demo release to show it to some potential interested users (mainly for virtual scenery exploration).

On TorqueLab, I introduce also some other packages I'm working on with my major effort for the moment on a tactical extension add-on for T3D.

This add-on started in fact just after the first demonstration of Pelorea: Tactical War. After our internal beta release and testing, it was clear that Pelorea controls and the game feelings were not right; and too much close to a clone of Warcraft-like game. Then we decided to change drastically the environment and came-up with this 3D hexagonal map display. When I started to add the game mechanics, I found out that a big part of the code may be re-used for other games similar to Pelorea. I have to say that with my engineer background; what I like most is to have nice architecture; and I tend to restart many times a task if I'm not satisfied with the current solution.

This is how came the idea of working on a Tactical Extension add-on for T3D, where Pelorea: Tactical War is a demonstration on how to use it. You can find on Pelorea website a slideshow with the use-cases / packages of this add-on. For those who do not know Pelorea, you can find some documentation on Scribd (and some of those docs are now hot documents on Scribd).

So, you will find also on TorqueLab description of other projects we are currently tackling like dynamic asset loading, editors... We have to be honest and to say that this will take times to finish all our ideas. As more crazy ideas are popping everyday; it is important for us to keep a clear path to some goals (Pelorea, TEP / Dynamic add-ons), and for the other ones to keep it in our book and when times are available put some effort / work on them.

By the way, I will like to thanks all team members and artists of our small group who are working and dedicated many times to our projects.