What was of those guys working on the RTS thingie?

Since a long time I, along two friends, James and Guy, have been working around the RTS Starter Kit.

Using community resources and much effort of our own, we ported the kit to the sucesive iterations of Torque. Point releases or version changes were no different, we worked on the 1.4 to 1.5 for Win and Mac. Then we entered the ultradimensional lands of TGEA, changing versions again and again, dancing with us in the infinitum of codebase ports... I dont know how the guys never piuk, because I were very near to, more than once.

In the middle of the RTS vortex, several projects of our own raised and fall as ocean waves, dancing in front of us like sirens... but we always had the kit as the main -and sometimes hatred- priority.


Eventually, we finished the RTS kit port to TGEA, version 1.8.1...
...But it got never released, lost among piles of tasks and papers around the new IAC ownership and the laberynthic walls of QA. And I think probbably the new company would have a good headache deciding what to do, given that -even when we desisted from any money from it- being done without contract or entity, would mean an administrative mess.

By then, of course, a new totally revamped engine was at full sail: T3D.

All over again... This time though, was more like a tabula rasa, as we decided that a port from the old one would not make sense anymore. So we engaged the heavy duty of thinking generally (making technology feels far more mentally exhausting than making games, and far less funny). Guy was the big architect and magician behind the heavy work, and James was always playing with models and determining the content for the demo missions, calculating polys, angles of vision, and creating universes while navigating big canyons on the maps.

Time passed, and in the middle other projects and contracts came on, but coming back again and again to the same thing (for years now) resulted really tiresome. We were around 40-50% done (that being all the functionality of previous versions, and more) of what we wanted to do with the Kit.

From TGE to T3D
The middle of the river is a dangerous place... you dont see the shore behind you, nor the one in front of you; if you dispair, you'll be in trouble.

Also the GG turning into IAC, made the bussiness model we had planned changed from one meeting to another, and with each change, the whole thing changed shape and strategy... Also, the lack of testing the codebase was having... a beta release would mean a major distress, and we were not sure of having the strenght.

Long story short, we basically took off from the thing. Not tottally cancelled, but neither with any concrete plans. I needed sometime to reconsider even if this was my thing, and the guys also took a good rest of it.

In my exile, I felt more and more the calling to come back, but with a focus more on games than in the kit. I fantasized with other frameworks, but, truth be told, all the work, effort and experience put into Torque was not to be thrown overboard.

An old game idea I wrote down once, started to grow in mind, and I decided to come back from the ashes. Like in those old and ugly action movies, I started to look from my camarades... And one by one, they answered the call, just because like me, they are mentally disturbed.

So here we are, and this are owr plans:

• To take the current codebase of the future RTS Kit for T3D and make a good game with it.
• Get rich and famous.
• From that solid and proven codebase, distil a worthy RTS kit.
• Get rich and famous again.

(all of course, before December 21th, 2012)


About the game to be, you'll probably know in the future, but for now, I just wanted to let you folks know the huge work James and Guy put into this for the last years, and how much I've enjoyed to work with them.

And also, that we are still fighting the way into the realization of our projects with Torque, no matter how bad the storm can look out there. We trust our hearts, and we trust in this community.

Thanks to this community, I had the honor to meet James and Guy, and many others like them. Long Life To GG.