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First T3D MIT Committee Meeting

by Eric Preisz · 09/24/2012 (1:25 pm) · 17 comments








First Committee Meeting




static.garagegames.com/static/upload/emp-59817/96478475_500px.png


A few weeks before we made the Torque 3D MIT announcement, there was a thread post regarding the direction of T3D. We hadn't made the announcement and we weren't yet prepped to do so. All I could say was that there was a "big announcement" coming and while I was being vague, I did promise the most transparent development process in the history of GarageGames. I don't think we could be any more transparent then putting all development out in the open and allowing anyone to view it. It's a very liberating feeling.

Today we had our first post-launch steering committee meeting. As you may have read in an earlier blog, Scott, David Montgomery-Blake and I are acting committee members and Dave Wyand is taking a full time position. We have decided not to make too many decisions now because our first goal is to replace the acting positions with full time committee members.

In the meantime, I will be posting all meeting notes in the T3D Beginner forums (so that everyone feels welcome to comment). If the committee has a specific question that they want to ask everyone, we will post those threads at the same time as the committee notes. I will use start the subject with the following convention: Committee Meeting: and Committee Topic: ? Note: Please don't think that the Committee Topics are the only feedback we are interested in…they are just specific questions we'd like to pose to the community directly.

I will post links to the forum posts below, but before I do, I have two requests that the committee asked me to address. The first, is that the deadline for submission to be a candidate for the Steering Committee is October 12th. Please contact Dave Wyand for consideration (davew@garagegames.com). We will be picking the committee shortly thereafter. The second topic is an explanation of Development vs. Master branches which I will post below.

Committee Meeting: 9/24/2012
Committee Topic: Issue Management on GitHub

Development vs. Master

We will be developing Torque 3D in a public forum. To make this possible, there will be at least two branches (sometimes there could be three or more depending on how we work) that we will work from. The two primary branches are Dev and Master.

Master is the branch you should fork if reliability is your biggest concern. Before something is moved into master, it will pass some a level of quality assurance before it is deemed the master. Some people call this branch stable.

Development is the branch you should fork if you are more interested in the latest changes. Approved changes that are merged or developed in branch may not be fully vetted, tested, or final. It's not suggested that you work or fork from Dev unless you are a confidence programmer who is able to navigate code that might be broken, half implemented, or buggy.

About the author

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#1
09/24/2012 (1:48 pm)
If anybody is confused the Dev repository branch is actually labelled Development on github. :)

Edit: Eric has updated his post to resolve the confusion.
#2
09/25/2012 (11:13 am)
Just got to say, I already love this ! One immediate benefit is how lean this build is now.

It was a 1.2GB download for T3D v1_2 pre MIT ... and its obviously been cleaned up, etc ... as now its currently only about 335mb, total.

-- for those of us on limited bandwidth, it makes a huge difference. Especially when you pay for each GB downloaded ...

Cant wait to see it running on Mac OS X!! ;)
#3
09/25/2012 (5:42 pm)
They've also removed a ton of assets ;)
#4
09/25/2012 (6:09 pm)
Those assets just got in the way of my kick assets, anyway.

Edit: Um, that wasn't meant to sound as rude as it did. I just wanted to say "kick assets" in context.
#5
09/25/2012 (8:08 pm)
Quote:kick assets
I see what you did there... *squinty look* :D
#6
09/26/2012 (9:11 am)
Don't forget that you can still access the China Town template by going through the FPS Tutorial.

- Dave
#7
09/26/2012 (10:45 pm)
Is the China Town template also covered under the MIT license?
#8
09/27/2012 (7:41 am)
Yes. I changed all of the header information in the download available here.
#9
09/27/2012 (8:44 am)
Cool, thanks! :)
#10
09/27/2012 (9:14 am)
Wow! This is fantastic news. With out a doubt this is a huge move, and the best open source game engine in history.

My biggest concern is what does this mean to Garage Games as a company? How will the company generate revenue and maintain the employees?
#11
09/27/2012 (9:15 am)
I downloaded it again, but I still find no license in it though. The files modification dates says 2012-09-19 13:16.
#12
09/27/2012 (9:17 am)
It's in all of the source and script files at the top.
#13
09/27/2012 (9:22 am)
@Britton
Your concerns are covered in Eric's blog here.
#14
09/27/2012 (9:26 am)
Yeah, I see it now. Sorry for being stupid. Is it just the source and scripts that's MIT and not the assets though?
#15
09/27/2012 (11:08 am)
Cire@ Read the other recent posts as well, all your questions have been previously answered - multiple times.
#16
09/27/2012 (11:18 am)
Ok, I will. I apologize for asking about this when it was already answered.
#17
09/27/2012 (2:40 pm)
@Britton - We are going to add video pre-roll to your tsunami thread. That will cover at least three employees :) (just kidding...but I did do the math just in case).