It's been a good month or two since Dave Wyand announced the next T3D steering committee, but here we are finally to say hello officially. We've been getting stuck into managing the repository, discussing the future of the engine internally, and writing code, which many of you have noticed. But without some official communication from us it's been a bit of a strange transition; we apologise! Here we finally are to explain ourselves a bit!

1. Who are we?

Many of us have been around this community for some time and you know us well - but it wouldn't feel right to assume we're well-known enough that an introduction is redundant! Without further ado, I present to you the current committee membership in alphabetical order of surname:

Daniel Buckmaster
Daniel has been working with Torque for something like seven years, and while he still hasn't completed an actual game, he's made Walkabout and lots of other cool things besides. He's passionate about making Torque easy to use, especially for scripters, and about improving the quality of existing code.

Thomas Fischer
Thomas is using Torque3D to realize an awesome softbody physics simulator at BeamNG. He's also been spearheading the effort to make Torque 64-bit compatible, and buildable using CMake.

Andrew Mac
Andrew was attracted to Torque by its open source license and history of usage in gaming. He hopes to give back to the community as much as possible and help to keep Torque relevant in today's gaming industry.

Fyodor Osokin
Since the release of TGE 1.4, Fyodor has been digging into the Torque codebase and developing an MMO with it. After all those years his main job is still the same - programming in Torque. Fyodor wants to bring the stability and performance of the engine to the top level.

Jeff Raab
Jeff started using Torque because of its full-source license, and has spent the last ten years learning everything from TorqueScript to modelling, animation and texturing. His goal is to make Torque as powerful as possible for small teams wanting to make big content.

Luis Anton Rebollo
Luis has spent ten years using the Torque engines sporadically, during that time learning everything he knows about programming. He has decided to focus on porting T3D to all possible platforms, and improving rendering and engine performance.

2. What have we been up to?

Pull requests

One of our big goals when we took over as committee was to process the huge backlog of issues and pull requests that had accumulated in the repository. Even ones we couldn't accept, we wanted to at least close or engage with the authors in some fashion. Over 40 issues and PRs have been closed since we took the reins, and we're not planning on slowing down. We've also started categorising issues into milestones; see below for a bit more about that.

Current work

Some very cool work has been going on - Luis, with BeamNG, has been spearheading the work to port the engine to Linux, and has been making fantastic progress. You can read about it here or view the list of current pull requests here.

Thanks to Andrey Syrokomskiy, we have a massive amount of work done towards making Torque 3D 64-bit compatible. Thomas and Andrew have been dismantling his work to break it up and get it integrated and working. Andrew has also been working on updating PhysX to the latest version. Other general improvements include setting up a continuous integration server, which we hope to start using to run automated testing of pull requests once the unit tests are working and separated out.


Luis's Linux port is coming along nicely

The Github wiki

One of the problems new users face when coming to Torque is that they can't find information very effectively. We reckon the Github wiki attached to the main repo is a perfect place to start pulling things together, but till now it hasn't acted as much of a wiki, only being modifiable by GG staff. We've set up another repository for the wiki, so now you can fork the wiki and make pull requests if you want to fix documentation or submit new content! We'll be putting some effort in the next little while into making it a clear and useful place to find help and resources for Torque. The Torque 3D wiki repo.

A new website!

As part of our effort to invigorate the Torque 3D brand, we've developed a new landing page for the engine, which we feel will put us in a good position to spread the word about Torque's bright future. Rather than pointing people to the product page here at GarageGames, we now have an independent location whose content is in the hands of the community (via the Committee, of course).

Just to be clear, this is not a full-fledged community website - it doesn't have forums or blogs or anything like that, all the real community will remain here. Think of it like a front-page for the engine where people can go to get the latest information on the engine, how to get started, etc. It's also the home of the Steering Committee charter, and has information about our contribution policies. And one of my favourite sections lists some of the premier projects currently using Torque 3D. It's obviously not an exhaustive list, so feel free to contact any one of us if you think your project should be up there! Future plans include reformatting that part of the site so we can feature many more user projects on a rotating basis, and provide more than a one-paragraph blurb and a single image for each. Watch this space.

Without further ado: here it is!

3. The future

Version 3.6

The next release of T3D will focus on doing some cleanup and paving the way for future changes. For example, we're working hard on x64 support, as well as getting the engine's unit testing framework ready to be put to serious use. We've also managed to add basic support for building the engine using CMake rather than the Project Generator, which is a great step forwards especially as we consider future cross-platform compatibility.

We'd like to announce that version 3.6 will go into a feature freeze two weeks from today on Monday the 19th of May. That means that no new issues will be assigned to this milestone, and we will focus on completing the existing issues so we can release. You can see the current list of isues schedules to be resolved in 3.6 here.

If you have submitted an issue on GitHub and it hasn't been assigned a milestone yet, please comment on it to bring it to our attention, and we'll see whether it's feasible for us to include. Or, if you're looking for a way to contribute to Torque's future, the list of issues for 3.6 would be a great place to start looking for things to work on! we, the Committee, can't do it all alone! We love to see pull-requests that fix our outstanding issues, whether you or someone else reported it.

Version 3.7

Version 3.7 is shaping up to include lots of improvements to TorqueScript. We're going to finally put serious effort into accepting James Uruqhart's console refactor work, which means completing the work Jeff started by defining some tests for the TorqueScript language itself. Beyond that, the choice of what will be in 3.7 is up to you guys! What would you most like to see? If there's an issue outstanding on GitHub you want to see made a priority, comment on it! We're also paying attention to the topmost items on the UserVoice forum.

And beyond

I recommend you check out our roadmap for some taste of what we'll be working on in the future. We're all keen to see Torque working on more new platforms, and to dust some cobwebs off its code. You've hopefully all heard about Jeff's component system work by now; it's something the whole committee is keen to see become mainstream when it's released.

Version 4.0 will be our first version with breaking 'API' changes, as per our new version number policy. We've got all sorts of things we'd like to do - from things as trivial as moving to 4-spaces-per-tab, to massive overhauls like introducing modular script templates closer to T2D's style, or making more use of the STL in the engine source.

4. Final words

We're all really excited about embarking on this new era in Torque's history. As always, we'll be around to answer any questions you have, discuss and debate - post here or in the forums! I'd also like to point everyone at a this thread which contains a bit of musing about the Comittee's current policies and thinking.

Thanks for reading!