Plan for Brian Ramage
by Brian Ramage · 06/05/2004 (11:34 pm) · 16 comments
Driver hell arggh! It's frustrating to see people have problems with the TSE demo since we spent quite a bit of time testing it to make sure it would run on as many cards as we could get a hold of. We even held the release for a couple of weeks until a crash we were getting with the ATI 8500&9000 cards was resolved by the Catalyst 4.5 drivers.
It's hard though since we really have no QA, it's pretty much just Ben and I testing things and bugging other members of GG for their machines to test on, or in one case trading an old nVIDIA 5800 FX board for Josh's roomate's crashing ATI 8500! I'm not sure that was such a great deal for him though becase he got the notorius "leaf blower" version of the card and he may go deaf from using it over long periods of time ;)
All in all the early release seems to have gone pretty well. We're going to be very very busy the next few months handling all of the feature requests from the community and trying to complete new ones. Somewhere in there I've got to find time to better document the new code that's gone in too ;)
I'm once again stunned at the depth and diversity of the community. It's just amazing and cool to see novices side by side with cutting edge professionals. It's always a blast to see top guys stop in and give feedback and even help out from time to time.
Thanks everyone for your enthusiasm and support!
It's hard though since we really have no QA, it's pretty much just Ben and I testing things and bugging other members of GG for their machines to test on, or in one case trading an old nVIDIA 5800 FX board for Josh's roomate's crashing ATI 8500! I'm not sure that was such a great deal for him though becase he got the notorius "leaf blower" version of the card and he may go deaf from using it over long periods of time ;)
All in all the early release seems to have gone pretty well. We're going to be very very busy the next few months handling all of the feature requests from the community and trying to complete new ones. Somewhere in there I've got to find time to better document the new code that's gone in too ;)
I'm once again stunned at the depth and diversity of the community. It's just amazing and cool to see novices side by side with cutting edge professionals. It's always a blast to see top guys stop in and give feedback and even help out from time to time.
Thanks everyone for your enthusiasm and support!
About the author
#2
But yeah, thinking about the amount of work to be done in the next few months... oh boy. :)
06/06/2004 (2:14 am)
Good .plan Brian. :) The launch went much more smoothly than I would've thought, from an abstract point of view. I mean, just given a generalized situation with that limited testing man-power and setup, I'm surprised there are as few problems as there have been. Sign of good engineering. Tons of props to you and Ben.But yeah, thinking about the amount of work to be done in the next few months... oh boy. :)
#3
Hopefully, with the community testing TSE - there will be much better coverage and basically a light Quality Assurance.
06/06/2004 (2:50 am)
I agree with the others, nice post. :)Hopefully, with the community testing TSE - there will be much better coverage and basically a light Quality Assurance.
#4
06/06/2004 (8:01 am)
Brian don't get down about the driver issues. I would say that things went pretty smoothly. It is great to see so many people in the community giving feedback on the demo alone. Don't know about the TSE owners cuz i'm not one "yet". We are all behind you guys. 
#5
06/06/2004 (12:17 pm)
Men can't have babies... or can they? Congratulations on your baby Brian!
#7
In fact, I hope to make a little kick-butt demo using just stock TSE. But that is going to have to wait until I figure out how to make kick-butt graphics in regular TGE, heh.
As for all the driver/card/etc. issues, what's become obvious to me is that this is still fairly new to a number of people on GG. Using shaders for 3D does require you think a little differently, plus be prepared to handle the stricter hardware/software requirements and there's going to be some growing pains as people work this out. (I myself included. I'm still stuck on the "oh wow, GLOOOOW and CUUBE MAAAPS!" phase, but there's a lot more you can do with shaders than just pretty effects. Like how the new terrain system offloads work to the GPU with a vertex shader.)
Keep it up!
06/06/2004 (2:01 pm)
Brian, as far as I am concerned, you guys have done a top-notch job with TSE. I haven't had much chance to play with it, but I can see it's going to be a massive evolutionary leap for Torque once it gets a few holes filled in with spackling. :)In fact, I hope to make a little kick-butt demo using just stock TSE. But that is going to have to wait until I figure out how to make kick-butt graphics in regular TGE, heh.
As for all the driver/card/etc. issues, what's become obvious to me is that this is still fairly new to a number of people on GG. Using shaders for 3D does require you think a little differently, plus be prepared to handle the stricter hardware/software requirements and there's going to be some growing pains as people work this out. (I myself included. I'm still stuck on the "oh wow, GLOOOOW and CUUBE MAAAPS!" phase, but there's a lot more you can do with shaders than just pretty effects. Like how the new terrain system offloads work to the GPU with a vertex shader.)
Keep it up!
#8
Kudos on the release.
06/06/2004 (2:50 pm)
TSE is a great product and I've already been hacking at it porting old code to the new GFX layer, and last time I could touch the pc (been sick) I was hacking at the particle engine, but I was having a bit of trouble, need to hammer on it more.Kudos on the release.
#9
06/07/2004 (10:34 am)
Thanks guys, I appreciate the kind words!
#10
Later, Ben
06/07/2004 (4:03 pm)
Hey, I took a look at the demo. It looks increadable and it worked perfectly on my 9800pro. Well done guys. :) Later, Ben
#11
06/07/2004 (5:52 pm)
Good luck man!
#12
06/07/2004 (11:05 pm)
Just a FYI. Nvidia GeForce Ti4200 64MB ram. The demo worked fine once I upgraded to the latest Nvidia driver. It seemed the .10 version difference made all the difference. Good luck!
#13
06/08/2004 (1:34 am)
I didn't realise that it was just you and Ben working on TSE. Kudos for all you've achived so far!
#14
06/08/2004 (4:06 am)
Running fine on both a GF 5900 FX and a Ti 4200 here. You mentioned you really don't have any QA. I'm sure I'm not the only one that would be happy to be an "external QA" team to at least test installs and the like on different platforms. 
#16
It's always fine to me reading you GG guys say things like "trading an old nVIDIA 5800 FX board for Josh
06/18/2004 (9:27 am)
@Simon, I think it's just him and Ben doing compatibility testing, not doing the whole stuff.It's always fine to me reading you GG guys say things like "trading an old nVIDIA 5800 FX board for Josh
Employee Melv May
Got some questions of my own re. TSE but I thought I'd waiting until some of the dust settles before I bug yer. ;)
- Melv.