Plan for Edward Maurina

EGTGE

Hello again folks. I know many of you have been patiently waiting for me to get the guide done....

At this point, there is still work to do, but I thought perhaps a status report would be in order. The guide has grown and grown and is now approaching 900 pages in length. However, it will likely get cropped a bit before printing to make it more manageable. A few days back I put together a teaser shot of all the pages:


The table on the right side of the image is the Open Office Master Document listing of the current chapters. Note: Don't take for granted that all you see there will be in the same places in the final product. Things move around a lot.

An overview of the guide would be:

Section 1 - Introduction

Section 2 - Basic Training
- Quick overview of Mission Editors and GUI Editor

Section 3 - Deep look (unless otherwise noted) at...
- (overview) TGE architecture concepts,
- Torque Script,
- All Mission Objects,
- Most Scene Objects,
- Overview of Callback concept (onCollision(), etc), plus reference to all methods and explanation of when/why they get called.
- TGE IO
- (overview) Look at various standard GUIs

Section 4 - Game Elements. In this chapter we review the 'elements' that make up a game, then we take a tour of the most common ones, making them each from TGE provided features
- Inventories,
- Bipeds,
- Non-Bipeds,
- Vehicles,
- AI samples,
- Weapons,
- Various Special Effects
- Game GUIS - Together, we will make several common GUIs

Section 5 - Engine Coding (this section is incomplete)

Section 6 - In this chapter we briefly discuss various debug tools and methods as would apply to:
- Scripting
- Coding
- Other

Section 7 - Here is where we put it all together. We walk through the creation of two games:
- Torque Man - Yes, its a bit cheezy, but everyone knows the mechanics of PAC MAN. This allows us to focus on making a 3D version of this game using scripts to build the levels, rudimentary AI, damage, etc. We re-use objects and GUIS we made in section 4.
- Torque Castle - This second game is a very modified Star Castle (you're dating yourself if you recall this). I won't say more that this for now. Demos will be avilable at a later date.

Section 8 - what kind of book would it be without appendicies. Here they are. :)

Every section and almost every chapter has a mission and sample lessons for each concept. I've done my best to show and tell for each feature I've dicussed in the guide. It has been a huge endeavor and a fun trip to boot.


How Much? what format?
Many have asked how much the full version of the guide will cost and what format it will come in. I don't yet have an answer for the first question, but I'm pretty sure we're talking about a printed book with some electronic portions for ease-of-use. I'll be selling this guide through Garage Games.

Note: Opinions are more than welcomed on format, price, and additional content concepts.

Is There A Free Version?

To date there have been 2296 downloads of the free version of this guide. To all of you who have downloaded it, I say, "Thank You." I will be releasing a more updated version of the 'free guide' as soon as I can. It will contain parts of section 1 and 2 and MAY contain a teaser here and there from other sections. It will contain several corrections, more examples, and more coverage than the prior version which is quite dated and has many errors. Please bear with me while I get this formated and finalized for you.


The (very) alpha versions of some chapters are still available at: download.

I would only download the old version if you are curious however. You'd be better served by waiting for the upated version. I'll make a formal announcement when it is available.

And that folks is all for now! Thanks again to all those who have encouraged me.

[HOW]EdM|EGTGE

Just for old time's sake, here is an old progress snapshot for comparison: