Plan for Ben Garney

Hey guys,

Quick note from my hotel lobby/bar. Getting ready for another awesome day at GDC. Need coffee...

The terrain engine supports arbitrary size areas. Geometry and texture are paged on the fly from the disk, so only the detail you're near is loaded. So even if you have very very large terrains (the brown terrain above is 4097x4097 samples), you only "pay" for the stuff you're viewing. The terrains currently have 8192x8192 textures on them; we'll up that once we get the toolchain upgraded a bit more. We have support for importing terrain from Terragen. (Yay!)

On shader 2.0 hardware there are two detail maps applied, to give visual interest. The terrain renders very fast on any hardware T&L video card. I think we can squeeze a litle more performance out of it... we'll see.

The water, which Brian worked on, is just awesome. Oblique frustrum culling, dynamic normal maps, cubemap pass, fresnel term, reflection, refraction, and so forth. We're going to explore some shore effects for the water - in our haste to get the GDC demo done, we focused on getting the basic functionality solid. We'll see how it goes.

Overall, reactions to TSE are awesome. It's even more impressive in person - a lot of people wandering by just stop and watch it. It looks even better on the 30" Cinema Displays Apple is letting us borrow. ;) Torque 2D and TGE are also drawing a lot of love. I have yet to actually walk around the floor once, because of the volume of people coming through the booth! (But, if you're at GDC, do stop by. ;)

I'm also excited to see Torque Constructor finally announced. That's a project I've been working on behind the scenes for a while now, and it's thrilling to finally get to let people know about how we're going to solve this particular problem. And, naturally, since we're doing it in Torque, not only is it cross platform but a lot of the development benefits - bug fixes, GUI controls, et cetera - will filter back to TSE, TGE, and T2D. I'm sure you'll hear a lot more about that once we're back from GDC. This is the first major step in dramatically increasing the qality of our editors as well as growing the number and power of them.

Congratulations to the Large Animal guys, who won the Technical Excellence category at IGF for Rocket Bowl. They wore my hat. :P Also, even more congrats to Chronic Logic on Gish, which won a Grand Prize as well as Innovation in Game Design. It's awesome to see so many GarageGames games in the finals and beyond. ;)

Well... I think that's about it for stuff I can talk about. There's a bunch more cool stuff just on the horizon - this year is a big one for GG. Until then, I'll see you on the GDC floor.