Plan for Nick Zafiris

I've had Torque for over a year now and in that year, I've messed around with it on a daily basis trying to learn and develop various components. I've gotten pretty far in creating stuff like my own scripted inventory, a save/load feature, a journal/log, although none are at 100%. I also now have a good grasp on things like GUI controls, precipitation, pathedCamera, audio, interior creation etc., as well as making minor engine modifications.

I learned a whole lot in this one year and one thing that helped was that I had a game idea in mind since day one and everything I did to learn revolved around that idea (3rd person, post-nuclear action/RPG). It helped me stay in focus, consistent and dedicated. Off course, my partner helped a lot with all his artwork, and I've had a great help from the community.

Now, I'm planning on starting fresh off of tutorial.base. I believe that this is the best way to go if you're ready to start developing a new game and add to it only the stuff that you'll be using.

Since the game is single player with multiple missions that will allow the player to travel back and forth between them, I need to modify the way current mission loading is handled. I found that it is spread across many files with intermingled functions that were difficult to follow. So I opened up a huge task to create a table and document all the major functions one by one included in every script file starting from common/server in a way that I can understand and refer back to.

In parallel, as functions are documented out, I'm also documenting the flow of the functions. To me this is one of the most important things that will truly help me understand how everything flows. For example, for the mission loading there are functions that call each other within the 3 missionDownload.cs files, clientConnection.cs, missionLoad.cs, missionInfo.cs, mission.cs, /server/scripts/game.cs, etc. Without having a visual representation as shown below, you get lost. At least I do. Planning on doing the same thing with other parts of the script too.

One thing I don't understand yet is that if you look at the difference between the game.cs files in starter.fps and tutorial.base, you'll see that in the starter.fps version there are many extra functions and function calls like startGame(), GameStart(), onGameDurationEnd(), cycleGame(), onCycleExec(), onCyclePauseEnd(), etc. Not sure if those are needed in my case.

Anyway that's the plan for now.

Nick

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