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Combining packs

by Mario N. Bonassin · in Torque Game Engine · 01/05/2005 (9:21 pm) · 6 replies

I have the RTS pack and the Lighting pack and I was wondering how I combine them with the torque sdk. If I want to have everything available can I just copy the files over? Or do I need to pick and chose which files are copied, or do I have to go in and manually point things to the rts and lighting folders?

I can't find anywhere that tells me what to do so pointing me in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Mario
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Torque Owner Eric Lavigne
#1
01/05/2005 (9:47 pm)
What you are talking about is merging. There are tools designed for that purpose. I haven't done this, so I can't offer anything more specific.

I believe that your specific question has been asked before. Try searching the forums for it.

Torque Owner Mario N. Bonassin
#2
01/05/2005 (10:23 pm)
I have done a search and all that comes up is in regards to the cvs merging. Thats not what I'm talking about. under the rts pack is a series of folders bin, engine, example, lib, etc. and under the lighting pack is the same series of folders and they all match with the sdk folders. If I cut and paste all the folders together do I have all three (lighting, rts, base) in one spot with which to work form or do I have to do something else to get everything to work together? or do I just pick one set of folders to work form and point to all the rest? I'm kind of new to this so it may seem a bit stupid.

Torque Owner John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)
#3
01/05/2005 (11:01 pm)
Hi Mario,

I've posted a draft of the new Lighting Pack Migration Guide here:

Synapse Gaming Lighting Pack - Migration Guide Thread

Originally I was going to wait for a new release and package it up it the Lighting Pack download, but there isn't any sensitive info in it and clearly it's needed now. :)

Let me know what you think!

-John

Torque Owner Eugene Goh
#4
01/06/2005 (3:17 am)
I think John, that you deserve kudos for hitting upon probably the best way to present add-on packs. I bought the Lighting Pack, but not the RTS one (though it seems that it will be an inevitable eventuality).

With the AI Pack and many more we can expect to see in the future, if every one of them conformed to this system, the developer would be free to mix and match whichever features that are needed for any project.

I suppose it could be even further extended, for more modular packs like the RTS one, to have the various features labelled in the comments, so even parts of packs can be easily extracted and used rather than the whole shebang.

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp
#5
01/06/2005 (3:41 am)
I have to agree here, merging of packs is going to be a bit of an issue, and Eugene has hit upon a pretty good idea--for those packs that can handle it, modifications to the root codebase (Stock 1.3) would be very beneficial if they were extremely focused on this type of documentation.

I'm going to go even further and post this idea along with my marketing one into a different thread!

Edit: While not directly on point to the topic here, I've posted a concept in the Site Feedback forum that may be interesting: Marketing/Packing (distribution) suggestions for Packs.

Torque Owner John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)
#6
01/06/2005 (1:55 pm)
Thanks guys!

Keeping the Lighting Pack changes so well commented is surprisingly easy. I keep all of the heavy code changes in the Lighting Pack's own source files, then I diff the Lighting Pack's TGE source files with a clean TGE tree, commenting any changed code.

By adding the comments I've allowed the Lighting Pack to be easily merged into a TGE project, or upgraded (from this version forward) in minutes and new projects based on the Lighting Pack can immediately jump into game development, because the entire TGE source is provided ready to use. Just download and compile! These helpful features have been a huge hit in the latest Lighting Pack release.

-John