Torque 2d feedback from new user
by Alex Rice · in Torque Game Builder · 07/07/2005 (11:59 pm) · 5 replies
Hey! I am a TGE user but decided I was biting off a bit much for my first game in 3D so I bought a T2D license. Here is some feedback after 1 day:
1. Documentation- I like the Tutorial and Reference documents. Haven't read the Technical Overview yet. I will be nicer if they are all edited together with a common layout and contents/index. The Reference doc in itself is quite useful. One problem on p.30 of T2D Reference.pdf there is an overlapping frame "Debug Modes" that hides the top of the frame for fxSceneWindow2D. The Tutorial is well written but too shallow. After reading I am thinking - when would I want to use a chunkedSprite vs. animatedSprite? how do I create/load an animated sprite? When would I want to use a Tilemap instead of a scroller?
2. Torque core! what a pleasure it is to be able to connect to T2D with the Tribal IDE debugger, and to also to hit tilde for the console and F10 for the GUI builder. This is great.
3. Like others, I want to know if the billiards demo is available, or anything similar that has animated 3d objects as 2d sprites? I don't understand how one is able to create realistic spin and roll on a pool ball that is just a 2d sprite. Is there just 1 roll animation, and you rotate the sprite to face the direction of rolling? That would account for roll, but not spin.
4. Anyone tried using imagemagick to create sprite strip composite images? I haven't tried it yet. Kind of surprising the T2D engine cannot take a list of bitmap files and composite them into a single bitmap at launch time. Is that feature planned at all for future releases? netmagick also has a morph feature that might be nice for doing kind of tweening or blending of different sprite frames.
1. Documentation- I like the Tutorial and Reference documents. Haven't read the Technical Overview yet. I will be nicer if they are all edited together with a common layout and contents/index. The Reference doc in itself is quite useful. One problem on p.30 of T2D Reference.pdf there is an overlapping frame "Debug Modes" that hides the top of the frame for fxSceneWindow2D. The Tutorial is well written but too shallow. After reading I am thinking - when would I want to use a chunkedSprite vs. animatedSprite? how do I create/load an animated sprite? When would I want to use a Tilemap instead of a scroller?
2. Torque core! what a pleasure it is to be able to connect to T2D with the Tribal IDE debugger, and to also to hit tilde for the console and F10 for the GUI builder. This is great.
3. Like others, I want to know if the billiards demo is available, or anything similar that has animated 3d objects as 2d sprites? I don't understand how one is able to create realistic spin and roll on a pool ball that is just a 2d sprite. Is there just 1 roll animation, and you rotate the sprite to face the direction of rolling? That would account for roll, but not spin.
4. Anyone tried using imagemagick to create sprite strip composite images? I haven't tried it yet. Kind of surprising the T2D engine cannot take a list of bitmap files and composite them into a single bitmap at launch time. Is that feature planned at all for future releases? netmagick also has a morph feature that might be nice for doing kind of tweening or blending of different sprite frames.
About the author
#2
07/08/2005 (9:30 am)
Welcome :)
#3
@Matthew - I didn't realize you have written so many tutorials for T2D. Awesome!
Torque EngineTechnology >> Tutorials >> Torque 2D
07/08/2005 (5:50 pm)
@Philip - thanks for the feedback!@Matthew - I didn't realize you have written so many tutorials for T2D. Awesome!
Torque EngineTechnology >> Tutorials >> Torque 2D
#5
07/09/2005 (4:20 pm)
OK I've read the Technical Overview. T2D is awesome. And this is just the EA release ?! Only one question: has anyone actually found a real world usage for mounting a tile-map onto a particle ? ;-) 
Torque Owner Philip Mansfield
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1 - Better docs are on the way. It's a trade off between time spent developing the engine and developing the docs :)
2 - Cool.
3 - I *think* (hope) that the pool demo will come with the next release.
4 - Yup, and it doesn't work too well. It creates a long line of sprites, rather than a grid. This causes problems if you have a lot of sprites as the image ends up as being too long for T2D to handle. Unless I just wasn't using it right...