Game Development Community

Moving to the Lighting Pack

by Thomas Shaw · in Torque Game Engine · 07/22/2005 (5:28 pm) · 4 replies

I am in the procces of integrating my project into the Lighting Pack.

We currently have very little engine code and so I was wondering what the best course of action was.

If I were to just integrate all of scripts and art assests and add what little engine code we have into the lighting pack would there be any drawbacks? I had read that "One of the biggest changes since version 1.1.5 of the Synapse Gaming Lighting Pack is the inclusion of the entire Torque Game Engine source tree, which eliminates the need for integration, but several other changes also occurred:" in the 1.1.5 merging guide.

Does this mean that there are some drawbacks to just porting over all my content in the non-BETA version that is avialable for download?

I would like for this to be as quick and painless as possible, but most of all I want the final result to work.

Thanks

Oh, and I was also wondering how stable the BETA version is. Are there any huge issues, or is it pretty safe?
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Torque Owner John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)
#1
07/23/2005 (3:25 am)
Hi Thomas,

That information in the Migration Guide was directed more towards existing Lighting Pack users - because a lot of the directory layout changed between 1.1.5 and later versions, I wanted to let people familiar with the 1.1.5 layout know where things moved to. That section is also handy for new users, as it shows where files are located in the Lighting Pack source tree. The changes after 1.1.5 actually made it significantly easier to merge code into the Lighting Pack (and vice-versa).

In the Migration Guide I only recommend merging the Lighting Pack into existing projects, because if a problem does occur it will likely be related to the Lighting Pack code (missing code, or files not added to the project, ...), which I can easily identify and help with. If an incomplete merge is made in the opposite direction then the missing or incomplete code is developer specific, which I won't have any knowledge of and can't easily help with.

If your project has minimal or well documented changes (ie you feel comfortable moving those changes into other TGE source trees), then it's probably easier to move your changes into the Lighting Pack and take advantage of the familiarity of your code.

Regardless of how you decide to merge the code just remember to backup a working copy of your project (source and all) before getting started, that way in the worse case scenario you only need to try merging again.

Let me know if this helps!

-John

Torque 3D Owner Thomas Shaw
#2
07/25/2005 (3:13 am)
Thanks,

That does help allot. However, I am also still wondering about the stability of the BETA version of the lighting pack. Would you clasify it as "near stable" or is it still pretty buggy.

Thanks.

Torque Owner John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)
#3
07/25/2005 (8:38 am)
Actually the 1.3.5 release is solid, I only labeled the release as a beta because the docs are incomplete, but feature-wise everything works great. I recommend using 1.3.5 - it has nearly twice as many features as 1.3 and there are a few helpful bug fixes added to the release.

You can find a complete list of the new 1.3.5 features in the release notes (lots of cool stuff in there :).

Torque 3D Owner Matthew Langley
Torque
#4
07/25/2005 (6:59 pm)
1.3.5 is your friend :)