From start to finish

#1 Hi Niall.
Have you tried the tutorial that cames with TGE 1.4? It covers the creation of a very simple game using the editors and a little of Torque Script, so you might find it useful.
But, if you already read the tutorial, and the book, then I think that you should really start experimenting with the engine, and try to implement you own ideas (keep it simple, at the beginning). It's, in my opinion, the only good way to really learn what an instrument like TGE can do.

Hope this will help!

Bye,
Jacopo

#2 Hi Niall,

I would imagine this type of tutorial would be fairly difficult. All games are different and there isn't one CORRECT way to make them. A tutorial will only run you through someone else's way which may be fine for them, their particular problem solving method but may be completely wrong for you.

Also, a tutorial about creating a game in TGE would be MASSIVE... and depending on your particular game, largely irrelevant. Think about it, every small problem would have to be discussed and the solution broken down. You'd be skipping entire sections because you don't need a particular feature or if it was a minimalistic tutorial, you'd still be left wanting to know something anyway, solving nothing.

I think this is why such tutorials are very few on the ground or are started and never completed.


I would say your best bet is to get the 3D game programming All in One books and run through the simple games found inside...

You won't get anything like Marble Madness or Tribes out of it, but it does cover the basics.
Things like inventory management and setting up your scripts.

They're not perfect, but they're a good start and good off-line reference material.

#3 Oops, just read the "I have the book" comment. I don't know what else to suggest.

#4 Thanks for the reply Jacopo.
Yeah I've often tried experimenting with the engine but my experiences along these lines have so far been, shall we say, not positive.
Recompiling the engine after changes is often daunting and not always what I really want to do in order to achieve my goals.
If anyone can point me in the right direction as to what exactly I should do, it'd be much appreciated.

EDIT: Just read your post Jason - thanks for the help anyways. I think I should just spend more time with the book.

Regards,
Niall.

#5 Dear all

I guess whoever buys TGE for game creation starts to ask pretty much the same question that
started this discussion thread. actually I still have the same question in my mind but in order to drive
the discussion even more let me ask the question in different words: what tools do we need to create a 3d game from start to end ? generally speaking we need the engine, modeling and animation tools and level design tools. my question is there any one out there tried or thought of whole set of tools combined with TGE to start game creation if the required resources are assumed to be there ? the engine is there , modeling tools are plenty but the export to DTS is an issue , what about level creation ? I did not like the one that comes with TGE. I kept searching and reading about 3DS, Maya, XSI, LW, GameSpace etc. I know that game companies use allot of apps but till now I can not imagine how a tool like XSI for example can aid in content creation in additoin to character modeling. can any one say use TGE for rendering, XSI for modeling, xyz for level desing ?

thanks all

#6 The tools you need... again can be as varied as you like depending on your platform but there are a few tools that you may need.

1. The Torque Engine.
This has the level editor and GUI designer built in. Without this, you're going nowhere fast.

2. a C++ Compiler and IDE.
I use MS Visual Studio 6 although that's not the only option... even for Windows.
Each platform has its options.

3. A TorqueScript Editor/Debugger.
A few good options here. I use Torsion some use TorqueDev.. [url = http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torquescript_editor_matrix]there are lots of options[/url].

4. a 3D Modeller for DTS Shapes (regular objects). I use Milkshape
4a. A UV Co-Ordinate Editor I use Ultimate Unwrap
4b. A DTS Exporter/Plugin (DTS Plus available from this site)

5. A 3D Modeller for DIF Shapes (buildings and interiors) . 3D World Studio or Quark (Constructor coming soon)
5a. A DIF Exporter/Plugin

6. A 2D Painting program for textures. I use Paintshop Pro and XaraX, you could use Photoshop or Gimp
6a. A Seamless Texture utility/Plugin. I use a program called Seamless Texture Generator.

7. A word processor - Open Office, Word.. you'll need something to create your documentation.. there's always pen and paper I guess.

This is from my own experience. You should be able to make anything with these tools.

#7 I had the same question; Ken Finney's excellent books (3D graphics All in One series) have pretty much answered it for me. - oops sorry - missed the above references to these books.

#8 This is an excellent list to mention and specially for beginners who do not have a good idea
what one needs and where to start. I really appreciate that. I went through the above list,
it describes the basic flow for game creation, but please bare with me I have two questions:

(1) do we need a DTS modeler and UV editor separately ? I assume that comes in one package, right ?
(2) 2D Painting program for textures and Seamless Texture Generator, is there any practical difference ?

thanks guys for your input.

-moe

#9 Mohammad: 3dsMax comes with a UV Unwrap capability, but 3dsMax costs $3000+
Most modelling programs that I've used do not have built-in unwrapping capability. If they do, I've never found it. Unwrapping and skinning 3d models is harder for me than making the rest of the model. Tools like Ultimate Unwrap (and 3ds's built-in tools) can be exceptionally useful.

#10 Absolutely, it is not easy to afford 3ds or maya
... what about my second question ?
what is the difference between an image editing tool like photoshop and a texture generator and
why do we need both of them ?

thanks

#11 Realistically, you don't need the seamless texture program.
It's just a utility I use to remove tiling artifacts to help me to make textures for buildings and so on.

I think one of the photoshop plugins does this or it's quite easy to make tilable textures in photoshop. But I don't have photoshop, I use paintshop pro and as lovely as Paintshop pro is, it's certainly not photoshop. I think it's fair to mention that the Seamless texture program I use doesn't actually generate textures itself, I just makes textures based on other textures, although there are procedural texture generators available.
But if you already have a tool like Photoshop, I'd use that instead.

Milkshape comes with a UV mapping facility, it's just not very good. It's OK for simple things and all of the primitives are already UV mapped. But if you want to do anything at all complicated, you need a better UV tool.

Milkshape's animation tools are also primitive, although usable. You might want to look around for a better animation solution.

XaraX is a vector drawing program, much like Corel Draw. I normally start making my model textures in Xara then export to Paintshop pro for adding other effects. www.xara.com/

The good thing about XaraX is that the artwork is completely scalable i.e. The textures can be exported at any resolution. So if you want to make textures 1024x1024 then find that you need them at 128x128, fine.. you just re-export and you've got a lower resolution texture. Or you can go the other way. You can put a fantastic amount of detail into a texture using it.

These are just my comments on the tools that I use on a day to day basis. I cannot comment of the features or ease of use of any of the other tools as I have little or no experience with them. I would however urge you to try as many tools as possible (within your budget) to see which fit your project.

There is no Best solution as everyone wants different things.

#12 I've just noticed that XaraX is coming to other platforms in the form of an Open Source version... So Linux and Mac can get a tool I've been raving about for years www.xaraxtreme.org/

#13 Thanks for the explanation. this is really gonna light the road for me since I am still a beginner. by the way I would like to ask: is there a better level editor for torque than the one that comes with it ?
thanks

#14 Level editor? Torque doesn't come with one. I use Cartography Shop.
However you may be referring to the terrain editor.
If you do not like the terrain editor you can always use a 3rd party program to generate the terrain and export the 2d heightfield bitmap and import it into Torque. I believe Ken's book explains this process (although I'm not 100% sure as I don't have it at hand).
having said that I'm sure you'd still need to "paint" your terrain and to be perfectly honest, Torque's terrain editor is the best I've ever used - it just works and is instantly "testable."

But back to my question - I have all of the tools I require yet it's getting beyond that stage and actually making something concrete that is alot harder. Are there any tutorials for creating any type of a game from start to finish (with or without the media creation). Just something that goes through using Torque itself as I know that support for 3rd party applications should be sought at the relevant company website.

Regards,
Niall.

#15 Hi Niall, I can understand where you are coming from, it can be very hard to know where to start a project. I have just recently started fiddling with torque being a complete noob, and have just gotten the book by Ken Finney. I was hoping that the book would help in this sort of area, take you through making a game from start to finish. But as i'm only on chapter 3 i don't wanna be too prosumptious.

Having said that i know what i want to eventually create, i have an idea for the game and what i want to be able to do in the game, and my goal is to create a complete working single level demo of the game.

Then once that is done possibly go on to working on other levels. If you can get one level of your game working with all the features you want working implemented then the rest should be a hell of a lot easier cause it's pretty much copying and editting code for the levels.

First thing you need to ask yourself is what is the game you want to make.

THen if you know that you need to ask yourself what would the first level of that game be. And i don't just mean ok yeah this guy is going to go in here and kill all these people. No i mean every thing, are there building, if so can you go in them, what is the layout of the inside of the structures. Are there AI bots, what are they going to do in the level. And so on. YOu need to know everything you want the player/player-character to be able to do, in the level and everything the games needs to do in that level to respond correctly to your characters actions.

(takes a breath)

Then you probably wanna have some notes written down of everything you just thought of.

Then you have to decide how you are going to try and do all this cool stuff you want to happen in your game level. For example i know how i want all the stuff for my demo to work. So first i'm breaking it down in to manageble areas, the game i want to make is a stealth action game (oh idiots and there dreams) and I have designed the full first level demo that i want to get working. And i have picked out a section of that, which i want to get working. All i want at this point is to get a small inclosed area, like the floor of a building with some objects in there (tables, chairs etc.) and get my character running around in there colliding with everything properly. And i mean my character, as in the one i made and animated with all the animations i have done. Get them all working properly, and then move onto the next step. Scripting the stuff in level, things like getting doors to open when i go up to them and press a button, maybe get some CCTV camaras mounted on the walls, and rotating left to right. Then trying to get an alarm to sound off if you are seen by the camera.

From there try and get bots working...

(another deep breath)

Sorry for dragging on, and some people may think i'm a complete idiot for doing it this way, but for me it's the easiest way i can think of. Now my character is going to be fully modelled, and textured but prob isn't going to be as nice looking as i want him to be in the end, same gose for the levels. Basically they are just things for you to work with so you can get your code/scripts working. You can alway go back later on and put in nicer models with better textures. BUT all the characters animations are going to be there, so I can make sure i can get them all working properly.

hopefully this is helpful and if not feel free to tell me i'm an idiot :) Considering i'm only just starting to play with torque, and i can't even get the tutorial that comes with it working fully, i have a hell of a long way to go lol. But i still have hope, sorry for babbling.

Regards,
Preet.

#16 I'm not sure that a tutorial is really what you need once you are past the beginner stage of how to do basic tasks. Sounds to me like what you need is to find someone to team up with and start generating an idea for how to tackle your game. Start with a simple gameplay concept. Decide what the bare minimum is to make that gameplay work and prototype it.

There really isnt any way to make a tutorial for this, seeing its more about organizing your thoughts and figuring out where to begin rather than how to do each step. For our first game we had a clear cut goal due to a contest we were entering. It had to have a handful of elements and run on a min spec system. We then planned out what we wanted the game to play like, figured out what the engine couldnt handle without work and then fixed those parts. Then moved on to level design, modeling and scripting work. Every few weeks we would go over our overall plan and prioritize each item by giving them a ranking 1-5. Where 1 was critical to the game actually working. 2 was needed for the game to play correctly. 3 was needed for gameplay and fun. 4 was a nice extra if we had time and 5 was bonus fluff we can do without. Every few weeks those priorities were re-checked and anything un-needed was cut.

Eventually you manage to work yourself down to a core game and each step becomes apparent.

A few other tools that we use...

Audacity - sound editor
Fragmotion - animations for milkshape models (milkshapes animation tool is too basic for our needs)
Photoshop - very nice tool to have if you can afford a copy and know someone that is good with it.
quark/3dworld studio - 3d world studio was too early in beta at the time for our last game, but we use it now.
milkshape - modeling
codeweaver - scripting ide, we used to use an in-house program we created but moved up to this
eclipse/visual studio - ide
treemagik - nice for very primitive foliage models
winmerge - must have for comparing scripts and source code changes
cvs/wincvs - source control
terregen - sky box generation
uvmapper - model skinning/ uv coordinates
doxygen - source code documentation
Inno setup - installer wizard creator
map2dif_plus - exporter for map files
map23ds - converter that changes map files to 3ds files
ms2dtsexporter plus - milkshape to dts exporter
png2ico - converts png files to ico files for executable icons
A.L.E. - landscape creation tool - we used this for a previous game but not for torque.

Both books by Ken:)

And of course TGE

Recently we obtained lightwave 8.5 and I'm thinking about upgrading to 9 but I have little experience in how well it exports to dts models so I cant recommend it yet.

We also used a pdf creation tool for our game manual but I cant recall the name of it right now.