Game Development Community

Managing WorkFlow

by Jason T · in Torque Game Engine · 02/02/2006 (2:04 am) · 5 replies

Hello all, Im cruising along in my leaning curve and I have some organizational questions.

right now to make a new game I just add a folder to 'Examples' and redirect the main.cs each time I switch games. This seems cumbersome. Is there a better solution?

Where is the best place to store your master folder of all your art objects? Right now I just drag a copy into each game but that gets very fat. Is there a way to import art directly from a master folder to your current game folder?

I make a bunch of little one-off games so Im constantly switching folders. I am just looking for workflow advice and basic file organization.

BTW. I dont use VB to edit. I saw a tutorial on that but it doesnt look like it applies.

Thanks everyone,
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Torque Owner Raasta
#1
02/02/2006 (10:00 am)
Quote: Where is the best place to store your master folder of all your art objects? Right now I just drag a copy into each game but that gets very fat. Is there a way to import art directly from a master folder to your current game folder?

I was doing about the same thing last night and had the same thought pop into my head about this. Currently I have alot of textures, bumpmaps, and images for various plants etc.. I was wondering if the common folder would be the place to do this at. But, I didn't have time to experiment with this.

Associate Manoel Neto
Default Studio Name
#2
02/02/2006 (11:12 am)
You can define as many "mod" folders as you want to be visible to the executable (as long as they are in the same folder as the EXE itself). By default, the "common" folder and your game folder are set as mod paths, but you can add as many as you need.

You could easily have a "data" mod solely for containing art assets. Example:

setModPaths("common;starter.fps;data;foo;bar");

That makes the folders "common", "starter.fps", "data", "foo" and "bar" visible to the game. So you could load a model using "data/furniture/chair.dts" as example.

Torque Owner Jason T
#3
02/02/2006 (1:13 pm)
Awesome. This is a huge help.

btw. There are many occurrences of setModPaths. Do you know which file I should modify?

Thanks again,

Associate Manoel Neto
Default Studio Name
#4
02/02/2006 (2:19 pm)
The first one, in the root main.cs, where it sets the mod paths to "common;" @ $defaultGame. Add your other folders there (into the string itself, delimited by semicolons) and it should work.

Torque Owner Raasta
#5
02/02/2006 (3:54 pm)
Yes, this works nice. I finally had a chance to check this out.

Quote:The first one, in the root main.cs, where it sets the mod paths to "common;" @ $defaultGame. Add your other folders there (into the string itself, delimited by semicolons) and it should work.

Here's what I did..

1) Made a folder and called it /artwork in my 'root' directory and copied all my artstuff into it.

2) edited the main.cs file in the root directory (where your .exe is located) to point to where my new folder (artwork) was located. 

$userMods = "creator;artwork;" @ $defaultGame;

3) Saved the main.cs

4) Also you can create a file inside the new folder (/artwork in my case) called main.cs. This is because when I ran the game the 1st couple times I was getting an error about missing the main.cs in /artfolder. I just left it blank.

Works for me, now I can see all my textures, bumpmaps and anything else while working on multiple game modules. Thanks Manoel for the help with this.

Raasta