Questions about TSE...
by Rawles "Numba" Roberts III · in Torque Game Engine · 03/13/2006 (3:07 pm) · 16 replies
I have a few questions about TSE, based on what I have seen in TGE.
1) Will TSE be more 'organized' than TGE? Are you going to make use of namespaces and such, as opposed to the same basic function/class with several slightly different names?
2) Will TSE be 'modular', aka, if I don't like your physics implimentation, can I just link in a different one and re-route the calls and callbacks as opposed to sifting through the entire source to remove/replace what exists? Or if I chose to replace the collision code, would I be able to replace it as well?
Those are my main concerns right now.
I realise that TGE has more features (both meanings) than other projects like Ogre3D or Irrlicht, but to be honest, TGE right now looks and feels like a series of hacks on top of more hacks. Maybe I'm spoiled by the relatively clean code of most Linux applications, but quite honestly TGE looks like a programmer's hell.
And if I want to replace TGE's collision code, or physics code, I can't just link in somethign different. I have to basically shed the entire codebase, and re-assemble it around the new code, and spend countless hours/days/weeks/months debugging everything to make it work right again.
Perhaps it is my lack of understanding concerning object-oriented code (all I know is enough to survive Java), and overloading, which I understand least of all, seems to be the norm anymore in programming. I miss the days of linear programming. I could handle a million and one functions. But this "well this class is a child of that class, but is a friend of this class, so because it did the Alien thing and polymorphed, can do shit completely unrelated to either of those" thing just doesn't make sense (not in reference to TGE, just in general).
It is also disconcerting to see employees acknowledge the fact that even they (the people who suposedly wrote TGE) don't have a good understanding as to the inner workings of Torque.
(see here: http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=24623)
I'm not ripping on anyone in particular @ GG. But I would think that someone at GG would have a clue as to what is going on. It's just a little creepy when the creators no longer know their creation.
And while there is documentation, it is either out-dated or scattered all over the forums and resources as tiny glipses here and there. Two nights ago, I spent 6 hours searching the forums, resources, and what documentation exists to find the bare minimum to load a game, without all of the various mods and such. Just a little demo. Was I successful? NO. I retired @ 4:00am with no results. The same with anythign else I have atempted to find information about. Physics, AI, spawning the player as a vehicle, missionAreas, physical zones, any of it. The more I try to understand TGE, the more tangled the mess becomes, like trying to untie a Mystery Knot.
I put all of this on the table so that maybe someone can reassure me that TSE won't come out looking like the clusterfuck (pardon the Anglo-Saxon...or don't) that TGE is. Because if it is, then I'm sure not buying it, early adopter or otherwise.
Sorry to sound like I am badmouthing GG. If it does, I apologize. You are doing a great thing allowing people to purchase your game engine for such a low price. But having to spend years studying your code (or even the scripting language, TorqueScript) to finally understand how it works is crazy. I could spend the same time writing my own game engine, or assembling most of one from free parts all over the net and filling in the missing pieces. I just don't want to invest time in TGE or TSE that will turn out later to be ill-spent.
Feel free to flame away, I bought an asbestos suit this morning.....
1) Will TSE be more 'organized' than TGE? Are you going to make use of namespaces and such, as opposed to the same basic function/class with several slightly different names?
2) Will TSE be 'modular', aka, if I don't like your physics implimentation, can I just link in a different one and re-route the calls and callbacks as opposed to sifting through the entire source to remove/replace what exists? Or if I chose to replace the collision code, would I be able to replace it as well?
Those are my main concerns right now.
I realise that TGE has more features (both meanings) than other projects like Ogre3D or Irrlicht, but to be honest, TGE right now looks and feels like a series of hacks on top of more hacks. Maybe I'm spoiled by the relatively clean code of most Linux applications, but quite honestly TGE looks like a programmer's hell.
And if I want to replace TGE's collision code, or physics code, I can't just link in somethign different. I have to basically shed the entire codebase, and re-assemble it around the new code, and spend countless hours/days/weeks/months debugging everything to make it work right again.
Perhaps it is my lack of understanding concerning object-oriented code (all I know is enough to survive Java), and overloading, which I understand least of all, seems to be the norm anymore in programming. I miss the days of linear programming. I could handle a million and one functions. But this "well this class is a child of that class, but is a friend of this class, so because it did the Alien thing and polymorphed, can do shit completely unrelated to either of those" thing just doesn't make sense (not in reference to TGE, just in general).
It is also disconcerting to see employees acknowledge the fact that even they (the people who suposedly wrote TGE) don't have a good understanding as to the inner workings of Torque.
(see here: http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=24623)
I'm not ripping on anyone in particular @ GG. But I would think that someone at GG would have a clue as to what is going on. It's just a little creepy when the creators no longer know their creation.
And while there is documentation, it is either out-dated or scattered all over the forums and resources as tiny glipses here and there. Two nights ago, I spent 6 hours searching the forums, resources, and what documentation exists to find the bare minimum to load a game, without all of the various mods and such. Just a little demo. Was I successful? NO. I retired @ 4:00am with no results. The same with anythign else I have atempted to find information about. Physics, AI, spawning the player as a vehicle, missionAreas, physical zones, any of it. The more I try to understand TGE, the more tangled the mess becomes, like trying to untie a Mystery Knot.
I put all of this on the table so that maybe someone can reassure me that TSE won't come out looking like the clusterfuck (pardon the Anglo-Saxon...or don't) that TGE is. Because if it is, then I'm sure not buying it, early adopter or otherwise.
Sorry to sound like I am badmouthing GG. If it does, I apologize. You are doing a great thing allowing people to purchase your game engine for such a low price. But having to spend years studying your code (or even the scripting language, TorqueScript) to finally understand how it works is crazy. I could spend the same time writing my own game engine, or assembling most of one from free parts all over the net and filling in the missing pieces. I just don't want to invest time in TGE or TSE that will turn out later to be ill-spent.
Feel free to flame away, I bought an asbestos suit this morning.....
About the author
#2
Since you sound so linux savvy, care to explain every line of code in the kernel in both design and implementation? Or would you, given a question you aren't familiar with, refer it to someone who does (as I did in the post you mentioned above).
And before you go and say "well, I didn't write the kernel code for my linux installation", I didn't write the code for Torque either--yet it seems that you feel every GG employee should have complete and total understanding of every line of more than 500,000 lines of code....
03/13/2006 (3:31 pm)
Just for a bit of comment regarding your jab at that particular thread:Since you sound so linux savvy, care to explain every line of code in the kernel in both design and implementation? Or would you, given a question you aren't familiar with, refer it to someone who does (as I did in the post you mentioned above).
And before you go and say "well, I didn't write the kernel code for my linux installation", I didn't write the code for Torque either--yet it seems that you feel every GG employee should have complete and total understanding of every line of more than 500,000 lines of code....
#3
There are a number of options for you since you already stated that if is similar, you won't be buying it. Since it has the same base structure, your decision has been made. Now you just need to decide what to buy instead.
03/13/2006 (3:57 pm)
If you want a rendering API with tacked on game functionality, go with Ogre. If you want a game API, go with Irrlicht or Nebula/2. I you want a game engine rather than an API, there are a lot of options. You could go with the Quake engines, C4, etc. Or you could take it a layer higher and go with A6, Unity, or Beyond Virtual. Then you wouldn't have to deal with these messy OO concepts.There are a number of options for you since you already stated that if is similar, you won't be buying it. Since it has the same base structure, your decision has been made. Now you just need to decide what to buy instead.
#4
6 hours is a bit excessive. You could have easily have gotten these answers on IRC in less than an hour if you had framed the question well (verbosely and politely). Even the forums could have provided the answer in less than a day with about 15 mins of work on your part (a search and a post). Instead you wound yourself all up without using all of the resources at your disposal and then came in with a bit of an agrressive/attacking/provacitive posture that is going to only rile people up. If your goal was to make GG sit up and fly right and fix our stuff then you can rest assured that we have heard it all before and are totally on top of it =P No need to beat the horse that is already working as hard as it can!
Perhaps you should have checked the TGE documentation page =P The MinApp tutorials sounds like what you are looking for. Btw, this documentation was linked to you in the email you received when you purchased the engine =) You could also try running through the GettingStarted.pdf that is included in the SDK install.
Have you wandered over to the Torque Developer Network yet? It covers a lot of the topics you seem to be interested in.
03/13/2006 (4:15 pm)
Quote:
And while there is documentation, it is either out-dated or scattered all over the forums and resources as tiny glipses here and there. Two nights ago, I spent 6 hours searching the forums, resources, and what documentation exists to find the bare minimum to load a game, without all of the various mods and such. Just a little demo. Was I successful? NO. I retired @ 4:00am with no results
6 hours is a bit excessive. You could have easily have gotten these answers on IRC in less than an hour if you had framed the question well (verbosely and politely). Even the forums could have provided the answer in less than a day with about 15 mins of work on your part (a search and a post). Instead you wound yourself all up without using all of the resources at your disposal and then came in with a bit of an agrressive/attacking/provacitive posture that is going to only rile people up. If your goal was to make GG sit up and fly right and fix our stuff then you can rest assured that we have heard it all before and are totally on top of it =P No need to beat the horse that is already working as hard as it can!
Perhaps you should have checked the TGE documentation page =P The MinApp tutorials sounds like what you are looking for. Btw, this documentation was linked to you in the email you received when you purchased the engine =) You could also try running through the GettingStarted.pdf that is included in the SDK install.
Have you wandered over to the Torque Developer Network yet? It covers a lot of the topics you seem to be interested in.
#5
@Stephen: If you took this as a personal jab, I am sorry. You were not the only GG employee who responded, yet noone affiliated with GG who responded seemed to express intimate knowledge of that area of code. All of you (employees @ GG) were excited that someone was doing an in-depth analysis of the code, which is great.
I just found it disturbing that noone at GG responded in a manner that would indicate they knew that area of code. I didn't mean to make it sound as though I expected everyone at GG to know every single line of code, but I did expect to see a more in-depth explaination, perhaps from the person that wrote it, as to how they intended it to work when they wrote it.
No such post was made, or hinted at. If it happened via email, then great. But what about the rest of us who are attempting to understand that same area? Do we get left in the dark, to ask the same questions over and over again, until people start responding with the "check xxx thread here", which, being only a partial conversation, leaves them even farther from the road of enlightenment than when they started?
It was stated in the thread that an analysis similiar to that being done by Scott and Kristen would have been needed to work on the problem, indicating a loss of information/knowledge along the way. Now whether that resulted from lost documentation, community code morph, or other factors, who knows?
Thus leaving the general impression that noone at GG knows how the game timing, which affects many things, works anymore. I didn't say it was true, but when you read it from my point of view (someone who has NOT invested the years to understand Torque), it does sound like the ball got dropped somewhere.
I wanted to know if TSE was going to inherit all of TGE's problems, or if you were doing a rewrite of the entire codebase to make it more manageable, aka effectively making a new engine based on TGE. According to Stefan's answer, no. You're just extending TGE to support shaders, and only rewriting the graphics areas. So all of the AI and physics problems will remain as they are. Lovely. Same shit, different name.
On the Linux note: I used to play with it, know my way around it fairly well. But my comparison was based on open-source projects in general. Either way, point taken, even if the initial comparison was misunderstood.
And all things considered, GG did an excellent job maintaining their sanity during the 'Microsucks era' of coding. It stinks when everyone it using a different set of standards. I'm glad I wasn't in on it. But now that ISO decided to get it together and set a standard, I thought you guys would be re-doing the codebase to make it easier in the long run. Just my opinion. And I'm sure that like everyone else's, it stinks. But it's still mine, stinky or otherwise.
03/13/2006 (4:17 pm)
@Stefan: Thank you. I searched to forums to find a definitive answer, and there was none that I could find.@Stephen: If you took this as a personal jab, I am sorry. You were not the only GG employee who responded, yet noone affiliated with GG who responded seemed to express intimate knowledge of that area of code. All of you (employees @ GG) were excited that someone was doing an in-depth analysis of the code, which is great.
I just found it disturbing that noone at GG responded in a manner that would indicate they knew that area of code. I didn't mean to make it sound as though I expected everyone at GG to know every single line of code, but I did expect to see a more in-depth explaination, perhaps from the person that wrote it, as to how they intended it to work when they wrote it.
No such post was made, or hinted at. If it happened via email, then great. But what about the rest of us who are attempting to understand that same area? Do we get left in the dark, to ask the same questions over and over again, until people start responding with the "check xxx thread here", which, being only a partial conversation, leaves them even farther from the road of enlightenment than when they started?
It was stated in the thread that an analysis similiar to that being done by Scott and Kristen would have been needed to work on the problem, indicating a loss of information/knowledge along the way. Now whether that resulted from lost documentation, community code morph, or other factors, who knows?
Thus leaving the general impression that noone at GG knows how the game timing, which affects many things, works anymore. I didn't say it was true, but when you read it from my point of view (someone who has NOT invested the years to understand Torque), it does sound like the ball got dropped somewhere.
I wanted to know if TSE was going to inherit all of TGE's problems, or if you were doing a rewrite of the entire codebase to make it more manageable, aka effectively making a new engine based on TGE. According to Stefan's answer, no. You're just extending TGE to support shaders, and only rewriting the graphics areas. So all of the AI and physics problems will remain as they are. Lovely. Same shit, different name.
On the Linux note: I used to play with it, know my way around it fairly well. But my comparison was based on open-source projects in general. Either way, point taken, even if the initial comparison was misunderstood.
And all things considered, GG did an excellent job maintaining their sanity during the 'Microsucks era' of coding. It stinks when everyone it using a different set of standards. I'm glad I wasn't in on it. But now that ISO decided to get it together and set a standard, I thought you guys would be re-doing the codebase to make it easier in the long run. Just my opinion. And I'm sure that like everyone else's, it stinks. But it's still mine, stinky or otherwise.
#6
I guess what gets me is that you are taking jabs, but not explaining specific questions you have. Pretty much anything that can be envisioned in a game engine has already been done with Torque, so I know that the engine itself isn't a limiting factor for anyone willing to sit down and accomplish what they want to accomplish.
Here are just a few examples of what's been done with the "Ai and physics problems", and other related "issues" that get discussed here from time to time:
--Real satellite data from Mars placed into a mock-up of the planet...player drives the Mars Rover around real mars terrain
--Real world military simulators (specifically, a UAV, next generation UH-60 helicopter joint simulator--pilot and gunner, and a Command Eye battlefield management/viewing system) all tied together in real time with Torque, allowing for 3 torque players working in concert with real world pilots to perform an urban extraction
--integration of ODE, Novodex, and other proprietary physics solutions, as well as AI Implant ($50k per seat enhanced AI suite) to Torque at various levels.
Where I'm going with this: Torque works outstandingly for many, many customers. It's accomplished things that no other game engine has ever accomplished. It is tightly integrated specifically to focus on the strengths and requirements of one of the top networking implementations available today.
To accomplish all the above (and a ton more), Torque is architected a specific way, and it seems as if you either don't understand that way, or have a particular difficulty seeing the "big picture" of inter-related systems. That doesn't lead directly to the negative comments you've made--in fact, you are the one saying that you want to go back to monolithic, non-OOP style programming, and no insult intended, but there is a very strong set of reasons why you don't see code like that (much, anyway) anymore...
03/13/2006 (4:34 pm)
I guess I felt the reason it was pointed at me is because Tim Gift, a couple of posts later, gave a completely descriptive explanation of the system. Even in your re-post, it sounds like you may have missed it--but he's one of the original authors of the system, and he absolutely knows what it's doing ;)I guess what gets me is that you are taking jabs, but not explaining specific questions you have. Pretty much anything that can be envisioned in a game engine has already been done with Torque, so I know that the engine itself isn't a limiting factor for anyone willing to sit down and accomplish what they want to accomplish.
Here are just a few examples of what's been done with the "Ai and physics problems", and other related "issues" that get discussed here from time to time:
--Real satellite data from Mars placed into a mock-up of the planet...player drives the Mars Rover around real mars terrain
--Real world military simulators (specifically, a UAV, next generation UH-60 helicopter joint simulator--pilot and gunner, and a Command Eye battlefield management/viewing system) all tied together in real time with Torque, allowing for 3 torque players working in concert with real world pilots to perform an urban extraction
--integration of ODE, Novodex, and other proprietary physics solutions, as well as AI Implant ($50k per seat enhanced AI suite) to Torque at various levels.
Where I'm going with this: Torque works outstandingly for many, many customers. It's accomplished things that no other game engine has ever accomplished. It is tightly integrated specifically to focus on the strengths and requirements of one of the top networking implementations available today.
To accomplish all the above (and a ton more), Torque is architected a specific way, and it seems as if you either don't understand that way, or have a particular difficulty seeing the "big picture" of inter-related systems. That doesn't lead directly to the negative comments you've made--in fact, you are the one saying that you want to go back to monolithic, non-OOP style programming, and no insult intended, but there is a very strong set of reasons why you don't see code like that (much, anyway) anymore...
#7
@Matt: I was taught that if you said something, be prepared to prove it. Forum boards being as they are, it is sometimes easier to provide the references with the statement. If what I have to say upsets people, I'm sorry. That's how I am.
I agree. 6 hours is excessive. IRC doesn't work. The few references I found to IRC did not work, in either mIRC, Visual IRC, or Chatzilla. I kept getting "server does not exist" errors. And since I found 20 seperate posts on the same subject, all giving the same answer, that posting again for IRC channel info would result in the same answers, which were proving useless.
As to the 'minimal code required to load", I also assumed that someone else, given that the GG community is so large, would have asked this same question, several times over. I only wanted 1 working instance. I was not able to find it.
Minapp Tut and "Getting Started". Read em, tried em. (Edit: "Getting Started.pdf" anyway. MinApp links don't load. Perhaps they were moved?) They still are not clear in what is required and what is not. Hence why I was still looking. TDN, well, it's....incomplete. Should be a great place for people like me to find answers once it's finished. But so far, I like it. I just couldn't find the answers.
As far as the horse goes, I was asking were it was headed, not trying to beat the poor thing to death.
Like I said before, I love what you are doing, I just wish it was easier to deal with.
@Stephen: I didn't say monolithic code was better, just easier for me to understand. I didn't get in on OOP at the ground floor, so now I have a hell of a climb waiting for me. And I chose Torque for my project based on all of the things it HAS done. Like I said above, I just wish it were easier to understand. And for the record, I hate pointers, hence why Polymorphism drives me up the wall. The friend thing and inheritance (especially when they happen together) also drive me nuts, but then again, I didn't learn programming this way initially. So much like Yoda's advice, "You must un-learn, what you have learned" and start over again. Such is life.
03/13/2006 (4:37 pm)
@David: Now that I know, you're right. I probably won't be buying TSE. And I've been looking at other possibilities.@Matt: I was taught that if you said something, be prepared to prove it. Forum boards being as they are, it is sometimes easier to provide the references with the statement. If what I have to say upsets people, I'm sorry. That's how I am.
I agree. 6 hours is excessive. IRC doesn't work. The few references I found to IRC did not work, in either mIRC, Visual IRC, or Chatzilla. I kept getting "server does not exist" errors. And since I found 20 seperate posts on the same subject, all giving the same answer, that posting again for IRC channel info would result in the same answers, which were proving useless.
As to the 'minimal code required to load", I also assumed that someone else, given that the GG community is so large, would have asked this same question, several times over. I only wanted 1 working instance. I was not able to find it.
Minapp Tut and "Getting Started". Read em, tried em. (Edit: "Getting Started.pdf" anyway. MinApp links don't load. Perhaps they were moved?) They still are not clear in what is required and what is not. Hence why I was still looking. TDN, well, it's....incomplete. Should be a great place for people like me to find answers once it's finished. But so far, I like it. I just couldn't find the answers.
As far as the horse goes, I was asking were it was headed, not trying to beat the poor thing to death.
Like I said before, I love what you are doing, I just wish it was easier to deal with.
@Stephen: I didn't say monolithic code was better, just easier for me to understand. I didn't get in on OOP at the ground floor, so now I have a hell of a climb waiting for me. And I chose Torque for my project based on all of the things it HAS done. Like I said above, I just wish it were easier to understand. And for the record, I hate pointers, hence why Polymorphism drives me up the wall. The friend thing and inheritance (especially when they happen together) also drive me nuts, but then again, I didn't learn programming this way initially. So much like Yoda's advice, "You must un-learn, what you have learned" and start over again. Such is life.
#8
They have, and the problem is, each one of them has a different definition of "required to load".
Required to load what:
--Guis?
--a mission file?
----How much of a mission file?
----Do you count terrain as part of your "minimum", or do you want terrain gone?
--Do you want the ability for editors to "load"?
--Do you want a player to be able to connect?
----What will they connect as--a camera, a player, both, neither?
----will they be able to pick up weapons?
------fire them?
--Do you want collision?
--do you want sound?
--Do you want a scene? (buildings, trees)
--do you want (yadda yadda yadda)
See where I'm going with this one? How can you write something "official" that answers a question that every single customer sees differently?. We feel that starter.fps, starter.racing, and tutorial.base are the "minimum" package to provide for each game type, because they demonstrate techniques and functionality that most games of that genre are going to want to have.
FYI, we routinely watch people (roughly 1-2 a month) "start with the minimum to load", and then spend the next three months bringing over things from starter.fps/starter.racing, complaining all the while that "the stuff I want isn't in tutorial.base". At the end of their time, they've re-implemented just about everything that was in the starter. kits for their selected genre...and while they've learned a lot (which is a really good thing), they've made zero progress because they wound up right back at the starter. kit we provided all along.
Anyway sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine because myself, Matt, and Ben are the standard employees that "front line" the forums...and this is one that we see time after time after time.
03/13/2006 (4:46 pm)
Quote:
As to the 'minimal code required to load", I also assumed that someone else, given that the GG community is so large, would have asked this same question, several times over.
They have, and the problem is, each one of them has a different definition of "required to load".
Required to load what:
--Guis?
--a mission file?
----How much of a mission file?
----Do you count terrain as part of your "minimum", or do you want terrain gone?
--Do you want the ability for editors to "load"?
--Do you want a player to be able to connect?
----What will they connect as--a camera, a player, both, neither?
----will they be able to pick up weapons?
------fire them?
--Do you want collision?
--do you want sound?
--Do you want a scene? (buildings, trees)
--do you want (yadda yadda yadda)
See where I'm going with this one? How can you write something "official" that answers a question that every single customer sees differently?. We feel that starter.fps, starter.racing, and tutorial.base are the "minimum" package to provide for each game type, because they demonstrate techniques and functionality that most games of that genre are going to want to have.
FYI, we routinely watch people (roughly 1-2 a month) "start with the minimum to load", and then spend the next three months bringing over things from starter.fps/starter.racing, complaining all the while that "the stuff I want isn't in tutorial.base". At the end of their time, they've re-implemented just about everything that was in the starter. kits for their selected genre...and while they've learned a lot (which is a really good thing), they've made zero progress because they wound up right back at the starter. kit we provided all along.
Anyway sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine because myself, Matt, and Ben are the standard employees that "front line" the forums...and this is one that we see time after time after time.
#9
03/13/2006 (5:20 pm)
Right on top of the Community/What's New page is a link to [url=http://www.garagegames.com/mg/chat/]irc chat
#10
do not work. All I get is a blank page with the GarageGames header at the top. WTF?
Hence most likely why I've been such a pain in you guy's side. I don't have the email anymore, harddrive failed about 3 days after I purchased TGE. But the links in the email (except to the GG documentation pages) didn't work either.
If they worked, I'd most likely be knee-deep in explained code (as opposed to drowning in code that I have tried to understand from callback and class-inheritance diagrams so faithfully generated by Doxygen) instead of whining here about how the documentation sucks and I don't get it.
Sometimes proper introduction is everything. Woudl you please check those links, and if they do work, then perhaps there is a problem with Firefox 1.5.0.1 and your website? If there is, please let me know. If I'm the only one having a problem, then perhaps I need to go postal on my ISP.
Edit: ARGHHH! Forums can be irritating. Ok, I'll search em. Thanks Matt.
Note: I usually just jump straight to the forums or Resources form the drop-down list. Thanks for pointing the IRC link out for me.
03/13/2006 (5:26 pm)
Ok, went back and checked, all links to forums from this page http://www.garagegames.com/developer/torque/tge/#basicdo not work. All I get is a blank page with the GarageGames header at the top. WTF?
Hence most likely why I've been such a pain in you guy's side. I don't have the email anymore, harddrive failed about 3 days after I purchased TGE. But the links in the email (except to the GG documentation pages) didn't work either.
If they worked, I'd most likely be knee-deep in explained code (as opposed to drowning in code that I have tried to understand from callback and class-inheritance diagrams so faithfully generated by Doxygen) instead of whining here about how the documentation sucks and I don't get it.
Sometimes proper introduction is everything. Woudl you please check those links, and if they do work, then perhaps there is a problem with Firefox 1.5.0.1 and your website? If there is, please let me know. If I'm the only one having a problem, then perhaps I need to go postal on my ISP.
Edit: ARGHHH! Forums can be irritating. Ok, I'll search em. Thanks Matt.
Note: I usually just jump straight to the forums or Resources form the drop-down list. Thanks for pointing the IRC link out for me.
#11
I've been meaning to ask about that IRC thing. I just clicked your magic-link and got the following output(below). Right now i'm on Verizon-DSL don't if that's good or bad. ( Well, I know it's bad, I don't know if it's part of the IRC-connect problem..)
When I was at school last fall, I spent some time trying to get onto GG and Minions-of-Mirth IRC channels using various clients including GAIM and mIRC. I kept getting "could not connect to server" errors. At the time I had similarly assumed the problem was with the university firewall...
I haven't tried the clients again, but if the java-client is any indication, the problem hasn't fixed it'self.
(afterthought)
Is it possible a linksys router could be killing the signal? Gut-feeling says no, but thought i'd throw that out there.
How could I better trouble-shoot this issue to get myself into IRC?
thanks,
~me
03/13/2006 (5:35 pm)
Matt, I've been meaning to ask about that IRC thing. I just clicked your magic-link and got the following output(below). Right now i'm on Verizon-DSL don't if that's good or bad. ( Well, I know it's bad, I don't know if it's part of the IRC-connect problem..)
When I was at school last fall, I spent some time trying to get onto GG and Minions-of-Mirth IRC channels using various clients including GAIM and mIRC. I kept getting "could not connect to server" errors. At the time I had similarly assumed the problem was with the university firewall...
I haven't tried the clients again, but if the java-client is any indication, the problem hasn't fixed it'self.
(afterthought)
Is it possible a linksys router could be killing the signal? Gut-feeling says no, but thought i'd throw that out there.
How could I better trouble-shoot this issue to get myself into IRC?
thanks,
~me
Welcome to Java IRC chat! Connecting to the server, please wait .... Unable to connect to server. Connecting to the server, please wait .... Unable to connect to server.
#12
You might try opening the port 6667 on your Linksys.
Otherwise, you have the same problem I was having with the 'regular' clients. Java works fine for me now.
I have a Cisco 804 ISDN router, but it wasn't showing as 'blocking' the IRC packets. They were being dropped at maxgaming's end (via tracert), which lead me to believe the server was dead.
Try it right now, I just got done chatting with Matt.
Java worked like a charm...
03/13/2006 (7:00 pm)
@RavenYou might try opening the port 6667 on your Linksys.
Otherwise, you have the same problem I was having with the 'regular' clients. Java works fine for me now.
I have a Cisco 804 ISDN router, but it wasn't showing as 'blocking' the IRC packets. They were being dropped at maxgaming's end (via tracert), which lead me to believe the server was dead.
Try it right now, I just got done chatting with Matt.
Java worked like a charm...
#13
Hitting the 'connect' button in the java window returns an error so quick it's like it didn't even try. It also doesn't leave any message in the linksys access logs (incoming or outgoing).
I'll try the manly clients tomarrow (checks stock of sacraficial virgin's blood)..
03/13/2006 (8:16 pm)
Naa, thanks anyways though. i specified 6667 to be forwarded to the right internal-IP, just in case. Nothing was blocking it to begin with. Also tried in IE, and firefox. still didn't work. Hitting the 'connect' button in the java window returns an error so quick it's like it didn't even try. It also doesn't leave any message in the linksys access logs (incoming or outgoing).
I'll try the manly clients tomarrow (checks stock of sacraficial virgin's blood)..
#14
03/13/2006 (8:32 pm)
Do you have McAfee or Norton blocking IRC ports? I can't remember if it was a standard configuration or not. I know it can be turned on or off, but I can't remember its installed state.
#15
03/13/2006 (8:42 pm)
Windows Firewall could also be a culprit
#16
I just tried it from the linux box using some client (KSirc) and got in almost no-problem. It is probably McAfee or Windows firewall on the other box. I'll look into it later, at least i'm in.
Thanks guys!
03/14/2006 (6:38 am)
Both good ideas I didn't think of. Trying to solve windows problems in a linux mind-set just doesn't work :-PI just tried it from the linux box using some client (KSirc) and got in almost no-problem. It is probably McAfee or Windows firewall on the other box. I'll look into it later, at least i'm in.
Thanks guys!
Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
Ie. TSE will be TGE with a new graphics engine and some improvements, not a total restructure of code. If any of the changes you talked about were to be done, I'm sure it would be for both TGE and TSE.