Torque X questions
by Alex Rice · in Torque Game Builder · 09/24/2006 (12:08 pm) · 29 replies
Hi all, I've been lurking, steadily working on Alien Eggz, my casual/puzzle type game prototype TGB .
I think it's pretty cool that TGB is going to be the initial target of Torque X . I've read most of the blogs and news posting about this. However not being up to speed on C#, .NET or XNA, I am not sure how much attention I should be paying to it or if I should go learn C#. I do understand TorqueX will be a great way to get into the xb360 channels and test on the console platform, but what it means for regular PC downloadable games, is a lot less clear.
Supposing you wrote a game in C# / XNA/ Torque X. Maybe you could get it published on XBOX 360, but perhaps not. Regardless you would also would want to publish it as a downloadable PC game.
- What versions of Windows could the game run on?
- Would the user have to be a member of that "creator's club" thing?
- What would the software and hardware requirements be?
- Would the user have to then go get large downloads of .NET and DirectX runtime libraries?
- Would XNA mostly be useful for prototyping on the PC, then for production on PC platforms it would need to be ported to torquescript to run on regular TGB Win/Mac/linux?
Thanks in advance,
Alex
I think it's pretty cool that TGB is going to be the initial target of Torque X . I've read most of the blogs and news posting about this. However not being up to speed on C#, .NET or XNA, I am not sure how much attention I should be paying to it or if I should go learn C#. I do understand TorqueX will be a great way to get into the xb360 channels and test on the console platform, but what it means for regular PC downloadable games, is a lot less clear.
Supposing you wrote a game in C# / XNA/ Torque X. Maybe you could get it published on XBOX 360, but perhaps not. Regardless you would also would want to publish it as a downloadable PC game.
- What versions of Windows could the game run on?
- Would the user have to be a member of that "creator's club" thing?
- What would the software and hardware requirements be?
- Would the user have to then go get large downloads of .NET and DirectX runtime libraries?
- Would XNA mostly be useful for prototyping on the PC, then for production on PC platforms it would need to be ported to torquescript to run on regular TGB Win/Mac/linux?
Thanks in advance,
Alex
About the author
#22
As for an ETA, it's too early to say. Just keep an eye on the product page.
10/02/2006 (11:52 am)
There are a lot of unknowns. TorqueX is still very much in development. As it stands right now, the 2d and 3d portions of TorqueX work from the same codebase. I have no idea how this will affect pricing for people who already have licenses to other producs, but I'm sure someone else can answer that.As for an ETA, it's too early to say. Just keep an eye on the product page.
#23
10/02/2006 (12:01 pm)
How much is it going to cost those of us who own TSE, TGE, and TGB? 
#24
1. GarageGames has always priced its products within reach of hobbyists and indies. TorqueX will be no different.
2. Don't know yet.
3. Don't know yet. We are somewhat constrained by when Micrsoft ships XNA GSE. In general, it is not days or weeks, but it is not many months either.
TGB will work with TX. There will be specifics added to the builder that will facilitate creation of TX games. TorqueScript will not work on TorqueX, but porting from Torquescript to C# is a fairly trivial task.
Working on TGB will definitely get you a jump on TorqueX.
-Jeff Tunnell, GG
10/02/2006 (1:52 pm)
We have not decided 1- how much it will cost, 2- what the upgrade path (if any) will be, or 3-when it will ship. Rough answers are:1. GarageGames has always priced its products within reach of hobbyists and indies. TorqueX will be no different.
2. Don't know yet.
3. Don't know yet. We are somewhat constrained by when Micrsoft ships XNA GSE. In general, it is not days or weeks, but it is not many months either.
TGB will work with TX. There will be specifics added to the builder that will facilitate creation of TX games. TorqueScript will not work on TorqueX, but porting from Torquescript to C# is a fairly trivial task.
Working on TGB will definitely get you a jump on TorqueX.
-Jeff Tunnell, GG
#25
Agreed. This is actually one of the main reasons why I chose TGB over some of the competing products out there (including the free ones). Since I code C# during my day job, it's nice not to have to deviate too far away from the syntax at night. :)
Does anyone know if there are any plans for XNA (and dare I ask, Torque X) on the Mono platform? I know that sounds a little ambitious.
10/09/2006 (10:53 pm)
Quote:
And I don't want to step on Alex's toes, but the reverse is actually true: C# is in fact very similar to TorqueScript in many ways, and porting of TorqueScript to C# has been a rather basic task for each project that has been moved into Torque X during development.
Agreed. This is actually one of the main reasons why I chose TGB over some of the competing products out there (including the free ones). Since I code C# during my day job, it's nice not to have to deviate too far away from the syntax at night. :)
Quote:Perhaps a code generator/converter would do the trick here?
TGB will work with TX. There will be specifics added to the builder that will facilitate creation of TX games. TorqueScript will not work on TorqueX, but porting from Torquescript to C# is a fairly trivial task.
Does anyone know if there are any plans for XNA (and dare I ask, Torque X) on the Mono platform? I know that sounds a little ambitious.
#26
10/10/2006 (7:27 am)
I'm sure that someone, somewhere has it in their sights, but I'm not sure about the licensing legalities. Perhaps the Windows portion could be ported over, but I'm sure the subscription portion would have some stickly legalese disallowing any semblance of port and release. Which does not mean that others will not build a bridge outside the licensing structure to do something similar under Mono. But I don't think we will see many people taking up the torch until they can dig into the XNA framework and inspect the guts harispex-style.
#27
10/11/2006 (1:04 am)
@Daniel - I'm pretty sure any sort of code generator/converter would be nearly impossible without significant markup to designate variable and return types, access modifiers for methods, inheritance, and most definitely straight rewrites of any hacky namespace black magic. Specifically the fact that TS is typeless and its namespace functionality is entirely ambiguous with no real classes or any concept of object-level inheritance make something like that more trouble than its worth. Anyone capable of marking up their TS to comply with any sort of functional TS-to-C# translator (considering how contrived it would have to be) would definitely be apt to just porting the code (which would undoubtedly be much easier). Aside from that there are some fundamental differences in how TX handles certain things. The TX developers are taking full advantage of the opportunity to rewrite everything from scratch, so some of the interfaces will be very familiar, but slightly different (for the sake of efficiency and ease of use) when compared to other Torque products.
#28
I understand GG's policy is not to reveal too much about future development to minimize the damage control for those that don't understand the software development process, but is it inappropriate to ask if TorqueX is moving in the direction of being more of an API exposed to .Net? (i.e. the "Binary Only Version" now becomes an Assembly library)
If so, that's pretty good news that the focus of development will be there. There are many language options if Microsoft chooses to open up support beyond C# (and it sounds like they will at least for the PC platform). Not that there is anything wrong with C# (I use it daily via the day job). I'm just thinking of the learning curve associated with it for the beginners and newbies.
Hopefully the opportunity to improve the shortcomings of Torque through TorqueX will be leveraged across to the other platforms as well. (One of the things that sold me on Torque to begin with was the idea of a domain specific language such as TorqueScript and it's notion of Code-Once-Deploy-Many to Mac, Win32, Linux, etc.)
As you may or may not know, Microsoft has been making some fairly significant strides toward "non-type safe" code environments in their CodeDom namespace. Scott Guthrie recently posted on his blog that a production-ready version IronPython has been released. Libraries to eliminate or reduce the overhead you speak of in regard to variables, accessors, etc are becoming native to the .Net framework with every loosely typed language that Microsoft adopts. If one were clever enough, creating a compiler (vs. an interpreter) of TorqueScript would probably not require much more coding, and the goofy implementation of namespaces in TorqueScirpt would probably adapt well to the LINQ technology that's on the way.
Anyway, thanks for the response. I certainly understand the worth of where it's important to focus development energy.
10/13/2006 (9:35 pm)
@Thomas:I understand GG's policy is not to reveal too much about future development to minimize the damage control for those that don't understand the software development process, but is it inappropriate to ask if TorqueX is moving in the direction of being more of an API exposed to .Net? (i.e. the "Binary Only Version" now becomes an Assembly library)
If so, that's pretty good news that the focus of development will be there. There are many language options if Microsoft chooses to open up support beyond C# (and it sounds like they will at least for the PC platform). Not that there is anything wrong with C# (I use it daily via the day job). I'm just thinking of the learning curve associated with it for the beginners and newbies.
Hopefully the opportunity to improve the shortcomings of Torque through TorqueX will be leveraged across to the other platforms as well. (One of the things that sold me on Torque to begin with was the idea of a domain specific language such as TorqueScript and it's notion of Code-Once-Deploy-Many to Mac, Win32, Linux, etc.)
As you may or may not know, Microsoft has been making some fairly significant strides toward "non-type safe" code environments in their CodeDom namespace. Scott Guthrie recently posted on his blog that a production-ready version IronPython has been released. Libraries to eliminate or reduce the overhead you speak of in regard to variables, accessors, etc are becoming native to the .Net framework with every loosely typed language that Microsoft adopts. If one were clever enough, creating a compiler (vs. an interpreter) of TorqueScript would probably not require much more coding, and the goofy implementation of namespaces in TorqueScirpt would probably adapt well to the LINQ technology that's on the way.
Anyway, thanks for the response. I certainly understand the worth of where it's important to focus development energy.
#29
You could conceivably port the TS code over from TGB so that TX could interpret TS, but it would take considerable time and effort to get it to work exactly right without having to change any script between TGB and TorqueX.
10/17/2006 (2:28 pm)
@Daniel - Right now I'm pretty sure that TorqueX does not adhere to CLS, though I could be wrong. You could conceivably port the TS code over from TGB so that TX could interpret TS, but it would take considerable time and effort to get it to work exactly right without having to change any script between TGB and TorqueX.
Torque Owner AzraelK
You said marble blast _ultra_ (the TSE version) was rebuild with torque X you also said we could port our TGB projects to C# and use the TGB level editor, That means torque x is a 3d/2d engine? that means torquex is some sort of C# based TGE, TSE, T2D XNA compatible combo?
That sounds beyond great! but how much is it going to cost to us who already own TGB and or TGE?
What is the ETA on torque x?