TGEA update when?

#21 Great, I'll be happy to see you there mb!

#22 @Andy Hawkins

I think you can forget about a 1.0.4 version, or any further development on TGEA whatsoever. Maybe GG will come in here and reassure you, but I doubt it. "Torque 2" is GG's current focus for 3D, and it looks to me like an "out with the old, in with the new" deal. TGEA's lead developer (Brian Ramage) now appears to be running his own company (and all good luck to him), and Torque 2 is being developed by a new team.

In these circumstances, I expect that your requests for bugfixes will be completely ignored. The best you can hope is that Stephen Zepp will show up and say that they will be addressed as part of the Torque 2 project. It seems pretty obvious to me that if you want any improvements to TGEA, you will have to make them yourself (and, fair enough, GG have given you the source code to enable you to do so).

I'm not cynical about Torque 2, by the way - it looks a good way to go. I just think that anyone currently using TGEA ought to be realistic - is it likely that a fairly small company like GG are going to commit resources to improving a dead product when its successor is just over the horizon?

#23 Was it realistic to mention TGEA as the new "flagship" for years if it never even left beta stability state and is then buried before even stabilized?

But I don't mind that much.
What I would like to see is that the MS 4.2 (or whatever the last version before destruction of TGEA by implementing the batch renderer was) would be made accessable to licensees as well.
Working with a "commonly working" engine would be far more realistic if you do not have it documented, instead of the new renderer related stuff that is not documented and never will be (since the "this page is community driven" appeared on the TGEA TDN I am sure that this won't change as the official documentation is MS2 or MS3 at best so if 16 months weren't enough to write a doc, 17 won't be as well)

And it would make the integration of other drivers simpler than it will be with the current implementation.

#24 In his last blog post Stephen Zepp said

TGE, TGE-A, and TGB (as well as TorqueX) will continue to receive active support until Torque 2 is well established as a development engine. At that time (well in to 2008), we will begin shifting developers towards using the new engine for future projects.

So hopefully there will be more fixes.

Speaking of which, what has happened to the Transparent Development project? And what happened to the long ago promise that all staff would keep their blogs up to date? Most of them haven't written a thing for months or years!

#25 What bugs are hampering you guys? There are a few that I can think of (taskbar shining through on some cards, dds not being handled same way as other image types, the lod bug), but most of them have fixes in the Bugs forum. I'd love to see some new features though, and it would help if some of the things that are currently commented out or not working (decals, splashes) were made to work at start or the engine came with a sample app for people new to the engine other than terrain_water_demo. OpenGL or better dual core support would be nice. Anti-aliasing would be great. Performance updates or shader feature are always a plus.

That having been said, I'm shipping a title in July and don't have many gripes with the engine since 1.03, the terrain shading was the last major issue I had with the engine, and that was fixed. TGE is certainly easier to work with, but TGEA is plenty capable.

#26 Decals actually work if you just uncomment them again and change the projection direction (ie - the constant used there)

Anti Aliasing will not happen. Just not possible by definition. MRT -> no hardware AA

If you are shipping the game yourself, some of the issues might be "unimportant" but a regular QA will not let your game pass as long as the task bar and ctrl-alt-del crash issues persist.

And seeing TGEA getting active support after 10 months of partial "one is forced to look into instead of doing something else" support would be great actually.

I'm still waiting on the documentation 10 months past launch, especially after the TDN was declared to be community driven, this is no optional thing anymore that it has to happen soon. I was told in May 07, when I asked the support, that someone was hired to do documentations and I would really like to see those or at least drafts of them.

At the moment, I would say the rebranding of TSE to TGEA was the worst step ever done.
The advanced would one let assume that TGEA is in any way advanced over TGE but it actually isn't.
Editors -> broken -> not advanced
Docs -> outdated, false, inexistant -> not advanced
Rendering -> cool new features but uncool new bugs and many missing TGE features -> not advanced

all in all it was a major graphics driver update at the price of twin major engine capability breaks, so TSE would have better suited it as that states more what it is: torque core technology with shader rendering.

#27 Dave, the right question is "what happened to any promise that GG ever made"?

Does anyone here remember that line:

"License holders are entitled to updates and all future bug fixes for one year."
www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1408

If you bought TGEA when it was released, or earlier, one year will be over in February.
And just to clarify, OpenGL support wouldn't "be nice". It's a feature that was promised and advertised when some of us bought the engine, so it must be done and soon.

For some reasons the expression "will continue to receive active support" made me laugh :)

#28 Well that clears a few things up. I did hope for more support from GG on TGEA rather than just leaving it up to community. I does seem like it's a beta but from what a few of you have said I should be able to patch it up and overcome the issues I was experiencing.

I just get a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth, when they dangled the "Shader Engine" carrot in front of us for so long, got the early adopters in, launched it, and then left it.

But I also understand that FPSCreatorX10 is kicking ass and so it's time to move on to DX10 as quickly as possible, so thank God we have a strong technical community to pick up the slack where support is required.

It's all good. I now am confident to port back to TGEA with my game. Thanks guys.

#29 I agree with teh points that Andy and Marc are saying, in a number of ways TGEA fell short maybe of what some of us might have hoped of it a few years ago. It is still my preferred engine mostly because of the full picture. I feel that its easier to bring the things up to par that need be in TGEA than to work with something else as a base. Rendering wise there are certainly better looking engines in the same price range (C4's lighting and shadowing are fantastic IMO), performance wise is somewhere in the middle, there are some cool features in TGEA that I really love (the shader system is great, atlas 2 is very good also with the exception of the art pipeline which is cryptic), having the majority of the TGE features in there helps a lot, but certainly the engine could have been better had it received more attention. It often has seemed as though GG has too many projects going and while some of them are very actively developed (TGB for example), TGEA seems to be less active. In fairness though there have been a few nice additions since 1.0. Atlas lightmaps were a much needed feature, and the Constructor migrations.

I've more or less accepted TGEA as it is though, and overall am happy with it as an engine at this point. Any other features that are added would simply be bonuses that I don't really need at this point, but would always be happy about. That is from my standpoint though, some other projects may find it unsuitable in some areas. That wasn't always the case, I was pretty frustrated with it around MS2/3. I am looking forward to Torque 2, and hoping that GG has learned a bit from this experience. Having things modularized should definitely help. It won't do me any good on my current project though, which is slated for July. Which is one of the reasons I'm curious on any outstanding issues people are having. It's hard to test under all hardware configurations and in some cases the bugs are things that only happen under certain hardware, I only have a couple of test boxes here.

@Marc: If your referring to the taskbar shining through bug there was a fix for that in the bugs forum, not sure if that's the same one. What's the CTRL-ALT-DEL bug?

#30 It seems that LOD bug is pretty high on people's list. Though I'm thinking if someone knew where to look it should be easy to fix.

#31 Oh I misunderstood - so I won't find a fix for the LOD bug in the forums? That's a pretty major bug - has anyone got a workaround?

#32 Not really ... we have "fake" workarounds that just prevent it from going to lowest lod level by massively changing the screen error variable in the prefs ... but thats it ...

As I don't have an 1.0.1 TGEA anymore, I can not even check back where they implemented it ...

#33 Oh so where's that prefs setting? What's it called? I bet I can fix it in source. I'll have a poke around soon.

#34 Andy, I can't run TGEA here at work but I would focus on the calls to TSShapeInstance::selectCurrentDetail in tsShapeInstance.cpp.

#35 I got all revisions of TGEA and TSE back to 3.5 or possibly 2.0.

If you think you can have any use of it, throw me an email and I'll link it here when I get time. Unless it's against the license agreement, of course.

#36 Thanks guys, Stephen I've sent you an email.

#37 Hey guys!

Just a quick heads up for anyone still tracking this thread:

I just announced the next update for TGEA over in my blog!