Space flight/battle sim...is this engine suitable?

#1 Well, the freespace 2 engine might be better, but Torque would work, just because it's overqualified ;). You'd have to trim down the engine to get rid of landscapes and buildings (not too hard, just don't put them in your levels) and do a new skybox... There's a resource on doing this.

#2 I was thinking about the issues involved in making this sort of game with torque the other day after looking at Earth and beyond. Torque has HUGE potential for a space game imo. Because its primarily a fps engine, it would also be great for being able to walk around your space ships/staions, and theres the potential for going planetside, and with a bit of work scaling stuff, a torque mission area can be a ridiculously large area of space. Still im not very good at the technical side of things so i could be very wrong ;)

#3 Well, there wouldn't be a whole lot of objects. I'd keep the ships relatively low-poly...an asteroid or a planet here and there...but mostly empty space. Would like some kind of 'floating particle' function to give you some idea of what axis you're travelling on.

The space itself I was going to break up into smaller 'sectors' with 'hyper-jumps' between them...don't know...lotsa ideas...gotta see what kind of tools are out there to realize them without having to undertake writing an engine myself ;-).

#4 There are already a few space games for Torque, so it's possible. If you want to have high velocity, you may need to fine tune the working set collision code for your ShapeBase derived objects.

#5 Okay, I guess my last question is: Does this engine support 'all the latest' hardware. In other words (I guess ;-) ), are there any known issues with it and, say, the latest nvidia and ati cards? Any issues with Creative Labs Audigys? (Other than the one's they created themselves), etc, etc.

#6 I haven't heard of many problems with Torque on modern hardware. Though, exploiting is properly is another matter altogether.

#7 http://forums.shatteredstar.com/user-cgi/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000132

http://forums.shatteredstar.com/user-cgi/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=000120

Freespace models, TGE powered.

#8 *DEEP BREATH*

Okay...I bought it...now let's see what I can do with it!

;-)

#9 Relax man, you did the right thing.

#10 Congrats... Welcome to the family ;)

#11 You might have a looksee at a mod I did. It is getting dated but it might give you a start or ideas. Take the edits with a grain of salt though as all I wanted to do was buildup a concept. I know of better ways to improve the code but this was my first cut at understanding the engine code and C++.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=2807

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=3007

#12 Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

RL is taking a toll right now, but as soon as I get some free time, I'm gonna go through that with a fine-tooth comb as it looks like just the sort of start I need!

#13 Wendell:

After going through your edits (both text and comparing manually with the patch file), it comes up Invalid connection objectId in netconnection.cc line 618. Still being totally unfamiliar with the code, any idea as to what might be causing this?

#14 Humm. Sounds like maybe some other updates might be failing. I believe that the code was patched against the 7/5 release. If you try and supply edits since then be careful.

#15 Hey Ben. You said "Welcome to the family". That mean that I'm not part of the garage games family if I use PowerRender for my engine?

#16 I can't find a CVS release under that date. The latest one on the list is march.

#17 Sorry about the confusion about a 7/5 release. What I meant was the CVS HEAD version as of 7/5. As long as the manual edits closely match the appropriate line numbers and such then all should be well.
I would double check the edits especially since the .zip file went though about three releases before getting it all correct. The latest .zip file has the latest and most correct edits. The patch file was created to hopefully overcome the subsequent edits confusions.
If all else still fails then if you make a patch file using the current HEAD, I can do a file compare to see if I can spot the problem.

Good Luck

#18 Jeremy: You're more like that crazy uncle... :P