Blog for Tom Spilman at GarageGames.com

Sickhead is hiring!

Tom Spilman — 2007-03-03T20:44:13+00:00

First i'd like to thank the Torque community... we couldn't have gotten this far with our dream without all of you. I cannot count the times that a resource, plan, or forum post has gotten us out of a jam in development. The success of both our Adventure Kit and Torsion is largely due to the ecosystem of indie cooperation and collaboration here.

When it came time to expand the team, i wanted that person to be one of you.

We're Hiring!

So the time has now come.

Sickhead Games, LLC is a small indie game studio founded October of 2002 in Dallas, Texas. Over the last 4 years it has been my business partner, Russell, and i who have been the sole employees at the studio. There are no CEOs or marketing guys... everyone at Sickhead works directly on the games. We've now gotten to the point that we cannot handle all the cool projects coming in ourselves.

Sickhead is looking for a new programmer to work along side us on all our projects. The programmers at Sickhead are required to be well rounded and can take on any task, although not always expertly. The perfect applicant for this position would have a strong background in 3D math with experience with animation techniques and physics (areas that are not my strong suits). Talent and a demonstrated ability to master new things are more important that degrees and big resumes. A passion for games and promoting indie game development is a must. If your easily offended don't bother applying... you must have an open mind, a laid back attitude, and a strong work ethic. This position is on-site in our new Dallas office.

Now what does Sickhead offer you?

First this is an exciting opportunity. This person would be the 3rd employee (we consider ourselves employees before being owners) and would have an equal voice and creative influence in all our projects. We have several new projects from games for motion simulators, a dinosaur simulation, a new TorqueX starter kit, Torsion 2, and a few other projects we cannot speak publicly about just yet. You would be working on all of these things as well as some prototyping and experimental game design. We want people with strong opinions and creative game ideas. Your getting in on the ground floor of an indie studio that is going places.

If your expecting a huge salary, this is not the studio for you. The salary for this position will be closer to that of a QA position, but that will be supplemented by frequent bonuses based on overall company performance. We are a strong believer in spreading the wealth when the company is doing well which is an offer you won't get from many employers. Insurance and medical benefits are planned, but haven't been decided on yet. If you need to move, we can compensate you some for that (and we'll help you move a couch).

Finally we've been indie for almost 5 years without a single loan, missed paycheck, or layoff. Although we're a small indie studio and there are always risks with that, we're extremely careful about being financially stable. We have to... this is my only job and i'd like to keep it. ;)

If your interested you can contact me directly at tom@sickheadgames.com. If you have any other questions about us or this position feel free to ask them below.

GDC

It's time for the Game Developer Conference yet again. This year we have a demo running in the GarageGames booth of an upcoming pack that we have been working on in collaboration with Ben. Not ready to show it off yet... but Tim goaded me into it... a little teaser can't hurt.

If anyone is out at GDC and wants to meet up drop me an email.

Torsion Update

Tom Spilman — 2006-05-31T08:30:58+00:00

New Torsion out today. As some of you may have noticed this one was up to the wire with the previous release expiring about 5 minutes ago (for those of you in CST).

This release mostly focused on the left side of the window... the project tree. As part of that the following got done:

You can now toggle the project tree filter to display ignored mod paths.
Fixed text coloring during project tree drag and drop.
When you 'explore' a file or folder from the project tree you no longer get the folders explorer bar.
Project tree view now supports multiple item selection with open, delete, move, and copy operations.
Updated directory watcher so you can always delete a folder in the project tree.
Added Explorer context menu in project tree context menu.
Fixed bug where you could not delete from the project tree when no script was open.
Fixed bug where you could delete the project root.
Added 'New File' into project tree context menu.
'New Folder' in project tree context menu now works.
We now use the native icons for all files in the project tree view.
You can now adjust the files and folders which are always excluded from the project tree view in the Preferences.

There are a lot more changes including more configurability (in particular for script and DSO extensions) and VC++ style menus. You can read the rest of the change log, but i'm gonna highlight a few of my favorite improvements:

Native Icons

Nothing really glamorous, but it's one that i've been wanted to see for a while. Torsion now queries the OS for the normal icons used for files when it populates the project tree. This has been a pet peeve of mine in VC++ since 2.0... don't assume i want to use the IDE to edit a non-source file, don't change the look of my non-source icons. The more i integrate the project tree with the native functionality of the OS the more useful it seems to become. I hope to extend this native feel to the Mac and Linux ports if it makes sense.

Explorer Menu

This came out really nice. It was inspired by the Explorer menu in the excellent tool BeyondCompare. This basically opens just about any shell extension based tool within Torsion.

And as you can see in the screen shot... it gives you some basic access to shell integrated version control systems. It's not ideal by any means, but it's better than waiting till i had time to implement a custom integration with SVN. Now to the big feature.

Edit and Continue

This was something i wasn't planning on adding at this time, but i had a need for it in a contract job and implemented a quick hack over a few hours. I've since spent a week on it and it's pretty damn good... better than VC++ in alot of cases, but of course it can fail badly in odd situations. For those of you not in the know, Edit and Continue is something Microsoft introduced with VC++ 6 that allowed you limited editing of C++ code while your app was running. This would allow you to make some small changes to the code without requiring a stop/compile/restart of the debug session.

For TorqueScript this is a easier than doing it for VC++, but it had it's own challenges. The first naive implementation just used exec() and the 'nocalls' parameter. The problem was that the 'nocalls' param was bugged in TGE 1.4 and would crash on some script files. Also it didn't quite behave as it should... global assignments outside of functions were executed and if you removed a function from the file it would not be removed from memory. A custom solution was needed and i added two new commands to the TelnetDebugger to make it work.

Which brings us to the bad news... i haven't updated the TelnetDebugger resource with the changes just yet. So although your teased with the "Set Next Statement" and the script reload prompt dialog, you'll get an evil Bing! from Torsion as the TelnetDebugger denied you your request.

I'll try to get the update for this out very soon. :)

Stability and What's Next

A quick note. I've noticed people commenting on Torsion stability here an there. In general is pretty good, but there have been a few pesky crash bugs out there. The automated crash reports have helped, but the biggest problem is that Torsion is still in an alpha state. I regularly rework large portions of the code when inserting new core features which leads to things being more unstable than i'd like. I try hard to keep this from effecting people because i wanted to get a real IDE out to people back when TorqueScript debugging was a joke. I'm in the final stretch towards beta, so cut me a little slack please. At that point it's all stability, polish, and some crap work (docs and marketing). I won't ship something that is bug ridden. Promise! :)

I have a heavy load of contract work going on, but i'm still pushing hard towards the final. The next release will promise to complete one feature people ask alot about... Find and Replace. I almost never use it myself and it's something difficult to implement well, so it's been back burner'd for a long time now. I can't put it off any longer. I will have full Find and Replace in the next release... count on it.

You can get Torsion at the usual location:

Download Torsion
v1.0.607 Alpha

Please send bug reports and feature requests over here.

- Tom

Torsion Update & TelnetDebugger Fix

Tom Spilman — 2006-04-03T10:24:24+00:00

I put out a new update to Torsion today. The build released two weeks ago ended up with a serious bug which would cause the code completion thread to run the CPU usage up to 100%. Please update as soon as possible.

Aside from this critical fix, a few more minor changes made it into this new build...

Added automatic check for new version on Torsion startup which can be disabled in Preferences.
Added Ctrl+Alt+S as shortcut for Save As.
You can convert a selection to uppercase via Ctrl+Shit+U or lowercase via Ctrl+U.
Fixed issue with GetProcessId() which caused Torsion to not work on Win9x machines or WinXP machines without Service Pack 1 installed.
You can now quickly comment block selections via Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Shift+K to uncomment.
Script scanner now properly handles block comments.
Fixed bug in script scanner that was locking up the code completion thread.
Project name now appears first in the application title.
Posted a patch for engine crash issue when debugging.

That last point is an important one. My TelnetDebugger improvements which were merged with 1.4 and TGB had a bug in them that could cause your game to crash when hitting some breakpoints in a debugging session. Before this fix gets merged into HEAD it would be great to get as many people to test it as possible. I encourage anyone who is doing a lot of TorqueScript work to install this fix. All feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Oh and how can anyone post a plan without a screenshot?

This is a quick little prototype i put together in about 8 hours (i'm a TGB newbie). Nothing really fancy in the screenshot other than the parallax clouds with shadows. Of course it was was done with Torsion. =)

You can get Torsion at the usual location:

Download Torsion
v1.0.549 Alpha

-- Tom

Torsion Updated!

Tom Spilman — 2006-03-21T20:48:16+00:00

First off I'm at the GDC this week. If anyone wants to meet up just drop me a name and phone number to tom AT sickheadgames DOT com and I'll give you a call back. I hope to spend some time with the GG guys talking Torsion and checking out all the cool new stuff they're about to unleash upon us. =)

So aside from contract work Torsion has been my primary focus of late. Today I released a new version that has a significant amount of improvements. I think this will be the final alpha release. The next release will be a beta and be 100% feature complete.

A few notable changes:

New project setting allows ignoring of select mod folders in both the project tree and for code completion.
Enabled code completion for fields within object and datablock declarations.
Script compiler errors are highlighted in the output window and they are double clickable.
New error display within output window for spotting errors quickly.
Added visibility toggle of left and bottom panes in view menu.
Added preferences dialog exposing all customizable IDE settings.
New optional pre-compile dumps the syntax errors of modified scripts into output window before execution.

Precompiler
IMO the coolest thing in the new release is the script precompiler.

When enabled it will compile any changed scripts before you launch your game. If you have any syntax errors they will be caught and reported in the output window. It works by calling your game executable with a special script file which just compiles a list of scripts. Since it uses your Torque executable it's always accurate and never misses or reports false errors. Say goodbye to alot of wasted time with this one feature.

The down side is that it assumes your Torque executable will run the script passed to it. If you have disabled this feature in your executable it won't work. I've added the ability to toggle it off per config to deal with that case.

Code Browser
The code browser has started to get a face lift, but it's not finished for this release. I've started to add filtering for different classes of identifier, but the mix isn't final yet. It now also shows the base class/datablock when you expand an object which is pretty handy. When you double click on an item it will take you to the script and line that identifier is declared in or will show you a list of locations to choose from.

I could use some feedback on this area of Torsion. There is a ton of data to display here and it's been challenging finding a way to display it all. I'm starting to think i need to do something different that what is normally seen in most IDEs.

Code Completion
This release has my third and final refactor of the code completion scanner engine. It took me a couple of tries before i got the design right as when i started the Torsion project i was pretty much a TorqueScript neophyte. Aside from the internal changes and performance improvements i added dot completion for the special %this local. I didn't get time on this pass, but it's all ready now to finish off all the other typical code completion features. I'll be on this right after GDC.

Preferences
Finally i've begun the process of exposing the preferences stored in the xml file to the IDE. All the coloring stuff is there as well as a few other toggles including tab size and type, disabling code folding, and code completion. There will be more options added now that the framework is in place to easily edit them. If you have a pet option go ahead and log it into our bug tracker.

Well... gotta get some lunch and rub elbows with industry folk. =)

Download Torsion
v1.0.544 Alpha

Precipitation for TSE

Tom Spilman — 2006-02-28T09:01:18+00:00

So over the last few months when i wasn't working on Torsion i've been poking at the TGE Precipitation object to TSE-ize it.

Originally i started with the intention to completely replace Precipitation. I looked at the few alternative methods, but in the end each had serious limitations. Most lacked collision which would have been a huge step backwards for anything but flight sim type games. The original TGE Precipitation system was really pretty darn good and really just needed some additional features and optimizations.

The first thing done was to move it all over to vertex buffers. It now uses an "optimally sized" volatile VB in a fill-render-fill pattern until all the particles are drawn. This is very optimal as we're sending lots of big batches to the card and not holding on to one fat exclusive VB. This means high performance and little video card resource usage.

Next i looked at what could be done with a shader. Again i looked at all the techniques out there and ended up with a widely compatible conservative approach. I reduced the vertex format to just a position and uv set and moved vertex coloring and alpha fade to the shader.

Still the really cool shader tricks are yet to come. With DX10 level cards you'll be able to process a VB and have it output new VB with more verts. In this way you could pass just the position, velocity, and camera pos up to the video card and have it build the particle completely. Also features like texture fetching from a vertex buffer would allow Precip to pass z buffer of the scene rendered from the averaged velocity vector to detect collision. This is the future of million particle systems running purely on the GPU.

After fixing a few bugs i turned my focus to new features and improvements:

Both drops and splashes can be animated or not.
Finally you can set the drops/splashes per side in the datablock.
The simulation stops when the object is zoned away or not in the view frustum.
Optional tinting of the particle by the ambient sun light.
You can pass precip thru the glow buffer.
Have the precip reflect in water or other dynamic reflective surfaces.
Moved the mWindEffectsPrecipitation out of Sky.
Options for precip to collide with players and vehicle types.
Can now set a fade distance for precip particles.
New setTurbulence() script function which works like modifyStorm.

A big new feature is volumetric precipitation. By disabling the followCam property you are free to position and rotate the precip object anywhere you want. This means you can put glowing rain flowing upwards inside a room or have a precip object attached to a moving shape:

Still i'm not done with Precipitation. As soon as the 1.4 and MBU merges are done i want to make another pass tuning performance on the system. I've also got a few more features i'd like to see:

Ripple particles.
Shadows and lights effect particle color.
Add randomized gusts sky wind system.

Anyway... i'm 26 hours without sleep now. How about a demo for you to play with:

Download TSE Precipitation Demo
(Select the walkthru from the menu and hit ALT+C to get the free camera to fly around)

PS. We've started a new contract TSE project yesterday. We'll be looking for 3 other individuals with specific skills to fill out some lucrative contract positions. I'll post a new plan on that later this week, but keep an eye on the help wanted forum.

Monday Jul 18 0:30

Tom Spilman — 2005-07-18T00:30:55+00:00

Screenshots and video in one plan? Inconceivable!

For the past 4 to 5 months my pet project has been a new TorqueScript development environment called Torsion and quoting Jeff Gran: I'm all giddy inside from the thought of it. Great plan there by the way Jeff. :)

[image]http://www.sickheadgames.com/stuff/garagegamesimages/torsion4_t.png[/...

This project started as I delved into more serious development with TorqueScript. The existing IDEs out there were ok, but each had some glaring faults; clumsy interfaces, lacking key features, the code was unmaintained, made with Java... :). As I spent days writing code exclusively in script my existing editor started to show it's warts.

Also in general the debugging support across all the IDEs was bad. No fault of the original Tribes team (they had games to ship), but this was because of Torque's script debugging API and script execution core. It lacked some key features to make automated debugging process better than the existing echo and print methods I was currently using to solve my script bugs.

So for these reasons I dusted off our Lua script debugger (which was shelved when we decided to go with Torque) and started to convert it over to be a full fledged TorqueScript editor. Since I started with an existing codebase (which uses wxWindows... hello portability) the basics got up and running very quickly, but soon it was apparent that some serious refactoring was needed. That refactoring took a good 4 months because of interruptions like contract work and laziness. The last month or so has been me filling out little features to make the initial alpha version useable for YOU GUYS.

The system consists of two parts. The editor itself and an enhanced TelnetDebugger resource which also makes some changes to the TorqueScript parser and execution core. This enhancement allows things like breakpoints on code in the main body of a script file, debugging of the non DSO'd main.cs, and fixes some existing bugs. Both parts, in theory, should work in any combination. You should be able to use the editor with an unpatched Torque engine (really you wouldn't want to) or the enhanced debugger with another script debugger like TribalIDE. The plan is that once these changes to the core have had some eyeballs go thru it, we can possibly have it submitted to be an official change to the core engine.

At this point we have something very useable for daily script development. Just about everything you would expect in a VisualStudio for TorqueScript is working or on it's way in the coming months. Still one button debugging gets me drooling every time. I can't describe how great it is to hit F5 and have your script code save, launch in the debugger, and stop at your breakpoint. It is very sweet indeed.

Now I have a few more little pesky bugs to tackle then some time to prepare the security layer and installer. We plan to start the public alpha test this week, so keep your eyes peeled. We seriously want to hear absolutely all the feedback we can on it. Bug reports, things that suck in the alpha, pet features, crazy pie-in-the-sky ideas, pricing thoughts, everything.

Let's end with the aforementioned Torsion teaser video.

I can't wait to get this into the collective hands of the community this week.

[image]http://www.sickheadgames.com/stuff/garagegamesimages/torsion1_t.png[/imag...

[image]http://www.sickheadgames.com/stuff/garagegamesimages/torsion2_t.png[/imag...

[image]http://www.sickheadgames.com/stuff/garagegamesimages/torsion3_t.png[/imag...

[image]http://www.sickheadgames.com/stuff/garagegamesimages/torsion5_t.png[/imag...

Thursday May 26 8:12

Tom Spilman — 2005-05-26T08:12:38+00:00

My work on Torque Pipeline 1.1 beta.

So the last few days i took some time to work on the next update to Torque Pipeline, our easy to use exporter for DIF interiors from Cartography Shop.

We had a short list of bugs to correct, some from our internal use and a couple from the community... all fairly boring stuff. Still we implemented a few new features:

- Inside/outside light scales can now be different for TGE DIFs.
- Lightmap statistics added during output.
- You can keep construction brushes from exporting by putting them in a hidden VisGroup.
- We added support for John Kabus' lightmap borders fix via a new worldspawn property.

All good stuff, but the biggest feature is that you'll be able to import Valve220 .maps into Cartshop:

You can see the familiar cottage and tower there from your Torque SDK. Note this is really an importer and is available right from the Cartshop File->Import menu. I still need to work out textures and a few other little details, but so far so good. The only thing that is gonna be tricky is floating point units. The .map format isn't very stable when you go from a plane format, to triangles, then back to planes. We'll see how it works out, but at least people who have existing assets for QuArK or WorldCraft have a way to get their work over to Cartshop now.

You can expect the 1.1 beta this week.

Saturday May 21 6:24

Tom Spilman — 2005-05-21T06:24:18+00:00

Work on interactive gui texture surfaces on DTS shapes.

So we finally released Torque Pipeline and so far a lot of people have picked it up and seem to love it. If you don't know what Pipeline is you should check it out!

So aside from that i've been working on rendering GUIs on textures so that i can place them it in the environment and interact with them. My first attempt was focused on interiors and it worked out fairly well. But of course putting them on DTS shapes.... in particular physics driven DTS shapes was alot cooler. So that's what i did (the video uses the XviD codec):

It took me a long while thinking of how to properly integrate things into Torque... then i gave up and hacked it in. I added a castRayTri() function to TSMesh which would test all visible triangles on a shape against my ray and would return the material and UV hit point of the closest triangle. This could use some optimization, but it works for now.

The thing that drives all this, as described in this thread, is a new class called GuiTextureCanvas. It deals with rendering the GUI on to a dynamic texture and holds a static console method which will fire off the castRayTri() on the SceneObject you pass to it.

Oh and i'm totally screwing the server/client boundary here, but you know what... i don't care. The client server boundary is a bitch... especially when you're doing a single player game. I guess i need more experience with it.

The physics by the way are courtesy of Thomas Lund's rigid shape resource. I'm looking into other solutions as the rigid shape stuff leaves alot to be desired. Gary Brigg's stuff looks promising as well as Akio's. Still I'm taking a serious look at the NovodeX SDK as neither is really ready to be used (correct me if i'm wrong... we're willing to pay for working ODE/Newton/Novodex physices in Torque). Lucky for us our game is single player which should help alot.

I know people are gonna ask me to release this as a resource, but it requires alot of other stuff that is unrelated like my object interaction system. I would do it, but frankly i'm feeling too lazy to gather all the changes to make it available. I'll see if I can get some time to gather it all and organize it. It really is a lot of work putting up a good resource.

Tuesday Apr 12 2:37

Tom Spilman — 2005-04-12T02:37:26+00:00

Bot navigation

I took this weekend off of CartShop5 exporter work to finish up the work on NPC pathfinding for our game.

So i started looking around the GG site for some decent bot pathfinding for Torque. To my disappointment i didn't find very much. I saw that the Torque AI Pack isn't going to be released for a while longer and Josef Jahn's resource was the best thing going. So that's where I decided to start.

I integrated the "AI Pathfinding" resource and got some ok initial results. It's automatic waypoint placement mode which is done by walking around the level isn't very good. Since it's triggered by line of sight it will always place a point after you turn a corner. This leaves you with a path where the AI will rub the wall to turn the corner. It was also time consuming and prone to error for an artist working with a map. Still it wasn't all bad... the pathfinding algo is fairly fast and works ok most of the time. It does break down at times and wander away from the goal, but that could be a bug I introduced.

Still I didn't like the manual point placement and wanted something fully automatic. So to improve on it I started firing rays thru the interior to see what I could get. The initial results were positive, but needed a lot more work. One week later and I'm pretty happy with what I've gotten. No wall rubbing and 100% automatically generated.

The downside is that it uses an obscene amount of points to get this level of navigation. Once I get past the prototype phase I'll look into combining these points into convex areas which will leave me with a system sort of like Counterstrike Source uses.

You can watch a little video (actually it's like 35MB) I threw together using Windows Movie Maker.

Saturday Apr 2 8:49

Tom Spilman — 2005-04-02T08:49:47+00:00

First plan, the Cartography Shop 5 beta

This is my first plan here... i guess it's probably the best place to let people know about the progress with Cartography Shop.

First of all beta 3 of our CartShop4 exporter is available now. It should be the last before the final release.

So with that nearing completion and Josh so kindly sending me the beta version of Cartography Shop 5, I decided to take the weekend to start testing the waters with it. It's really an alpha IMO as *a lot* of stuff is still not working, but already it shows great improvement. Windowed selection is in. Carving is 100% more robust than it was in CS4. New "arch" primitive. All great additions!

Ok... So it's still *really* early, but I started by writing one of the new mesh reader plugins to support Torque DTS meshes. These should look familiar to all Torque users:

(Also notice the arch from the new arch tool)

It seems the normals are screwed up and a few more complex DTS meshes fail to load, but it's a good start. The eventual goal is that you'll just have to add your Torque/mod/data/shapes folder into the CS5 mesh search path and it will automatically populate it's mesh list with all the DTS shapes in your game.

I'll keep people up to date with what's going on here from time to time.