Blog for Greg Ellwood at GarageGames.com

Getting back into Torque and GameSpace Exporting

Greg Ellwood — 2006-08-28T15:28:59+00:00

Getting back into Torque

Since my last blog, I've been getting back into Torque. Over the last few days I've been getting my dev machine setup with all the latest Torque stuff. What I'm really waiting for is TSE MS4 but till thats here I thought I'd start off with TGE. I haven't really done much with Torque since 1.2 so I set about downloading 1.4 and the latest lighting kit. Also installed Visual Studio C++ Express 2005.

I must say things have progressed a long way since I last built Torque. It used to take a couple of days of messing around with CVS and Visual Studio etc. to get up and running. Within a couple of hours I had everything I needed installed and had everything compiling nicely. With all the new documentation and tutorials, getting back into things was so much easier than I expected.

Exporting

A couple of years ago my team was having a lot of trouble learning to export to .DTS. Our modellers had no trouble in creating great models but getting them in game gave us serious headaches. Now I'm a programmer and struggle like mad with anything art related and our lead modeller told me that I had no chance at exporting so I decided I needed to give it a try :)

I couldn't afford MAX so decided to purchase GameSpace as I'd previously had a little success with modelling in TrueSpace. Armed with GameSpace and the DarkIndustries exporter I decided to start simple to create and export a textured cube. After several hours of messing around I got my cube running in the old show tool and then in game. I was rather pleased with myself, this exporting stuff was easy! ;)

Several months went by and I'd progressed from simple primitives to more complex shapes and had them exporting with collision and detail levels. Next up I tried a vehicle and a weapon and eventually got those going too. It was all going well until I tried to export a tree that one of the team had made. I could get the tree to export but no matter what I tried I simply couldn't work out how to get transparency to work on the leaves.

Here was my best effort:

Anyway, I've tried to export this tree on and off for the past couple of years with no success. Yesterday I decided to take another shot at it and after a couple more hours I think I finally got my head around what I was doing wrong because I finally did it!

If anyone else has been having trouble with something similar in GameSpace feel free to contact me and I'll do my best to help.

I must say I'm loving ShowTool Pro so much better than the old one. The only things I need to learn to export now are characters and animations, hopefully they will be easier than trees with transparent textures but maybe I'll just quit while I'm ahead :)

gameCMS

Thanks to everyone who tried out my gameCMS software (see last blog for more info).

I've had some great feedback on it and since then I've rolled out a new patch (1.0.9) and have also released the first public alpha build of gameCMS Studio. Here's a screenie:

See this thread for more info.

-Greg.

Has it really been that long?

Greg Ellwood — 2006-08-22T12:19:09+00:00

I've had a task on my todo list for a while now called 'Post another GG .plan'. I visit the GG site pretty much every day, read everyone else's .plans but never seem to get the time to write my own.

I finally sat down to write this .plan and thought I'd better check out my previous one first and was shocked when I spotted the date - Aug 05, 2003 - over 3 years ago! Has it really been that long? I guess it has, this might be a long one.. ;)

Well last time I'd been a member of the GG community for just over a year and was just really starting to get to grips with Torque. I introduced myself, talked about my projects and promised to start getting involved with the community more. At the time I was working with a small team called iNvasionWorks on our first Torque powered game.

Project GreenLight: Airborne Operations 1939-45

Ok, hands up, who remembers GreenLight?

iNvasionWorks formed from a group of friends who met on the web while creating maps for Day of Defeat. Some of the maps that you may have played in Valve's retail release of Day of Defeat were made by members of the iNvasionWorks team. I joined the team as a programmer to work on their own WW2 game and eventually I ended up leading the team as well.

We started Project GreenLight using TGE back in late 2002. The game is an online multiplayer first person shooter based around the missions of Paratroopers in World War II. My claim to fame is that GreenLight made the infamous GG whiteboard at one point :)

We had 4 dev shots on GG during 2003-2004:

www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=509
www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=613
www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=677
www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=727

In addition to those shots we made a lot more progress into 2005:

www.invasionworks.com/gl_equip.php
www.invasionworks.com/gl_guis.php
www.invasionworks.com/gl_maps.php
www.invasionworks.com/gl_players.php
www.invasionworks.com/gl_vehicles.php
www.invasionworks.com/gl_weapons.php

The game also managed to get small previews in a few popular gaming magazines.

During development we came across many problems due to creating such an ambitious game as an indie team. Our biggest problem however was keeping the team together and continually moving forward.

We lost a graphics guy who went to Ubisoft to work on the Splinter Cell series, a mapper to Valve, one of the current members is working on Dark Messiah. We also had members sent to Iraq and another who lost almost everything in the New Orleans disaster.

I personally have moved house and job twice since GL started and have also got engaged.

Mid-2005 we were at a stage where we could release a beta of the game but we just weren't happy with what we had. There was nothing particularly wrong with the game just it was still a fair way off what we wanted it to be.

After a lot of thought we made the hard decision to put the game on hold. A big part of this decision was due to the announcement of TSE. We did some tests with the new terrain and water in TSE along with various shaders and decided that TSE was what we needed to really pull off our vision for GL. Although usable we decided to wait until TSE hit MS4 before we picked GL back up.

The iNvasionWorks team members have been pretty much doing their own things for the past year or so. We've done some bits and pieces with TSE but nothing we want to show just yet. With the recent TSE MS4 announcements we're starting to think about GL again and I'm really excited to get back into it.

So what else have I been up to?

I've actually been incredibly busy over the past year and have various projects on the go. As mentioned I have TGE and TSE licenses but also recently started prototyping some game ideas with TGB and have also picked up the Adventure Kit. I'm also excited to pick up XNA and Torque X as soon as they are available.

GameBurst

In my spare time I'm heavily involved in the gaming community and run my own game fan site - www.gameburst.com. If anyone wants extra coverage for their game projects drop me an email and I'll be happy to post about them.

gameCMS

GameBurst runs on my own custom PHP/MySQL Content Management System. Last year I realised there was a need in the gaming community for a decent gaming Content Management System. There were already a handful available but most of them suffered from a mix of the following problems:

* Bug ridden
* Expensive
* Too complex
* Not customisable, resulting in lots of sites that all look the same

I decided to take the best parts of my CMS and after a little polish gameCMS Lite 1.0 was born. gameCMS Lite is FREE and Open Source, using it it's possible to power pretty much any kind of site you can think of such as:

* Single Game Fansites
* Single System Fansites
* Multi-Console Websites
* Gaming Press Websites
* Game & Mod Development Teams
* Clan Websites

The core features of gameCMS are:

* Games (obviously!)
* News
* Media - with support for unlimited image types, automatic thumbnailing and watermarking
* Articles - unlimited types, multipage and custom rating systems
* Polls
* Cheats
* Staff

There are currently several hundred sites either in development or already using gameCMS Lite.

Feel free to download yourself a copy (note you must register on the gameCMS forums) or check out the gamecms site for more info and a demo: www.gamecms.com

To try and overcome the problem of everyone creating identical sites I decided to release gameCMS with no default frontend. To help users create sites with gameCMS I am constantly releasing documentation and tutorials as well as FREE sample frontends and integration classes that users can use, customise or just learn from.

Here's some examples from the first sample frontend powered by gameCMS Lite:

www.gamecms.com/sample6
www.gamecms.com/sample6/gameInfo.php?gameId=3
www.gamecms.com/sample6/review.php?articleId=6&page=1

You can download the sample which includes the original .PSD for FREE from the gameCMS site.

One thing I would like to do with Lite is make it more indie friendly as every game needs a website right? If anyone has ideas that they would like to see in a CMS I'd love to hear them, please post them here or on the gameCMS forums.

You may have wondered why I called it gameCMS Lite and not just gameCMS. This is because I am also releasing a more advanced edition called gameCMS Pro. Pro will feature a greater focus on user interaction and customisation and will be a paid CMS. It's due for release at the end of this year.

A final part of the gameCMS suite that I am creating is a standalone windows app called gameCMS Studio. Studio is developed in C#.NET 2.0 and features a powerful editor, ftp, database and image tools. It will also contain wizards aimed at helping people quickly integrate their layouts with gameCMS. Studio is still in development and is due to launch later this year. You can find a few Studio teaser screens here:

www.gamecms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=529

So thats a quick overview of what I've been up to. I'm going to try and post more regular .plans but if not, see you in 3 years ;)

-Greg.

Tuesday Aug 5 12:42

Greg Ellwood — 2003-08-05T12:42:12+00:00

My first .plan, a bit about me, my current Torque project and getting involved with the community.

This is my first .plan so I apologise if it's a little unorganised.

My name is Greg.. I'm known around the web as FireFly. I'm 24, have a BSc(hons) Software Engineering degree and my current day job involves developing bespoke web/database applications. In my spare time I work on various web/game projects.

Just over a year ago I was approached by the iNvasion Works team (who are known for creating some of the best Day of Defeat maps around) to see if I would be interested on working on a very ambitious World War 2 game (Project GreenLight: Airbourne Operations 1939-45) with them as lead coder.

I'd worked on several game/mod projects and created many websites for people and this looked like an exciting project so I jumped at the chance. They already had their eyes on Torque for the engine so I bought my license that day.

We spent around 6 months working on designs and building a team of people with the necessary skills.

Its now a year later, I believe I now have a good understanding of Torque, GreenLight is progressing well with around 6months development complete and we're hope to hit beta sometime this year. Here are links to the 2 dev shots we've posted here so far:

Snapshot 1
Snapshot 2

More details on the project can be found here

When I posted our last dev shot I realised that I've hardly spent any time with the Garage Games community - I hadn't even created my profile! So since then I've decided to try and get a bit more involved.

Last week I started checking the forums more often and have been helping to answer people's queries. I've begun speaking to people on some other projects and now I've written my first .plan! :)

I think I'm on the right track now to becoming more involved with the GG community - my next aims are:

-to keep helping out people on the forums where I can
-hang around in the IRC channel too
-post at least a fortnightly .plan
-continue working hard on GreenLight and keep the community updated with regular dev shots
-find time to post up some of my torque work as resources

If anyone wants to bounce coding ideas off me online you can get me on:

ICQ: 4546901
AIM: gregellwood
MSN: greg_ellwood@hotmail.com
IRC: [iNw]FireFly on neverdream, gamesnet and a couple of others.

-Greg.