TGB 1.7 Released

Dan Maruschak — 2008-01-31T01:57:11+00:00

Hi guys. I'm happy to announce the release of TGB 1.7! It's got some features that I've wanted to see in TGB for a while, like the ability to specify collision-polygon style information as behavior fields, which we were able to put through a trial-by-fire in our recent Game-in-a-Day entry, GarageQuest. It was really cool to get a chance to use the tools I've been working on to do some fun game development stuff. And Game-in-a-day was a nice break from normal development, since people didn't mind so much if my code had a few rough edges, and I could focus mostly on the fun stuff. :) It's a good reminder that even though making our tools can be hard work sometimes, the end goal is about helping people have fun and make their own fun stuff.

So what's new for 1.7? Well, it's got a new Linkpoint Editor:

And a new Collision Polygon Editor:

And it has beefed up support for the t2dShapeVector object, in case anyone gets on an extreme retro kick:

Official 1.7 Change Log:

- New Collision Polygon Editor
- New Linkpoint Editor
- New method: t2dSceneObject.mountToLinkpoint, lets you mount directly to a linkpoint if you already have its LinkpointID (be careful, linkpointIDs aren't necessarily the same as the index of the linkpoint)
- New method: t2dSceneObject.getAllMountedChildren, returns a list of all of the objects that are mounted to this object
- New method: t2dSceneObject.getChildrenOfLinkpoint, returns all objects mounted to object at a particular linkpointID
- Can create t2dShapeVector objects from the Create pane (look for the "Polygon" type in the "Other" rollout of the create pane -- also, be careful when using the "fill" options on these polygons, only convex polygons are guaranteed to render correctly when you have the "fill" option set)
- New editor for creating t2dShapeVector objects
- New utility function: t2dAngleToPoint
- Added support for a new type of behavior field: "polygon"
- Bug fix: t2dSceneWindow's getCurrentCameraArea and getCurrentCameraSize methods now return the current size directly, without modifying it
- Bug fix: t2dTextObject size no longer arbitrarily add 1.0 to width of text objects, so text objects widths work better for very small text object sizes
- Bug fix: Now able to delete any linkpoint, regardless of whether or not there is another sceneobject located at the linkpoint's world position

And 1.7.2 adds:
- Bug fix: cloneWithBehaviors method now copies linkpoints from original object to clone
- Bug fix: t2dShape3D objects now clone properly with cloneWithBehaviors method
- Bug fix: t2dShapeVectors now take the FlipX/FlipY properties into account when rendering
- Bug fix: small tweaks and fixes to the new editors introduced in 1.7
- Added support for a new type of behavior field: "localpointlist"

Feel free to post any questions, issues, or comments specifically about this release either here or in this forum thread. If you have any bug reports feel free to post them in the report bugs forum. Enjoy!

TGB Tool Development

Dan Maruschak — 2008-01-02T19:57:18+00:00

Hi everyone. I thought I'd introduce myself, and give you guys an idea of what I'm working on. I work on the Tech & Tools team as a Tool and Docs Engineer. On the Tech and Tools team, our job is to focus on usability and the user experience, to let the Engine Dev team focus more on just the core technology. One aspect of what we do is documentation (you may have seen my Torque X tutorials), and another aspect is working on tools to make the game development experience better. Most of you have probably heard about the future plans for Torque 2, and until that's ready to go (which won't be any time soon) we've got a balancing act -- we want to make sure that we'll be ready with a great engine and tools experience when we get to the Torque 2 launch, but we also want to make sure that our current products and customers get the love and attention they deserve. One of the ways we can help our current products (while also looking forward) is by making tool design and usability improvements. This will let us improve our current products, and it will let us try out designs and ideas that we might be able to use in our next-generation tools. To that end, I've been working on the linkpoint editor in TGB:

The first difference is that this editor is in its own window, instead of a mode of the main editor. Personally, I hate modes: they're disorienting, it's easy to forget you're in them, they tend to introduce complexity and bugs, and they're harder to test. The second difference in the new editor is that it adds the ability to directly change the X and Y positions of the individual linkpoints via text entry fields, so you can set things precisely (when you want to). The third big difference is the ability to create linkpoints outside the object's bounding box, a feature that the engine has always supported, but that the old tool didn't:

Now, this is still a work in progress. There are some changes I want to make to the GUI layout, there are a few other things I need to finish up, and then I need to do quite a bit of cleanup under the hood before it's release ready. Once it's polished up a bit, I'll also probably be able to use it to update the Collision Polygon editor, and also create an editor for the t2dShapeVector object. I'm hoping to have this ready for the next release of TGB (no promises on release dates yet!). So what do you guys think? And if you have ideas about other things that would make TGB better, let's talk about it. We love hearing ideas from the community. Obviously we can't do everything, but we can definitely consider anything.

Blog for Dan Maruschak at GarageGames.com

TGB 1.7 Released

TGB Tool Development