Blog for Ed Averill at GarageGames.com

Biting off more than you can chew..

Ed Averill — 2006-08-22T20:41:45+00:00

..seems to be a common enough failing in this business!

In the unhappy position I find myself in (working for a startup in Silicon Valley) I don't have a whole lot of "spare time" to work on my titles. This even after I had figured that my initial concept (a simpl explore-and-score-points thing) would be easily realizable..

Even just using TGE/TLK "out of the box" without any engine mods still means you have to do the design, then all the visual and audio content, then the scripting, then put it all together and test it.. and as I had kind of expected the scripting part was the easiest bit! Man.. cranking out decent artwork is no joke (this said as a programmer and musician, note that my traditional art skills are minimal and my computer art skills might be called passable on a good day).

so I've decided to try to implement one of my earlier concepts (kind of a 2D animal sim sort of affair) in TGB, figuring that it'll be easier to get something started there, and I can leverage everything I learn doing that into making a full-blown 3D game.

Thankfully Animation:Master can render out images suitable for sprites, and since there's a Torque exporter for it I can later take those assets into a true 3D version of the game if I want. I have some history/experience with A:M so that, at least, isn't a massive learning curve. I still have bald spots on my head from trying to come to terms with QuArK... ugh.. the horror.. the horror. Ship Constructor soon!!

Next task, other than working with TGB.. get out of this startup and into something that's not quite so bandwidth consuming!!!

Thursday Oct 27 20:57

Ed Averill — 2005-10-27T20:57:48+00:00

Hunting and gathering...

Well, slowly but surely I become Torque-ified.

I've been spending a lot of time with the tutorials, both here and from various third parties. Also been watching all the IGC videos (thanks to all for making those available), very interesting stuff. Also researching into what I need to put together a decent production pipeline on my development system.. lots of good stuff out there, even for someone on a limited budget.

Being self-funded is never saying "Please give me more cash", although it does often involve the question "More tools.. or beer?". Thankfully, no spousal unit means that there's one less layer to pass through when making that kind of a decision (lol). Soooo...

Money has been flowing to bring decent tools in-house. Bought Visual Studio (urgh), bought Cartography Shop, bought the Lighting Pack, bought a couple of Content Packs, and finally bought Showtool Pro. Thankfully I already own some modelling tools and a copy of Milkshape! It's a good thing my day gig as an embedded systems engineer can fund all this.

I do have a game concept in mind - something fairly easy to implement, no real character animation involved, child-friendly and that sort of thing. Not an MMORPG, not an FPS, not an RTS, just something you can sit down, play for 1/2 hour or so, have fun, and smile at. I think of it as an "all-ages kids game". I certainly believe it's limited enough in scope for one person to finish without spontaneously combusting! After that, maybe some kind of environmental walkthrough/interaction kind of game, something.. surreal. Always wanted to do something along those lines, even if it's not "commercially viable".

Kids games.. heh.. having worked on the (ill-fated) Compaq/Fisher-Price Wonder Cruiser ages ago, maybe I'm trying to recapture fond memories!

I'm not expecting to have anything playable (or even screenshots) for a while as there's at least 2-3 months worth of learning curve minimum, I'd guess. Once I do, I'll post them in the Appropriate Places.

Tuesday Oct 18 17:57

Ed Averill — 2005-10-18T17:57:58+00:00

Ah, the newbies life for me!

Ok, actually invested some cash in a few nice things to have to make my Torque life easier!

Picked up the Lighting Pack first, too many goodies in there to not have, and the price is right.

Then grabbed Cartography Shop and the Pipeline for Torque. Quark makes my head hurt and my ulcer flare up. I liked the demo so I'll use it for now, we'll see how things go once Constructor ships.

A trip to Barnes and Noble this evening, to see if they have Ken Finneys book(s) in stock.

Spending lots of quality time with tutorials, watching the IGC videos, reading eight bazillion forum posts, installing the TBE, getting my old Eclipse books out, installing Blender, peering through the Blender docs, wondering if I shouldn't reinstall Milkshape as well, wishing I had the money for Max, deciding I'd rather buy a scooter with that kind of cash, and wondering if I shouldn't be saving up for a dual-core AMD64 system.

My head, despite all this, did not explode as I thought it might. ;-p

Thursday Sep 22 18:47

Ed Averill — 2005-09-22T18:47:52+00:00

They say you can never leave...

..they might be right!

After a VERY protracted hiatus during which I ended up working for Danger Inc. (the folks that make the Hiptop mobile Internet device, also known as the T-Mobile Sidekick), I've decided to poke my nose back into Torque.. not to make engine mods or tools.. but to work on childrens games!

Maybe I'm just pining for the days when I worked on the Compaq/Fisher-Price Wonder Cruiser, or the fun times I had at GDCs past.. or maybe I'm in my second childhood (lol)! Soo..

Once more into the breech!

Thursday Dec 16 17:11

Ed Averill — 2004-12-16T17:11:42+00:00

API overkill, or "how complex can it get?"

Well, my Eclipse plugin programming book and my SWT/JFace books arrived a while ago, and I will have to say that developing a commercial-grade plugin suite is a bit more complex than I had originally anticipated! Even though it's all in Java, there might be places I'll need to implement bits in C or C++, although I'm not sure I can't coerce Java to do what I need (mainly controlling spawning off the various tools, monitoring the progress of the compiler, and things like that).

I've started looking at the code for the CDT Eclipse plugins (on the eclipse.org/cdt page), this is a suite that supports C/C++ development and might be a reasonable jumping-off point, and if nothing else should be worth studying to see how others have attacked the problem.

It's certainly not a days or weeks project, this looks to be in the months range, at least if I want to do a "proper" job on it, and I certainly want to make this the best I can.

The design is in flux as I'm learning more about how perspectives, editors, and various parts of Eclipse work and how to wire new things into it - I can definitely say I'll have editors for C, C++, and Torquescript at a minimum, and that I'll support GCC and the Microsoft .NET free compiler. I'll also support Subversion for version control, and for content pipeline I'll support Milkshape, Blender, Paint Shop Pro, Quark, and the GIMP as part of the first release. Hopefully I can find a way to allow a configurable pipeline that will allow each shop to define/configure/arrange the tools they use, instead of having to either use what I give 'em or make them hack the Java plugin source to add tools (blech). Additional fun I'm not looking forward to is convering the makefile system to Ant build scripts (shudder), but I consider makefiles evil and am willing to make that effort. I also want to write a "Torque Project Wizard" that will put together a skeleton project with the engine and a basic script framework, although I'm not sure that's worth the effort - it's on the list as a learning experience, although near the bottom priority-wise.

Oh well, back to work! Where's my coffee...

Wednesday Dec 8 16:12

Ed Averill — 2004-12-08T16:12:10+00:00

Sound and fury, signifying..

Plenty of goings on. I'm working on finalizing the design document for the Eclipse for Torque (EFT) project and trying to put together a page on my website. Progress has been slowed a bit by a sudden flood of interviews, but i'm not complaining (lol).

Also purchased the RTS Starter Kit, there was too much good stuff there that'll make my life easier for this simple RTS I'm considering, and who can beat the price?

Invested in a couple of books, one on writing Eclipse plugins, the other on SWT/JFace, which is a GUI component library that's used in Eclipse. Those will arrive from Amazon either 12/10 or 12/13. The online docs for Eclipse are OK, but I like to have something I can refer to sitting next to me while I'm cranking out the code. I'm old-fashioned, I guess!

I'm vacillating on which compiler(s) I should set the EFT plugins up for. Mingw/msys seems like a no-brainer choice, but there are free command-line compilers from Microsoft that appear to be pretty decent, the latest one supporting .NET development as well.

Annoying thing: I don't have Linux installed to test this all on, which is a bother. I might have to find a way to get a copy, repartition my machine, and add a Linux partition to it. I'm not even thinking about a Mac version of this at all, mainly because I don't know anyone that owns a Mac and I'm clueless about how the Mac works. Maybe once I'm done some enterprising soul could work on a Mac port, but it's months before I have to worry about it.

Saturday Dec 4 14:58

Ed Averill — 2004-12-04T14:58:09+00:00

Time is suddenly not an issue. :-|

Well, joy of joys, I got laid off last week. Half the engineering staff got let go (5 out of 10 people) and I was told that the division won't be taking on any more development work. Guess they're turning into a pure sales-and-marketing operation.. if not shutting down completely! No real surprise, and I got a decent severance package and will get my pension money in a lump sum - enough there to go anbout 6 months without work, if I have to.

The good thing is that this frees up time for me to work on my EFT (Eclipse For Torque) plugins. The Eclipse API is pretty comprehensive, it's been taking some time to wade through it, but I believe I can do just about anything I need to. I'm going to try to develop a mini-game as I develop the plugin set, using my own tools so that I can find weaknesses without having to involve testers until I have something worth testing (lol).

Next week I'll put up a Website for my work, mainly to have a developers blog for now and later for beta releases of the software.

Wednesday Nov 3 18:46

Ed Averill — 2004-11-03T18:46:52+00:00

Switching gears and directions to just creating Torque tools.

Ok, I give up.. kind of. ;-)

Indeedy do, as far as I've been able to personally determine even with Torque it's impossible for one man to do a decent job on an indie game nowadays and still have time for minor inconvienences like work, health, shopping, that kind of thing! Even just trying to stick with scripting, not hacking the engine itself, there's still too much to be done in the way of generating content for the bloody thing. And good artists (or even just passable ones) are impossible to find around here, at least that have time and are willing to do work for just beer-and-pizza level money.

So what's a poor boy to do? Well, I think I have enough bandwidth to work on tools - specifically, developing an Eclipse environment that is specific for Torque development. I'm learning to write Eclipse plugins at the day gig, and I figure I might as well do something useful with that experience. Since Microsoft has released free versions of their compiler, SDK, and .NET stuff it seems like those without Tons Of Cash(tm) would be able to make use of such a thing.. especially if I can get tools (Quark, etc.) into the integrated environment.. producing kind of a "Torque IDE" affair. Heck, once it's done, I might even be able to develop a microgame on my own (lol, hope springs infernal and all that rot).

It's going to be a long process, I'm sure, as the Eclipse environment is no joke to code for, plus I'm learning Java (I'm a C/C++/assembly hack at heart) so there's some ramp-up time here. I'll post an updated .plan when I get a Web page up on my domain for the project, in case anyone is interested in watching my (so-called) progress. I have no idea if anyone will really care and/or use this once it comes out, but who knows? At least it will be fun and educational making it!

Saturday Feb 14 18:07

Ed Averill — 2004-02-14T18:07:55+00:00

Crunch, grovel, ouch!

Things proceed apace. Thanks to the pile of tutorials out there, I'm coming up to speed on Torque a little faster than I had originally expected. About the biggest complaint I have is how long it took to get everything out of CVS via my dialup connection (lol, I'm a bit of a Luddite in that way.. I'll get broadband when fixed wireless is prevalent). I have to keep telling myself.. scripting first, engine later. If I dive headfirst into the engine code I'll never get a game done! So far I'd be willing to bet I can implement 90% of my title in scripting, which would be a Good Thing.. about the only concern I have is that there are some kinds of AI I'd probably prefer to implement at least partially in C++ for performance reasons.

Nice to see the addition of the Blender exporter, while I have a fair number of tools (Ultimate Unwrap3D, CharacterFX, MS3D, Wings) Blender is a welcome addition to the arsenal. Gamespace looks interesting.. but apparently from what I've seen so far there are some "issues" with exporting to Torque, so I'll wait and see what happens there. Anything that keeps me from buying MAX is good (heh). A good Lightwave exporter would rock my world.

Back to playing with scripting and modelling fish. ;)

Tuesday Feb 3 17:51

Ed Averill — 2004-02-03T17:51:04+00:00

Off and.. crawling? Starting out with Torque.

Well, after beating my head trying to get a Competing Product to handle modest size terrain areas without having the framerate drop to slideshow levels, I went ahead and got Torque. My, but there's a lot of code there (lol)! I've been digging through the tutorials, prelim docs, external Websites, and everything else in an attempt to come up to speed as quickly as possible. Thank heavens I have some hardcore experience reverse-engineering software or my head would have exploded by now!

All other spare time is being spent in Milkshape, attempting to get some basic models set up.

More information as progress occurs. ;p