Blog for Neil Marshall at GarageGames.com

Experimenting with TSE

Neil Marshall — 2006-08-18T19:06:26+00:00

Now that the TGE plugin is at least functional I've been working on exploring some other features of TGE/TSE to see how my project will be able to move forward. Yesterday I was informed that instead of creating DIF's for my task I might want to try creating a DTS with a polygon soup collision mesh. Everyone always says "It doesn't work, use DIF" which I know but I did some exploring anyways to see why people say that.

I was surprised to see that the MAX exporter will actually allow you to export a collision mesh which isn't convex. And I was even more surprised to see (After some people on IRC assured me) that the collision mesh would work.

I've tried to get one of my more complex meshes into TSE but it didn't work out so well. It was crashing not only TSE but 3DSMax as well so I decided to resort to the good old standby... the teapot.

I created an array of 10 teapots in max, then attached all of them together and gave them a Torque friendly name. Then I cloned the 10 pot mesh and made it a collision mesh and exported. After about 10 minutes it finally exported and I launched TSE. I tried to load it but TSE stopped painting the screen. I was getting the same results as when I tried my more complex model earlier (Which I let run for 2 hours just to see what would happen) so I was about to hit alt-f4 when to my surprise the model actually showed up.

At first the frame rate wasn't bad. But as soon as you walk into the bounding box that quickly changes. And the 3rd image is there just to prove that the collision against the player object works. (vehicles and crossbolts don't work).

So if you ever wondered, do I need to use DIF's, the answer is technically No, but realistically Yes. In case you're wondering these tests were done on a Radeon 9600 series on a P4 3GHz using the latest public TSE head (Milestone 3 I think).

TGE Browser Plugin Online

Neil Marshall — 2006-07-19T20:49:01+00:00

It's TGE Browser Plugin time again...

* TDN Resource Page
* The code itself
* A Live example

Even though I haven't written a plan/blog in a while, I've still been working on the code. I finally got most of it working today and put it online for people to try out/download and mess around with. It would be great if people could test out, not only the live example, but the source code as well. I'm interested in knowing if all the steps on the wiki actually work for other people. I'm sure I've missed SOMETHING.

Known Bugs:
The plugin will crash when you close the tab/window which houses it in Firefox. If someone could help me with this one it would be fantastic. :)

Thats it!

- NeilM

TGE Browser Plugin

Neil Marshall — 2006-05-29T13:34:06+00:00

The TGE Browser Plugin is finally at the point where you can actually use it. I might call it Alpha or Beta soon. I'm interested in hearing stories from people using it. If you are, let me know.

The browser plugin - progress

Neil Marshall — 2006-05-02T15:34:33+00:00

The browser plugin project made some progress today with the help of James U. You can now reload the web page that the plugin is on and you can now press back/forward.

It was no easy task because Torque does some wacky stuff that I'm still trying to solve. There were two major hurdals though. First, was the obvious one of getting AbstractClassRep to shutdown and reinitalize properly. Once that was done reloading worked in the main menu. However, if you went into the 3D portion of the engine, and hit reload, it would crash.

What we could tell by debugging was there were 3 or 4 objects left in memory that looked like particles. I removed the particles from the demo game and I was able to reload once. Every other time I tried it, I ran into the same crash though. It turns out it was because Kork likes his foot puffs. I removed Kork and was able to reload if I didn't walk around. There are a couple messages on the forums where other people have run into this problem for various reasons as well, but there wasn't really a good solution to be found. James came to the rescue again and wrote a function which removes all emitters before the game shuts down. It seems to work quite well.

Now you can reload most of the time without it crashing but there are a couple issues left to debug. I think they're related to some information hanging around but I haven't found it yet.

In the meantime I've uploaded the latest source code to TDN and you can check it out. I would post a screenshot but you can only show a browser window so many times. I guess I could record a movie of me pressing the reload button... :)

TGE Browser Plugin

Neil Marshall — 2006-04-24T13:54:07+00:00

I actually slid this online friday afternoon, but didn't have a chance to update TDN until today. I have a compiled version with a basic installer which is available here. Install it into a fresh Torque Demo example directory. To get it to work in Firefox you need to copy np3DPlugin.dll into your Firefox plugins directory.

Please report any issues you have (besides reload/back+forward crashing the web browser) to me neil@eightlines.com.

If you want to mess around with the code for your project it's available for free on TDN.

More TGE in the Browser

Neil Marshall — 2006-04-11T13:20:34+00:00

I'm still working on the browser plugin. I've made some progress on the ActiveX side of things such as you can now exit the browser. You can now also exit the browser without crashing which is always a plus. :)

Just this morning I also fixed the display to resize with the window. I had to remove the size checks that are there in order to get it to stretch across dual monitors so you can end up with some wacky displays. Running TGE in dual monitor mode is really trippy.

There are still a lot of issues left with the mouse. You also can't type in the console for some reason. And the biggest issue is still Reloading. I have no idea how to fix that. If anyone has any suggestions on how to reload the console functions without asserting I'd like to know.

If you want to download the code, it's available for free here

On to the screenshot (Click it to get the full size):

TGE Plugin now working in IE 6.0

Neil Marshall — 2006-03-24T16:04:25+00:00

Source Code: tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGE/Code/How_to_make_torque_a_plugin

Debug IE/Firefox plugin running in IE: Works (Can't exit or reload)
Debug IE/Firefox plugin running in Firefox: Works (Can't reload, mouse issues)
Release IE/Firefox plugin running in IE: Not setup yet
Release IE/Firefox plugin running in Firefox: Works
Debug Firefox plugin: Works
Release Firefox plugin: Works

I'm still looking for someone to help port the Firefox only plugin to Linux and Mac.
I'm also looking for someone to help get the reload button to work.

Any takers? :)

It works!

Neil Marshall — 2006-03-07T21:28:36+00:00

I finally got the Torque Plugin to work!

If you're interested in giving it a spin, the code and installation instructions are here. If you're willing to help out great! Just fix something and email the code to me and I'll put it in the zip file so that other people can build on top of it.

TGE Plugin source code

It took me a while to get to this point. It turns out that the error message in my last post was caused by a couple different problems.

1) The processor wasn't being detected, so it didn't know how to draw properly. This was due to the fact that I had disabled the assembly language code in an attempt to get it to compile. Once I re-enabled it, and figured out the linking errors, the top of the console.log file showed that it picked up my processor.

2) The next problem that I spotted was DirectInput wasn't loading. It turns out that this wasn't really the issue either, but I managed to fix it with some help from people in the IRC channels. It turns out the appInstance variable was always 0 and I had to find the HINSTANCE of the application which the npPlugin architecture didn't supply me properly (It gives me an instance of the plugin and the browser window, but neither of those worked).

3) And finally, the cause of the crash was failing to run the run(argc, argv) function. I didn't realize that the bootup process started sooner in the code then where I was looking. Once I got those 3 lines of code to execute the plugin didn't crash and I made it to the main menu.

Next up is to look into the reasons why the mouse doesn't work too well in the GUI screens, but it works perfectly in the game itself (If you can get there). If anyone knows the reason, please let me know.

And now for the ever popular screenshots:

Plugin Progress

Neil Marshall — 2006-03-01T21:50:09+00:00

I made some progress with the plugin today. It's taken me a while to figure out Unicode as I've never had to deal with it before and for now I seem to be past that hurdal.

A few moments ago I saw this:

Which is TGE 1.4 starting to load in FireFox. But sadly it was quickly followed by this dreaded screen:

I just love the interesting error messages you find in Torque. While working on this project I've seen comments ranging from "D3D Sucks" to "Flux capacitor unavailable" to the ever popular "D3D still sucks". They do lighten up the drudgery of coding but they aren't always helpful. (The capacitor one is in a round about way).

Anyways, I should have the updated code up on TDN sometime tomorrow for people to check out.

Torque Browser Plugin

Neil Marshall — 2006-02-16T16:18:37+00:00

I've recieved permission from the company I work for to start a project on TDN so that I can get TGE turned into a browser plugin. I was hoping to put it online when I had something visible to show, but I ran into a snag with ActiveX and DirectX conflicting (As far as I can tell).

You can access the article & code in TDN here tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGE/Code/How_to_make_torque_a_plugin

If you know VS.net well enough to help me fix these compile errors, can you please check out the "Tutorial"? The plugins compile and work on their own when TGE is removed from the DLL. If you get it to compile then your browsers will look like this: