Blog for Thomas Buscaglia at GarageGames.com

Torque X 3D Beta is here!

Thomas Buscaglia — 2007-11-29T07:33:45+00:00

Torque X 3D Beta is finally here!

For those not "in the know" about Torque X progress I thought I'd post a quick .plan about the Beta that got pushed out today. Here's a quick recap of the progress forum posts with screenshots and some development details followed by tonight's announcement post:

Torque X 3D Update - June 14
Torque X 3D Update - July 10
Torque X 3D Update - September 7
Torque X 3D Update - October 14
Torque X 3D Beta Is Here

Happy Wednesday, everyone.

Introducing TXB!

Thomas Buscaglia — 2007-06-14T05:51:28+00:00

That's right, feast your eyes on the brand new Torque X Builder!

Ok, so it's nothing new...

Here's the skinny: due to overwhelming confusion concerning Torque Game Builder X (TGBX) and what the heck it was, we decided to rename it to Torque X Builder (TXB). It's still got all the same functionality, but now it's got a more meaningful name, thus making oral recital of our tech product line 27% less likely to induce seizures.

One last time:
Torque X Builder is the level builder for Torque X, previously known as TGBX.

WTF is a clipmap?

Thomas Buscaglia — 2007-06-09T17:08:52+00:00

Hey, guys. I was recently sentenced to port the Atlas clipmap to Torque X terrain. Now that it's done I thought I'd take a couple minutes to to talk a little about the concept and implementation.

What is a clip map?
Hello, Wikipedia....

Quote:
Clipmapping is a method of clipping a mipmap to a subset of data pertinent to the geometry being displayed. This is useful for loading as little data as possible when memory is limited, such as on a graphics processing unit.

What this means is that you can effectively have a freakishly huge virtual texture for a very small fraction of the memory cost. This has obvious implications for terrain, which is why I was forced to implement it.

How does it work?
You take a stack of textures the same size and fill them with texture data sampled from descending mip levels of the virtual texture. What you get is a series of textures of degrading quality. Each one represents a larger area of the virtual texture. This set of textures is the clip stack.

If your clipmap textures are 512x512 you can effectively represent a 16384x16384 virtual texture with only 6 clip stack levels. The first level would be a 512x512 piece of the virtual texture that's closest to your viewpoint, the second level would be a 512x512 representation of a 1024x1024 area of the virtual texture closest to your viewpoint, and so on and the 6th level would be a 512x512 representation of the entire 16384x16384 virtual texture.

Because the texture data in the clip stack is only relevant to the areas around you, you have to recenter the clipmap when you viewpoint changes. Below you can see a clipmap with a simple debug texture being drawn on a terrain. Each clip level's checkerboard size is the same size across the texture space to make the level transitions more obvious (4 squares on one level will appear the same size as 1 square on the next level when drawn on the terrain).

To make things more efficient, instead of updating the entire texture for a clip level, clipmaps take advantage of toroidal mapping - meaning they rely on the fact that textures coordinates can wrap. When a clip level is recentered, the clip map calculates which regions of the texture need to be filled with new data and only updates those regions. Below is the same debug texture, now toggling between three colors each time it performs an update on a section of the clip level texture. Each different color rectangle is a single region update to a clip level's texture (notice that the lowest detailed level is never updated).

As a result of using this method, instead of the seams of the source texture region that's in a given clip level being along the edges of the texture they move through the texture space and the shader compensates for that offset in the texture coordinates at render time. Below are snapshots of all 6 512x512 clip levels of the clip stack described above from highest to lowest detail.

And below, a hideuos F terrain exported from TGE and imported into Torque X with the above blender clipmap applied.

That's all for now. Hope someone found this interesting.

If you'd like more information on the topic, there's a pretty detailed paper
here.

Something to look forward to...

Thomas Buscaglia — 2007-04-10T05:15:30+00:00

Hey, guys. I realized I haven't written a .plan in a little bit, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to let you guys in on a little bit of what I've been working on. And this time: more pictures and less complaining about being sleepy! First up, the top-secret project I've been working on...

A lot of you guys in the community know about it already, or at least know it's been in the works, but it's just about out the door so it seems safe enough to officially let you guys in on it. Without further adieu...

That's right, a full-blown platformer starter kit for Torque X. Too good to be true? Yes! But it's still true, and it's pretty sweet if I do say so myself. Some of the highlights of the kit are: full state-based platformer physics, pickup and inventory systems, actor control layer and AI foundation, a simple checkpoint system, parallax scroller manager, a simplified sound management system that's integrated with the actor animation manager, a nearly-full-game demo built on the framework (art and sound assets included), and of course full source.

For those of you are already in the throes of Torque X development, rest assured that all the functionality in the kit is put together using that sweet TX component system we've all come to know and love. Starting a new platformer project will be as easy as selecting it from a list.

Other than the starter kit, I've also been working on polishing off some sweet feature additions to the 2D side of Torque X for the post-1.0 release. Most exciting are the additions of cell and key materials to Torque X, the addition of TGB-like animation controls for the camera, and the expansion of some of the animated sprite controls.

Above you can see a static sprite, tile layer, animated sprite, and several particle effects all using the same celled material.

And here you can see the results after a few calls to the camera to animate its position, zoom and rotation.

Unfortunately the changes to animated sprites all have to do with how they animate, so pictures wouldn't really show off the changes very well. Basically, you'll be able to interrupt an animation with another temporary animation and let it resume from where it was (or at any point) once the new animation is over. You can also queue up an unlimited number of animations on a single sprite. It's also possible to generate a cue to represent the current animation state of a sprite at any time which you can later use to reload that animation as it was being played.

That's about all I can really talk about for now. If you want a closer look at the platformer kit, there's a somewhat boring video on youtube of some out-of-box level building with the kit slightly sped up to be slightly less boring.

About this deadline...

Thomas Buscaglia — 2007-02-07T16:08:01+00:00

I've spent the last month scrambling to hit a moving target and it's been driving me absolutely bonkers. We all read these posts over and over and they're all "scope yer game" and "plan shtuff out" and "the last 10% is 90% of the work", but it really drives it home when you're sitting at your desk browsing the forums because you'd rather do just about anything other than look at that monster project you love that's sitting wide-eyed and grinning at you from a window just beneath your browser waiting for you to force that last week of work into it. The kicker: I desperately want to.

I don't know if it's my chronic procrastination bleeding into my life passions or preemptive empty-project-nest syndrome, but I'm having a hell of a time just trying to get my eyes onto my IDE. Just so nobody gets the impression that I'm getting paid to sit around and flick boogers, I should mention that I've been working fifty to eighty hour weeks for the past month and a half. Not because I was told to - in fact GG is one of the most lax companies I've ever even heard of - because I wanted to. Really, because I needed to.

I may not be the brightest bulb in the basket, or the most rational, but nobody who really knows me would hear that I'm not a passionate person. When I get my hands on a project like this current one, I'm all about it. Maybe to a fault. Now I'm tired and frustrated and ready to walk away from it, when the amount of work left, if the hardest parts were an all-out barroom brawl, would amount to no more than a friendly tickle.

I don't know what I'm going to think from one minute to the next. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, I'm a pretty fickle person. Right now, though, I look at all the work that went into this project and the state I'm in and the state of the project and it just gives me one feeling. That feeling is best described by a phrase I probably shouldn't publicise, but in my head it sounds a little something like this:

"F*CK YEAH!"

I don't regret one single sleepless night. I made something that I'm proud of and nobody can take that away from me. It's a small achievement, but it's mine. It was my first project with a new language built on constantly changing tech and after almost four months now it's nearly complete. I pushed it right up to the edge and decided I needed more edge, so I built it. All that's left to do is stick the flag in it, put it on the conveyor belt, and go take a freaking nap.

I guess I'll have to wait and see how I feel about it a week from now, because I might just be halucinating from sleep deprivation at the moment. I just felt the need to vent that.

Thanks for reading.

GG: Thanks for everything

Thomas Buscaglia — 2006-08-13T23:47:48+00:00

Well, it's been a great ride but my three-month internship here at Garage Games has come to an end. I want to say thanks to everyone at GG and everyone in the community for making this such a great experience. I've learned a lot and had an awesome time. I'm not great at stuff like this, so I'll just leave it at that.

Thanks for everything.

I'll be around. ;)

Interning at GG

Thomas Buscaglia — 2006-06-21T01:37:50+00:00

Hey everyone, this is my first blog. I was accosted by some employees here at Garage Games with pitchforks (and a few crudely sharpened chopsticks) and told to post a blog and introduce myself, so here I am.

A little about me:
I'm interning here over my Summer break. I go to UCF in Orlando, FL where I'm working on my bachelor's in Digital Media. I'm originally from Miami, FL, where I spent most of my free time going to local shows and drinking in parking lots with my buddies. Orlando is boring, 'nuff said. I'm normally regarded as 'weird' on a regular basis by both strangers and friends alike. I love to travel when I can and I love, love, love music.

I have about six or seven years (I have no real concept of time) of programming/scripting experience with various languages/environments including C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, UnrealScript, and now TorqueScript. I also have [very] moderate modelling and rigging experience with Maya and Max. Plus I can make clouds with Photoshop (Clouds Filter, ACTIVATE)! I enjoy learning new things and working on any kind of multimedia projects and I generally strive for quality in whatever projects I work on. I've worked on several game projects, including one which actually shipped: Devastation by Digitalo Studios. Most recently I've been getting in way over my head doing large-scale PHP work for practically nothing to try and build some kind of portfolio, but you know how that goes... [Checkers' commercial] "You gotta eat!"

My first impressions:
Eugene is AWESOME! The weather here rocks and the hippies are more or less docile - I haven't been attacked yet. It's clean and laid back and I actually saw a sorority girl talk to a homeless dude (unheard of where I come from, but great nonetheless). There are some decent local bars and plenty of riff-raff to mingle with. The local music scene here is kinda bland from what I've seen so far, but I've only been here for two weeks and they've kept me pretty busy, what with the TGB release and all, so I'll have to investigate further.

As for GG, I love it. One of my major hesitations in coming out for this internship was the idea of being a number in a box, but it's really not like that here. Everyone is awesome and they made me feel at home within the first week. Aside from being a little intimidated by the sheer intelligence of most of the staff, I have been really confortable here - heck, they had a keg in the office on friday.

What I've been doing so far:
I have been working on TGB stuff: some scripting stuff, and some doc stuff that had to get done before the release. By the way guys, TGB is so freaking easy to use. Within 24 hours of being introduced to it (with no prior TorqueScript experience) I was able to make a little car control prototype from scratch - and I'm including the ten minutes I spent on art ;P. I also just finished working on a simple physics demo that will be up on TDN soon (I think...). Other than TGB stuff, I also got to go to the TGE/TSE boot camp for free, which was great (thanks, Steve!) - lots of info. Hmm, what else? Oh yea, I also went paintballing with some guys from the office the other day and I'm.. still... sore.... ugh. These past two weeks have been great, and I've got lots more time here to enjoy it. To sum it up: Life is good.

-Thomas