Blog for Phillip OShea at GarageGames.com

Torque: Gui Updates v0.1

Phillip OShea — 2008-05-16T04:11:21+00:00

Check out my last blog if you haven't already: Torque: Gui Updates.

Thanks to the support from the GG community, I have been slowly playing around with the TGEA level editor I displayed earlier. I now have incorporated all of the features that the current TGEA level editor supports and a few small tweaks here or there to have it all running nicely.

There is a bug with Torque where you can't remove tabs very easily, making my life a little harder. I had to modify the source in order to get it to work, but switching between editors now displays dedicated tabs. These tabs are just like normal, but only display under certain conditions. This is a feature that I need to expand upon before release, however.

The main reason I post this blog is to try to gauge what the community want from the GUI updates? There was enough support from you all to warrant me continuing with this project, but I would like to make it as friendly for everyone as I can.

I would also like someone from the community to provide me with some icons that I can use in the editor. There is a large array of icons that I require, but all I can offer you is including your name in the credits.

The two main ideas on my agenda are to allow users to add their own tabs and forms from the editor and to support dockable windows. These should enable you guys to configure the mission editor the way you want it, getting the most out of your time with the editor.

I am also thinking about moving some of the object manipulation elements to a context menu (reset transform, drop at location, etc). Let me know what you think. (Note: A context menu is a right-click menu dropdown)

Please post comments and ideas (don't ask me to rewrite the whole thing, just small features that make life easier) and I will do my best to incorporate them into this project.

Here are a few more screenshots:

Torque: GUI Updates

Phillip OShea — 2008-04-12T01:54:31+00:00

TGB was my first port of call when I joined the GG community. It was a great starting point for a game development hobby, but ultimately I would want to move onto bigger and better things.

Despite being derived from similar code the differences between TGEA and TGB made it difficult for me to get my head around things. If you take a look at each of the level editors in the Torque engines you will notice that they are quite unique, but dated.

I had the crazy idea that I would give the editors a bit of an update.

My idea was simple: Create a GUI system that is consistent between each Torque engine and is easily extendable.

Here is my first concept:

The entire toolbar is derived from an XML sheet and is processed through TS. Here is a small example of the toolbar:

<LevelEditorToolBar>
    <ToolBarPage>
        <Text>Mission</Text>
        <ToolBarStack>
            <Text>Project</Text>
            <LargeButton>
                <iconBitmap>newIcon</iconBitmap>
                <ToolTip>New Mission</ToolTip>
                <Command>EditorNewMission();</Command>
                <Shortcut>New</Shortcut>
            </LargeButton>
            <LargeButton>
                <iconBitmap>openIcon</iconBitmap>
                <ToolTip>Open Mission</ToolTip>
                <Command>EditorOpenMission();</Command>
                <Shortcut>Open</Shortcut>
            </LargeButton>
            <DropDownButton>
                <LargeButton>
                    <iconBitmap>saveIcon</iconBitmap>
                    <ToolTip>Save...</ToolTip>
                </LargeButton>
                <MenuButton>
                    <Text>Save</Text>
                    <Command>EditorSaveMissionMenu();</Command>
                    <Shortcut>Save</Shortcut>
                </MenuButton>
                <MenuButton>
                    <Text>Save As</Text>
                    <Command>EditorSaveMissionAs();</Command>
                    <Shortcut>SaveAs</Shortcut>
                </MenuButton>
            </DropDownButton>
        </ToolBarStack>
    </ToolBarPage>
</LevelEditorToolBar>

Because the toolbar is derived from XML it is easily extendible. The <Shortcut> tag references a keyboard command like "Ctrl S" or "Shift-Ctrl S" and binds the button's command to the assigned shortcut.

The <DropDownButton> references a quasi-control that I have created. It is just like a regular pop up control, except it is a button and looks like a regular toolbar menu with shortcut labels as well. See below:

Note: This drop down menu is a "Radio" type menu. The "Normal" button has been depressed and the other one is highlighted with the mouse (though the screenshot neglected it).

The toolbar pages are either permanent or conditional. Permanent pages are there, permanently and the conditional pages are only visible when criteria have been met (i.e. mission creator/inspector is active). This aspect hasn't been properly implemented yet, but it is the plan.

The next idea that I had is the idea of widgets: small scripts that you can add into the editor to make it work the way that you want it to. I want the user to be able to dictate the type of environment they want to work in and how they work in it.

Now, here is the bad news. My time with gaming and game development is becoming quite limited and I really need to select my projects carefully. I want to gauge community enthusiasm towards this project. If there is enough interest in this, then I will pursue the project and roll it out eventually, otherwise I will have to put it aside and give way to profitable projects (this project will be released for free to the community).

Just leave a post or give the blog a rating and let me know what you think.

Platformer Starter Kit - New feature incoming!

Phillip OShea — 2008-03-16T22:04:55+00:00

It has been nearly a week since the TGB Platformer Starter Kit was launched and I couldn't be happier with the reception it received from the community. I am ecstatic that I have been able to get a product created and out onto the market. I hope that this will be the first of many, not only starter kits, but games down the track.

I would just like to give a small introduction about my experience with GG and a brief description of my time developing the kit. If you want to get straight to my announcement, just scroll down.

My Introduction to Garage Games

I first stumbled upon GarageGames and TGB when I was wondering how much an XBLA game made. Google bought me to the Make It Big in Games blog written by Jeff Tunnell and Josh Dallman. Once I had stumbled upon this website, I was hooked.

It didn't take long for me to understand that, for the most part, this is a great community with a great passion for developing games. So many people were out there helping others, donating their own time and energy to help accomplish something new.

One of the first posts I had read on the TGB forum was related to creating a Platform game in TGB, containing all of the pitfalls and hurdles that one would have to avoid in development. I opened up TGB 1.3.1 and hoped over to the TDN to start creating the Mini Platformer. The users in that post were right and many problems mentioned were frequently displaying, one of which was the good ol' walk up wall trick.

I played around with everything a bit more and bought it upon myself to improve its current state by making my own platformer from a new direction. It turned out okay, way more buggy than the Mini Platformer, but I had learnt a lot and elements from that tutorial would go on to help in the PSK.

I had already purchased the TX PSK but had very little experience in C#, which deterred me from actually using it. In my opinion, the TX PSK is a great example of what a few guys can do with a bit of free time. They had laid an excellent point of reference for anybody looking to create a platformer game in TGB, but nobody had done it. Being the budding game developer and part time entrepreneur that I am, I saw an excellent way for me to create my own game and learn TGB and TS. Since most programming languages are easy enough to read through and understand, I decided to use that as a foundation to my own platformer.

The Development

The first, what some would call a *build*, was just a black cube running around a white background. I had to implement a method of movement first. This was a critical aspect that added an element of difficulty in production, but made everything worthwhile.

When you come across difficulties in game development, you have to sit down and ask yourself "Is it worth it?" I bet that in many indie and commercial games there are elements which should have been scrapped due to the input cost in relation to benefit for the user. I believe that critical aspects of your game should be reviewed if you spend weeks of developing prototypes with little improvement. I am one of those people who need to walk away when I encounter a problem. I know that if I sit there and spend a few more hours on a stubborn bug that I can fix it, but I also know that if I walk away and come back to it later, I will fix it in minutes. I learnt quickly that you need to take breaks.

I upgraded from the little black box to the ninja art from the Mini Platformer. At this point I had started to ponder the use of source modifications in order to get One-Way collisions working as well as sloped surfaces. I messed around with a few mods and got both elements to work.

I added the ability to ignore collisions from specific objects. It was just a vector of scene objects stored away in an object that was checked upon collision. It did its job and gave me the ability to jump through platforms.

My method of detecting sloped surfaces was a glorified cast-collision (a function I strongly disliked at the time). There wasn't much too it really. I created a function that simulated a collision between the ground poly and a shape that I could create. It would return collision details including the contact normal and the position, two critical elements for sloped surfaces.

It was at this point that I started work on my animation FSM. I had been using a rather large quantity of if statements which got really, really confusing and prompted me to upgrade. I had never used FSM's of even understood the concept, but I was able to get the manager working in a few days. It turned out to be really simple system and I am really happy with the results. The FSM was written in TS and I have outlined its framework in this post. Carpenter Software went on to develop a larger, more detailed FSM here.

It was at this point that I had started to add a lot of the TX PSK's features and I decided that there might be some commercial gain in this for me. I contacted Thomas (the GG employee who created the TX PSK) threw over a build and enquired about the possibility of a starter kit. A few emails were sent back and forth and when I had it to a stage where critical elements were working (relatively) bug free, I got in contact with Derek Bronson.

Derek manages 3rd party content at GG is someone who I get along with quite well. He was incredibly supportive (as was the whole GG team) and helped me get everything prepped and ready for release. I had never done anything like this before and it was fantastic to have someone like Derek there to help me package the kit.

Derek prompted me find a method of one-way platforms and sloped surfaces without using source modifications. I saw the obvious potential in this requirement, but did not fancy the idea of actually doing it. I argued with Dan Maruschak and boldly stated that it was not possible to do either of these two things in TS. A week later, I had been proved wrong.

These two elements were the biggest pain in the ass, period.

From this point it would take a few more months of refining and adding features to get it to the point where it works just as well (if not better) as the TX PSK. The next phase in my scheme for world domination would be the announcement.

The Announcement

Derek approached me and asked if he could display my work at the GG booth in this year's GDC. I was over the moon! The feeling was incredible. I had achieved what many developers dream of, a product that is shown to the world and that people take interest in.

I whipped up a snapshot to submit and wrote a small blog highlighting some of the finer points of the kit. Personally, I was surprised that I didn't receive any comments about my "Object Manager". I thought that this little system was awesome and it certainly saved me the trouble of remembering object groups. Anyway, everything had been announced and I was one step closer to release.

Derek and I sat down and discussed price.

I know that a lot of people were disappointed in the price difference between the TX PSK and my own, but there were reasons for it.

I don't think some people fully appreciate the amount of work that goes into developing something like this. Platform games have been absent from the TGB scene since its introduction a few years back. This is because it is a difficult system to implement. 4,000 lines of code and comments went into the kit and it has taken me 6 months of work to get it to this stage. If it wasn't a difficult system to implement, then I am sure that someone else would have done it.

I also think that quite a few people thought that I was a GG employee. I am just another one of you guys, no different. I worked hard and managed to create something great. I am sure that you have the potential too.

There have been quite a few people who have purchased the kit and made the comment that it was well worth the investment. I hope that it continues to be the case. In saying that, I would like to make an announcement.

Something New!

I wanted to add something to the kit that most of the TGB community would have thought it impossible to do in its current setup. Network support.

For the past few weeks I have been working on a network layer for the PSK. I have successfully linked the majority of the PSK's features between two clients and am thoroughly testing my work. I am smoothing out the movement to get everything the two clients as synchronized as possible.

In order to add smooth movement I created a basic pathing system to the kit. It is like the moveTo function in TGB, except it uses the x-axis only and tells the player to run to the point. I might try to improve it later on, but at the moment I am focusing on more important elements.

I don't have an ETA on the upgrade, but it is coming, promise!

In my opinion, a networkable version of the PSK will justify the $50 price tag. Just remember that all future upgrades will be free to all TGB PSK users!

Platformer Starter Kit (TGB)

Phillip OShea — 2008-02-26T05:41:10+00:00

I am proud to announce Torque Game Builder's (TGB) Platformer Starter Kit (PSK)! The kit does not require source modifications and is available to any TGB user (version 1.5 and up)!

The PSK should hopefully be released within the next few weeks. It will include the full source, framework documentation, a small demo level and a tutorial on how to construct it.

This kit is based on the Torque X Platformer design, including all of its major features and a few more. Everything you see below is customizable. Thanks to TGB's behavior system you are able to modify nearly any setting for any object in the game, it is that simple.

Platforms

One of the most basic features of any platformer is to have platforms! The PSK sports Solid and One-Way, allowing for flat and sloped surfaces. There are also Moving, Bouncing, Falling and Conveyor platforms! The platform system has been set up with expandability in mind, if you can think of a new type, you can add it!

Ladders and Hazards

Most platform games have some kind of ladder or rope which allows characters to climb up and down, the PSK is no different. Included is an area damage hazard that deals periodic damage to your character when inside the trigger (ideal for lava or electricity fields) and will deal damage upon collision if it is a regular scene object (great for spiked floors or crushing doors).

Collectable Items

Objects are collectable by players and have been set up in a similar fashion to platforms. Adding the pickup behavior to your object will allow that object to be collected, but what sort of object it is, is up to you! The foundation for an inventory system has been set up which records the items that you've collected in your journey.

Spawn Points and Check Points

In order to improve performance, any type of object can be spawned through a spawn point. You wouldn't want the computer to process the information of the 50 enemies in your scene each frame, so you control how many there are in the scene at any given time. Check points not only record the player's respawn position, but they also record how many objects each spawned has spawned.

Sound and Animation Manager

Using TGB's sound system can be quite daunting at times. The PSK has included a sound manager which handles all of the sounds and music being played in the kit. Characters in the game are animated through the system created in the PSK. It uses a Finite State Machine to handle all of the details when changing states and supports animation transitions!

Object Manager

Conditional collisions are always a tricky aspect of any game. The PSK uses the graph group system in place in TGB, but has made it easy to manage through a new labeling system. Group types are labeled and can have parents and children types. Objects can then be told to collide with objects from specific groups. Here is a small example:

- An object is an Apple and a Fruit.
- An object is an Orange and a Fruit.
- An object is a Fruit (not an Apply or an Orange).

- An object set to collide with Apples will collide with Apples and Fruit, but not Oranges.
- An object set to collide with Oranges will collide with Oranges and Fruit, but not Apples.
- An object set to collide with Fruit will collide with Apples, Oranges and Fruit.

It is a pretty basic system, but it is a very handy tool to help with managing your scene. It means that you can have triggers or objects which affect all characters in your game, or just specific character types.

Basic AI Controller

Through the use of behaviors, characters in the world can act like players. Behaviors allow you to treat a characters body and its brain as two separate objects. This means that all you need to do is script the brain and the body will interact with the world. Included in the PSK is a basic enemy who walks side to side, but has the ability to behave like a player!

Parallax Scrollers

Parallax scrollers create a sense of depth to your game. When the camera moves, your background images can scroll at different rates. All you have to do is add the behavior, set the scroll rate and the kit will do the rest.

Final Note

This kit should provide a solid foundation for any user wanting to recreate any of the classic platformer games. Give it a go (when it is released) and I will do my very best to provide users with support in the creation of their games.

Much of this work could not have been done without the support from GG. They have been outstanding and have offered me a great deal of assistance over the past few months. Huge shout out to Derek Bronson and Thomas Buscaglia for their guidance and help.

I don't know of the pricing, but I would like to make it as accessible as possible. The kit is in its final stages and should be released within the next few weeks, however, nothing is guaranteed. I am continuing to polish the code and provide as much detail in the source as I can before release.

Phillip O'Shea
(Lead Designer)