Torque 3D Development - Beta 3!

Thanks for your patience everyone. I know this was a longer stretch than expected between Beta 2 and 3, but wow, we've been busy!

Download Torque 3D Beta 3 from your Account

Again, we have an enormous list of new stuff (see below), improvements (~200), (fixes (100+) and known issues you'll find posting in the Torque 3D forums.

New Stuff in Beta 3!

Shape Editor - This new feature allows you to apply various changes to a mesh after it is loaded. You can merge animations, define nodes, rename meshes, and more. Tutorial video and extensive docs on this are forthcoming, but it's pretty intuitive to play with, so have fun!


                      

Decal Editor - This allows you to quickly paint and edit decals in the scene. On the engine side, we've done a major rework of Decal-related source code, so it's now much more efficient and significantly easier to understand. As with the Shape Editor, we'll have a tutorial video and extensive docs available soon.


                      

Mesh Road Editor - This allows you to quickly prototype a 3D mesh road. We're stressing the word "prototype" here because there's a lot this tool is not yet wired to do. For example, applying an arbitrary mesh profile (for different shaped roads with curbs for example) is not yet possible. This would be an excellent community project if someone want to give it a go, but we're going to leave this as a prototyping tool in this release.


                      

Beta 3 also includes...

Major reworking of the Material Editor to improve flow and usability

Material Selector and tagging system for Materials

                      

Full pureLIGHT support including improved Tonemapping and the new Vertex Color Lighting (allows you to bake lighting into the vertex colors...more efficient for small/dense meshes) as well as support for mixing with Advanced Lighting

A new pureLIGHT Demo with several new example scenes

                      

Portal and Zone objects and exposed them to the World Editor

SFX now supports streaming sound

Switched Glow to be a new PostFX

Improved TerrainBlock rendering

Normal mapping and Parallax mapping for TerrainMaterials

           

Added Parallax mapping to mesh Materials

Mac / OSX Support for:

• Basic Lighting
• TerrainBlock
• Water
• ScatterSky
• CloudLayer
• Toolbox
• pureLIGHT

Interiors can now be exported to Collada via the World Editor

A Toggle Visibility tool to World Editor which allows for toggling on and off various debug rendering modes as well as toggling the visibility of various game classes

                      

Vastly improved Reflection handling

New 'soft snap' capability to the World Editor (hold down CTRL while moving selected objects to activate it)

New PhysX Cloth object and exposed it to the World Editor (video from last week if you missed it)

                      


For the full monster list of improvements, fixes, and remaining known issues, see the Torque 3D forums for details.

If you're ready to move to Torque 3D, you can still get your $100 OFF pre-order discount right now. This discount will be reduced to $50 OFF at the end of June. If you're already a Torque 3D owner, congrats! Don't forget to post your Beta 3 feedback in Torque 3D Private Forums. We need your help to get to the finish line!

We've still got a ways to go to fully catch up on the Mac / OSX side, but we're moving quickly. Full feature and stability parity with Windows is our goal for Beta 4.

More development blogs to come. This is post #25.

Torque 3D development blogs:

• Post #1 - Kickoff
• Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
• Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
• Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
• Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
• Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
• Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
• Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
• Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
• Post #11 - Depth of Field
• Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
• Post #13 - Soft Particles
• Post #14 - World Editor
• Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
• Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
• Post #17 - River & Road Editors
• Post #18 - Beta is UP!
• Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, and the Material Editor
• Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
• Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
• Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
• Post #23 - pureLIGHT
• Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
• Post #25 - Beta 3!
• Post #26 - Coming Soon!