Torque 3D Development - Torque 3D 2010 Roadmap

Headed to GDC

As mentioned by Eric a few times now, the beginning of this year has been a very busy time for the Torque team! Admist all of the turmoil of moving our team to Las Vegas and getting a new fearless leader, the Torque 3D team still managed to get Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 1 out the door before we had to settle into crunch mode for our GDC demos.

The team really rallied and we were extremely pleased to show our shiny new demos (and shinier old ones) off at GDC. I can honestly say that I haven't ever seen nicer artwork running in Torque 3D and it nicely shows off what our engine is capable of in the right hands.


People at GDC kept asking when the Chinatown game was going to be released so they could play it!

GDC is over! Now what?

After the dust settled from a long run up to GDC, it was time for the Torque 3D team to sit back and evaluate our plans for the rest of the year and to have some very serious discussions about how we would like to work with our community. We also had a lot to talk about in how we could continue to converge our various product lines, especially in the light of the new plans for Torque X and Torque 2D.

Early in our discussions it becamse obvious that a lot of the work we did to increase the performance of the GDC demos would be hugely beneficial for our users to start working with and testing sooner rather than later. It also became obvious that attempting to split those features, some of which happened at a very low architectural level, out of the existing codebase would be difficult and time consuming. We realized that everyone on the team was eager to move to a new, more iterative development process and that trying to ensure that Torque 3D Beta 2 had no new features would greatly delay our getting to that new process.

    
It was great to hang out with our long-time friends at GDC!

Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 2

So, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that Torque 3D Beta 2 is going to include some new features. Unfortunately we weren't able to stick strictly to the idea that we would only include bugfixes in the second Beta but it truly will be for the best. The good news is that you should see some very nice performance boosts with Torque 3D Beta 2. There was a lot of low level engine work done to increase performance and we added Hardware Mesh Instancing which helps enourmously with scenes that have a lot of repetitive meshes (like a Forest). Deferred rendering can be very sensitive to the number of draw calls and Hardware Mesh Instancing can give some major improvements there.

We are working hard to get Torque 3D Beta 2 ready for you guys (there is a little more background work that we need to get done). We do want to make sure that it is very polished. I can tell you that I personally did a ton of demos and walkthroughs with the latest version at GDC and it was remarkably stable. Without pinning us down to a specific release date, I will say that I expect that we will be able to ship it in the next month or so. After we get Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 2 out to you guys, we will drive very hard towards getting the Final version done and released to both Pro and Binary users. Then the fun starts!


Anyone up for some Torque Parkour? Or perhaps it is time for a robot revolution?

Rolling Updates

As soon as Torque 3D 1.1 Final is out the door, we are going to radically change how we develop Torque 3D and distribute releases to our customers and community. The basic idea is that we are going to start focusing on a single system, tool, editor, or aspect of Torque 3D and spend about a month (4-6 weeks usually) really improving it and polishing it. We will be soliciting feedback from you, the community, about what improvements you would like to see us work on as well as gathering more specific feedback on what you would like to see done for a specific "focus update".

At the end of each one of these "scrums" or "sprints" we will then release a new version of the engine that includes that update to the Pro users as a "Work in Progress" snapshot that people can start testing against and using for their game development. Since the timeframe for these sprints are short, they will be receiving limited QA before we release them to you. They will continue to get more QA from both our lab and from the community and we will roll those fixes into the next rolling update. However, we do want to be very clear that each of these updates have the potential to be less stable than the previous ones. Given that we are planning to focus more on polish than features each update should get more stable in general.

After we finish about 3 or 4 updates we will then bundle these up with any fixes and release them as a larger WIP snapshot to the Binary users to play with. After every 6 to 8 updates, we will pause the rolling updates and focus on packaging up and polishing those updates into an official point release that will go out to both Pro and Binary users.

We will continue to work on some larger features in the background which will land in the updates at the appropriate times. For example, if we do some larger updates to the backend of the Material system, we can roll this out with a focus sprint on improving the usability of the Material Editor. We do, however, want to make sure that there is good, focused updates going out far more rapidly than we have in the past.


Once Torque 3D 1.1 ships we may have to take a vacation in the South Pacific ;)

The Torque 3D 2010 Roadmap

First we need to get Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 2 and Final out the door and into your hands. We then expect to start our new iterative development process this summer. In the meantime, be thinking about the updates you would like to see and what specifically you would like to see done as part of a "focus sprint". For example, the first "rolling update" is very likely going to be focused on making the Camera system more powerful, flexible, and editor friendly. We do have lots of ideas already but we'd love to hear yours as well.

Also, as you may be able to tell from this blog, we haven't quite settled on an ideal name for these rolling updates/focus sprints/development snapshots. If you have any ideas of what we should call it or if you like one of these names better than others then please speak up =)

Thanks!