What happened to the iPhone team?

#1 Sven's last post was in August. I don't think anyone else from Luma has posted on the forums.

When is iT2d going to get some serious funding? The sooner instantAction.com is abandoned and torque start funding indie development again the better.

#2 The team is heads down and quite focused on iTorque 3D right now. I have had them spinning hard on the beta to get something out to the iTGE people who have been waiting for something stable for quite a while.

#3 so does that mean that iT2D which unlike it3D is still being sold still isn't worth even a single fulltime developer?
so basically the same as since t2D 1.0 days every now and then for months when all dev force was shifted to iTGE and killed the pace at which the totally unusable itgb even got looked at :(

Please, finally start to take your engines serious again as GG did in its TGE only days.
Either support and sell it (1+ fulltime dev) or don't, but don't sell and odn't support it as you did with itorque since its very release

#4 Wow. That means no 1.4.1 for a long time. I see that Torque is run like how I run my development ;)

Anyway, thanks for the update Michael. Without you, we'd be talking to a wall.

Alright guys, no update coming soon, lets (try to) fix some bugs and make some games.

#5 @Johnny - Ouch! I just read that blog. Now, I'm even more miffed at the response we just got!

Quote:
The team is heads down and quite focused on iTorque 3D right now. I have had them spinning hard on the beta to get something out to the iTGE people who have been waiting for something stable for quite a while.

That is a completely unacceptable and, quite frankly, insulting excuse. I don't know how many threads this now makes referencing the seaming abandonment of a product for which we all paid a considerable amount of money.

As stated before, Michael, these posts are in no way directed at you personally. However, as you are pretty much the only one who does occasionally post responses to our inquiries, you must carry the brunt of the irate mob back to your constituents.

The bottom line is this:

Do not respond to your customers who are complaining about a non-functional product they purchased from you by saying "We're working really hard on a different product right now. We'll get to you as soon as we can." If the IA staff does not see a statement like that to be as offensive as it is to us customers, then I'm truly flabbergasted.

To not have a dedicated team (heck, even one person as Marc stated--but, in reality, this engine needs several just to remove all of the bloated, unnecessary code from the Desktop version of the engine; let alone actually fixing the broken or missing functionality) for this product illustrates to us that this was done on a whim, as a means to make a quick buck off of us developers.

Now, your efforts are focused on a completely different product, leaving us to fend for ourselves. What's next? Once an unsupported, buggy version of iT3D is released, you'll announce to us that we get no support for that either because you're working on T2Droid?

As much as we complain, we are slaves to the very product which is our bane. We drudge along, confident that others on this forum will heed our plea for assistance. Many questions get answered by experienced developers. Many questions get left unanswered and the thread progresses toward begging, hair-pulling, and then the eventual rant.

Someone within IA came up with the idea to port TGB to become iT2D. Someone else agreed it was doable. Someone else backed the idea. This thought process led to the slop which has been thrown in our trough. It attracts all sorts of bugs (pun intended), but we are inexplicably attracted to its stink.

Well, that concludes my dramatic rant for the day. I shall now retire to my cave to check on the monkeys I have fixing the code base of:

i-Tweak-2-Death (iT2D)...

#6 Then it's simple, upgrade or pick another product and quit whining about it. Search, if they are 'ignoring' you then it means they have posted the fix somewhere and someone isn't taking the time to search for it.

#7 @Brian - Love your post!

#8 @Clayton, what do we upgrade to and why should we pick another product when we've all payed out hard earned cash for the promise of this product. Have you *actually* tried to create a commercial game in iT2D, have you been through the frustrations that we've all suffered?

#9 I'm a little mythed by Clayton's post too... upgrade to what? Also, he doesn't even own iTorque2D according to his profile? Troll much?

#10 I probably shouldn't post but I'd prefer to squash this breed of post so it remains a dying species.

Clayton's post is reminiscent of the blind-fanboi-guardsmanship that existed during GG's hay-days. Thankfully I don't see that type of mentality here often in the last year.
- I hope that mentality fades completely from this site as it actually gives the developers a moment to embody that they are ok with failing(which they are most likely not). Everyone loses when thoughts like that are the basis of the argument.."upgrade or get another", heh, you'd think he works for them.

T3D went nearly 1 year without a point release due to them working on TX/&/moving. EVERY 'engine' is taking a backseat to some other 'engine', in rotation. It's clearly not right.

End note:
Without Matt and Mich, this company would probably flop on it's belly, right here, right now. I truly hope they're getting paid accordingly.

#11 Indeed, Matt and Mich try to keep the rest reputation GG hasn't lost alive somewhere.

But its clear that something must change, it was ever clear since their lead engine architect ran away (can't be said differently) and since brett left the sinking ship for GGs main competitor when he joined Unity Technologies

#12 There's a need for more dedicated people to each engine. They clearly have a resource allocation problem. I would like engine updates to happen more frequently (and I think Mich agrees with that). It's currently an incredibly slow process.

#13 Marks solution of allowing the community to update the engine would solve the resource allocation problems - it's not like we don't know how to use subversion and test ;-) Perhaps start small with a core set of developers who would work on the engine releasing small updates but often. How much worse can it be than what we already have?

#14 The community can update the engine. Look at the TX engine. Pino set up a SVN on XP-Dev and if you have a license you can get access. The changes we made were put back into the TX engine making it a useful product. We are now working on converting it to XNA 4.0 something IA said they do not have resources for. Ron added farseer physics to the engine, so now the TX engine is ahead of T2D.

IA even made Pino an associate. So far the project has been really successful. If anyone wants to take lead on this I will sign on. I am not a great C++ coder however I am pretty good at finding bugs/issues.

#15 hehe TX always was ahead.
it had components since day 1 and due to XNA also shaders which gave it some nice realtime light and fake 3d through Normalmapping effect :)

And yeah, TX is a good example of where the engine could have gone when handled correspondingly.
But in case of iTGB the price is a major reason against it.

its one thing if you pay $300 as with TX, but at $750 per seat as on iTGB the community is quite a bit smaller and the expectations on support are higher (and I think thats fair after all we payed 2x the price of TGB pro on top of tgb pro to get an iphone engine we still didn't get in a acceptable 1.0 state reasonably seen)

#16 Nope, not a fan boy and not employed by GG or TP or whatever they want to call themselves. I say that because I have used tons of engines and libraries over the past 12 years and that is my approach. If the company is ignoring what I need then I simply upgrade (if I can afford it), change engines/libraries, or such. Why fight trying to use a product where you are in limbo all the time? I have TGB, TGE, and TGEA thanks to my college. If I couldn't get any help from GG with any of them I would simply go to UDK, Allegro, SDL, XNA, Unity3D, or any other thing out there to let me turn my ideas into reality. Changing is better than complaining about it on one of their forums and hoping someone in GG replies with a answer you want.

#17 Because we want to get something for the $500 + studio upgrade we payed per seat.

And I own Unity 2.x pro + iphone 1.x pro as well as unity 3 pro + iphone pro as well as shiva unlimited and have rather little problem working with obj-c either
out of your list Unity is the only engine by the way that is even of relevance or related to the topic as none of the others even runs on the iphone. (don't give a damn about udk going to do so at some point cause the going to do so is what brought up this thread here as it doesn't over 1.5 years post "release")

Not all just run away cause its exactly this attitude that allows companies to get away with such sneaky, shady games unharmed and I'm just no longer accepting that.
I bought something, I've even around the pages with the features I bought and want to get what I payed for or a refund.

you don't go out buy a car and stay calm if it comes with 3 wheels, half the windows missing, no door back right and a hole in the gas tank, so why do you do it with engines.

#18 @Clayton - You're a hobbyist, so of course you'd have a different viewpoint than a professional developer.

Changing/upgrading is not better than complaining if GG would actually listen to the complaints... sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

It's obvious that GG is spread too thin if they're having to put all of their developers on one product at the expense of another.

#19 Everyone here makes apps and knows how much work it takes to make a new app or even an update to an app. And we know that if we put one of products to the side for a later time, that product is never going to be done.

I work at a big company and our flagship products are worked on everyday. There is no downtime. There is no other way.

So let's look at where we stand. No roadmap, no milestones, and no one working on the product. At least I have help from the great forum members.

#20

Quote:At least I have help from the great forum members.

Thought quite a few less than there used to be, GG / IA did a great job at driving away most of their major supporters over the past 1.5 years basically.
What you have still here are those who like the tech enough to take the hit from frustrations and temporal anger so they can help others and alike ... But even that won't continue forever, at the current rate, most here will be gone by the time their current projects are finished cause Corona and Cocos2D both have reduced their lack of editor problem quite a bit, which is and always was the only benefit iTGB had at all (even if it were free thats the only one but at its price it has lost a lot of impact as an important reason cause it just does not balance out the missing support, bug fixing, cleanup work and performance optimizations required)