Torque Game Engine Advanced version now available!
Cirrus Skies is a new 'Cloud Management System' for the Torque Game Engine and Torque Game Engine Advanced. It adds new functionality and flexibility, allowing game developers to quickly create beautiful, lifelike and dynamic skies for their games. Many developers want fine-grained control over the appearance and behavior of their skies. Traditional Torque cloud layers just didn't allow for that, Cirrus Skies delivers it!
In the past, Torque-Developers were limited to three bitmap-textured cloud layers. These layers collectively, were either ON or OFF. The clouds layers were tightly woven into the sky-box, creating a monolithic tangle of legacy code. For developers, replacing the bitmaps with procedurally-generated clouds was a complex undertaking fraught with danger. Common results included: lost productivity, missed deadlines and cloud-layer lock-in.
Cirrus Skies changes all this by adding an entire new subsystem to Torque. The new code is entirely de-coupled from the sky-box, dramatically simplifying how both systems work. The clean object-oriented design is easy for C++ developers to extend and modify.
TorqueScript fans should be excited too! Cloud layers can be defined and modified, in exacting-detail, from Torque mission files. All of the new cloud-layer controls are equally available to TorqueScript, no C++ required!
If your looking for an easy way to differentiate your game from the pack; add another level of realism and detail; or just want that extra pizazz - than Cirrus Skies is the Torque Code-Mod for you!
Cirrus Skies Includes:
- Cirrus Skies - Cloud-Layer Management System
- dfCloudLayerBasic - Cloud Texture Module
- dfCloudLayerJahn - Cloud Texture Module
- dfCloudLayerPeterson - Cloud Texture Module
- dfCloudLayerRendell - Cloud Texture Module
- Significantly cleaned up 'Sky Class'
- Reusable Perlin-Noise and Simplex-Noise generator class
- Six demo missions
Cirrus Skies - Cloud-Layer Management System:
- Arbitrary number of cloud layers per mission
- Ability to toggle and fade all layers independently
- Ability to set or fade any layer to any transparency value
- Ability to select different source-types for each cloud-layer's texture
- Ability to create star-fields and other visual effects
- Ability to fully control cloud-layers through C++ or TorqueScript
Included Texture Modules:
- dfCloudLayerBasic - Supports loading of bitmap texture-images.
- dfCloudLayerJahn - Fractal cloud generation using the diamond-square method.
- dfCloudLayerPeterson - Procedural cloud generation using Simplex-Noise.
- dfCloudLayerRendell - Procedural cloud generation using Perlin-Noise; supports clouds that billow and change over time.
- Demo Missions - Included as examples of how to add the cloud layers to your mission files. They show off a range of effects that can be achieved and highlight some of the technical limitations Cirrus Skies has overcome.
Operating Systems:
- Windows
- Should work on all OSes supported by Torque but this has not been tested.
Game-Engines:
- TGE-1.5.2
- Should work back to TGE-1.3 or prior but again, has not been tested.
- TGEA version now available. Supports 1.8.1
