Flight Game Example for TGE(A) - OUT NOW!

(continued from my previous blog)

After several months of development, improvement and bugfixing the Flight Game Example has been completed and is available for 30 US$ as electronic download. You can get it right here on the Decane website or from the Plimus store.

The Flight Game Example (FGE) shows how to make a flying game with Torque and includes the complete script sources and the source art in Photoshop and 3DS Max 7, .X and FBX format. Beside that it includes a detailed documentation with general explanations, a script walkthrough, a merger guide as well as tips & tricks. A set of custom C++ classes have been developed to enable AI flying vehicle movement. Those classes are published as public resource on the GarageGames site (to be conform with the TGE(A) EULA) and include a detailed walkthrough of all the necessary engine changes required to get the 2 space ship classes working. The first class is used for a fighter class space ship and the second class is used to steer a mothership kind of space ship and has in difference a trigger that can be sync'ed together with the space ship to allow script-side custom trigger operations (like healing other ships or re-arming). The FGE contains also a complete working demo with pre-compiled Windows binaries of TGE 1.4.2, TGE 1.5.2 and TGEA 1.0.1. Additionally a Mac TGE 1.4.2 universal binary is also included.

Please see here a list of features of the FGE:
- Complete flying game example with a "game" and "common" directory ready to be used.
- 3 different game modes supplied:
- Bot Carnage. Useful for debugging AI. Humans spawn as camera, bots as ships.
- Deathmatch. Classic deathmatch style dogfight game.
- Team Deathmatch inclusive different team skins and team score displays.
- Game-type aware end game screen.
- 2 primary weapons (Blaster, Pulsar) and 2 secondary weapons (MFRL, Sidewinder)
- Player spawns directly as vehicle and not as a player like Kork (so no need to mount a flying vehicle)
- Scout flying vehicle shape with all necessary nodes.
- Repairship flying vehicle shape with all necessary nodes.
- Seperate Scout and Repairship debris shape files provided when the ship blows up.
- Full set of datablocks for the flying vehicle with:
- forward/backward/downward afterburners (booster)
- 2-level damage smoke emitters
- contrails
- ship explosion with debris trails
- Water splash
- Complete source art except the palm tree. Shapes / debris are delivered as Max 7 files, HUD as Photohop PSD files. Please note (and excuse) that the art (except the palm tree) was made by a programmer, not by an artist! ;-)
- Client side HUD with displays for the selected weapons, ammo, afterburner status and ship health as well as a score displays and a radar screen. In team deathmatch mode additional team scores are displayed.
- Homing missile support. The patch for the projectile class allows to have homing missiles called Sidewinder in the demo game. Targets for the missiles can be set via script.
- Further enhancements like auto-explode for the projectile class after a given time is over without having hit something.
- Ability to let explode projectiles by script at any time.
- Direct support for the aiFlyingVehicle and aiRepairshipFlyingVehicle C++ classes from this resource on the GarageGames.com site. Put those files directly into the engine to archive simple AI flying vehicles like shown in the demo.
- An AI state machine purely in TorqueScript to apply some basic behaviour to the AI vehicles featuring:
- "Brains" for the bots. Features a dumb brain and a predator brain.
- Flying to a destination location.
- Randomly flying around.
- Hunt and shoot other flying vehicles.
- Automatic weapon selection with auto-switch over if ammo is empty.
- Automatically search and fly out to re-fill the weapons if they're empty.
- Can have multiple ammo boxes and ship will auto-pickup one of them for re-filling.
- Automatically fly out to pick up health patches if the health of the ship is below 20% or flying to one of the repairships to get healed by the "nano repair bots" the repairships spawn out when flying right behind.
- Auto-usage of the afterburner if target is too far away.
- State machine is easy to extend for your own actions.
- AI Control GUI dialog to have a control over the bots in-game (via CTRL+B). Mainly serves for debugging the bots in the game.
- Mission-area aware ships. Script is set up that ships get damage-over-time as long as they stay out of the mission area. Additionally a bitmap is displayed to human connected players and a warning sound is played back if the player is out of the mission area.
- Demo mission that shows a battle of the bots.
- Pre-compiled Windows and (universal) Mac binary executables to quickly test the complete kit (only need to apply the script changes, not the engine changes).
- 3+1 royalty-free techno-stlye music tracks (complete Decane Music Pack 3 from Decane Music) as 192 kbps Ogg Vorbis files.
- Detailed documentation


Well, I hope you guys like this pack. I put a lot of effort into it and hope to see now some decent flying vehicles in your games! :-)
I should further mention that all future updates to the FGE are free of charge. So if for example bugs are found or I develop new features for it, you will be notified automatically as soon as a new version is available for download. I created a question & answer thread in the TGE private discussions forum if you have any questions.

Finally I would like to thank very much the following people (in an unsorted order):
Thomas "Man of Ice" Lund, Andrew "Ando" McElvenny, Thomas "Alienforce" Alenfors, Tom Vogt, James "Burning" Laker, Thor Zollinger, Matt Webster, Chris "C2" Byars, Stefan Lundmark, Derk Adams, Robert Geiman, Sickhead Games, my wife, the GG community and for sure the guys at GarageGames: James Wiley, Tim Aste, Stephen Zepp & Joshua Dallmann.

Have fun with the FGE and thanks for reading.

Martin :-)

Here is a screenshot medley of the TGEA version of the Flight Game Example: