TGB 1.6 Released...and Manatees?
by Deborah M. Fike · 12/14/2007 (2:34 pm) · 9 comments
TGB 1.6 is out. Get it here!
Last weekend, I created a game. It was based on the classic Asteroids, but I decided to personalize it. I am a big supporter of the Save the Manatee organization, so, instead of a spaceship, I used a manatee. And instead of asteroids, I had motorboats. Sadly, it won't be coming to a store near you. My collisions didn't work right. The crunch deadline passed and I still had no fish bullet functionality. But I am now officially a newbie game creator.
Georgia: My Adopted Manatee
Recently Stephen Zepp put on a Boot Camp for the non-programmers of the Tech & Tools Unit at GarageGames. Unlike other people in the Garage who are working 'round the clock on the next best place for you to publish and play games (InstantAction) or the great new games we're building for it, OUR mission is to bring you the absolute best game engines and tools at an affordable price. We're working overtime to improve documentation, our forums, our website, and of course the tech itself. Everyday, we are working towards better solutions for Torque and have various projects that are handling all these issues.
My particular role in this new unit is to merge customer needs with software development so that we can keep moving forward on the Torque line. (If you want an official title, I am the Torque Product Group Manager.) As my first official Tech & Tools blog, I am proud to announce TGB 1.6! Here's what you can expect in this new version:
Engine & Tool
- File IO issues have been fixed, a doc explaining some of the changes and principles of it can be found here.
- Camera mounting jitter is fixed
- An issue in which a cloned object that had behaviors would not trigger its behaviors "onAdd" and "onAddToScene" callbacks has been fixed
- Fixed a collision issue causing "walking through objects"
- Fixed various issues with the 'Tree View' based GUI's
- Project Templates can now specify resource includes
- Scene Editor will now properly dismount objects, paths, etc when deleting children and / or parent objects
- Jumping mouse in Tiger fixed (Mac Specific)
Animation Builder
- The image browser will now display 'LINK' image maps
- The trash icon will now properly trash all animation frames
GUI Editor
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now properly add the .gui extension
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now remember the file name when re-saving
- It is now possible to select locked gui items, but still impossible to move or resize them
- Resolved some GUI object selection issuesa
Project Builder
- Company and product name entries
- Updates the game project's commonConfig.xml file with proper information
- Renames executable with the product name
- Updates game's window title with product name
Documentation
- Some "TGB Reference" description updates
- Syntax examples have been added to methods for t2dSceneobject in the "TGB Reference"
- Tutorials have had a compatibility pass
If you have any specific questions about what is changed, we've made a forum post for it here.
For those of you who need to play around with TGB now, go ahead and download it on your "My Account" page or buy it here. For those of you are interested, sidebar with me into a journey into the past. TGB has been through many incarnations in its day. Below is a chart of the releases we've done on it (not including version 1.6):
It's been great to see what people have done with TGB. I am continually amazed that people with all levels of experience - from newbies to former commercial developers - can take TGB and produce fantastic games. A few great examples (in no particular order):
Amaranth Games's Grimm's Hatchery: A beautiful game that lets you explore a medieval world and raise magical pets. Grimm's Hatchery is Amaranth Games's first use of any GarageGames engine. The company specializes in casual games and RPGs with big stories from the SNES generation.
Top Meadow's Poker Puzzle: An extremely addictive game that mixes your love of gambling and puzzle strategy. Puzzle Poker was one of the earliest TGB games releases on our website. In fact, my partner-in-crime Eric Fritz was one of the early play testers of the game.
Conor O'Kane's DroneSwarm: A shoot 'em up game that won 6th place in the Shmup-dev 'Options' 2k7 Competition. With only artist experience, Conor made the game completely from TorqueScript between June and October 2007 working evenings and weekends. He only needed two other developers - Kevin Ross did music and Alex Parker did music and sound effects - to complete the prototype. It wasn't easy, of course. In his own words to me, "As I went along I made many mistakes - I found the feedback of people on the GarageGames forums and IRC channel and the shmup-dev website invaluable for correcting my mistakes and teaching me proper programming practices."
Thanks for being a great community and helping us bring TGB this far. We definitely couldn't have done it without you. I look forward to working with you to push the boundaries further into 2008. And maybe I can take the manatee concept into other classics. Hmm...
Last weekend, I created a game. It was based on the classic Asteroids, but I decided to personalize it. I am a big supporter of the Save the Manatee organization, so, instead of a spaceship, I used a manatee. And instead of asteroids, I had motorboats. Sadly, it won't be coming to a store near you. My collisions didn't work right. The crunch deadline passed and I still had no fish bullet functionality. But I am now officially a newbie game creator.
Georgia: My Adopted Manatee
Recently Stephen Zepp put on a Boot Camp for the non-programmers of the Tech & Tools Unit at GarageGames. Unlike other people in the Garage who are working 'round the clock on the next best place for you to publish and play games (InstantAction) or the great new games we're building for it, OUR mission is to bring you the absolute best game engines and tools at an affordable price. We're working overtime to improve documentation, our forums, our website, and of course the tech itself. Everyday, we are working towards better solutions for Torque and have various projects that are handling all these issues.
My particular role in this new unit is to merge customer needs with software development so that we can keep moving forward on the Torque line. (If you want an official title, I am the Torque Product Group Manager.) As my first official Tech & Tools blog, I am proud to announce TGB 1.6! Here's what you can expect in this new version:
Engine & Tool
- File IO issues have been fixed, a doc explaining some of the changes and principles of it can be found here.
- Camera mounting jitter is fixed
- An issue in which a cloned object that had behaviors would not trigger its behaviors "onAdd" and "onAddToScene" callbacks has been fixed
- Fixed a collision issue causing "walking through objects"
- Fixed various issues with the 'Tree View' based GUI's
- Project Templates can now specify resource includes
- Scene Editor will now properly dismount objects, paths, etc when deleting children and / or parent objects
- Jumping mouse in Tiger fixed (Mac Specific)
Animation Builder
- The image browser will now display 'LINK' image maps
- The trash icon will now properly trash all animation frames
GUI Editor
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now properly add the .gui extension
- When saving a new GUI, the editor will now remember the file name when re-saving
- It is now possible to select locked gui items, but still impossible to move or resize them
- Resolved some GUI object selection issuesa
Project Builder
- Company and product name entries
- Updates the game project's commonConfig.xml file with proper information
- Renames executable with the product name
- Updates game's window title with product name
Documentation
- Some "TGB Reference" description updates
- Syntax examples have been added to methods for t2dSceneobject in the "TGB Reference"
- Tutorials have had a compatibility pass
If you have any specific questions about what is changed, we've made a forum post for it here.
For those of you who need to play around with TGB now, go ahead and download it on your "My Account" page or buy it here. For those of you are interested, sidebar with me into a journey into the past. TGB has been through many incarnations in its day. Below is a chart of the releases we've done on it (not including version 1.6):
It's been great to see what people have done with TGB. I am continually amazed that people with all levels of experience - from newbies to former commercial developers - can take TGB and produce fantastic games. A few great examples (in no particular order):
Amaranth Games's Grimm's Hatchery: A beautiful game that lets you explore a medieval world and raise magical pets. Grimm's Hatchery is Amaranth Games's first use of any GarageGames engine. The company specializes in casual games and RPGs with big stories from the SNES generation.
Top Meadow's Poker Puzzle: An extremely addictive game that mixes your love of gambling and puzzle strategy. Puzzle Poker was one of the earliest TGB games releases on our website. In fact, my partner-in-crime Eric Fritz was one of the early play testers of the game.
Conor O'Kane's DroneSwarm: A shoot 'em up game that won 6th place in the Shmup-dev 'Options' 2k7 Competition. With only artist experience, Conor made the game completely from TorqueScript between June and October 2007 working evenings and weekends. He only needed two other developers - Kevin Ross did music and Alex Parker did music and sound effects - to complete the prototype. It wasn't easy, of course. In his own words to me, "As I went along I made many mistakes - I found the feedback of people on the GarageGames forums and IRC channel and the shmup-dev website invaluable for correcting my mistakes and teaching me proper programming practices."
Thanks for being a great community and helping us bring TGB this far. We definitely couldn't have done it without you. I look forward to working with you to push the boundaries further into 2008. And maybe I can take the manatee concept into other classics. Hmm...
About the author
I write games for a living. <3 my job.
#2
This community is great!
Kevin
12/14/2007 (3:19 pm)
Its awesome to see TGB come this far. Ironically I'm still trying to finish up a project on 1.1.3, but I can't wait to start some work on 1.6. Great write up, Deborah! Its good to see some fine examples of work people have done with TGB. This community is great!
Kevin
#4
12/15/2007 (1:29 pm)
Hey Deborah! Awesome job on the new TGB build. Just talking with a client on using TGB for a project, posted about it in my blog. I'm also still working on some games in my spare time using 1.1.3 but I'm eager to dig into 2.6 with this new project. Take care 
#5
12/15/2007 (8:08 pm)
w00t! Nice job all. Special thanks to Robert Blanchet, Justin DuJardin, Matt Langley and Melv May for sorting through a lot of these improvements. Much more to come with TGB by the way folks. Did we mention there a path to Xbox 360 and Wii for TGB now????
#6
12/15/2007 (9:17 pm)
I was going to adopt a manatee but I forgot all about it. I guess I'll make it a Christmas present to the manatees this year. 
#7
12/17/2007 (12:09 am)
:( where's TGE 2.0 milestone date? :(
#8
@ John: Are you referring to Torque 2.0? We've got a lot of people at GarageGames working on it, but it's still in the early design phases so we're not ready to give you a deadline any more clear than 2008. But we definitely want to continue working on our current product line, like this TGB release, so people still have the game making tools they need.
12/17/2007 (12:28 am)
@ Master Treb: When you donate to Save the Manatee Club, it's really cool. They let you pick manatees with fun personalities. Georgia (pictured above) is a very playful manatee, which is why I choose her.@ John: Are you referring to Torque 2.0? We've got a lot of people at GarageGames working on it, but it's still in the early design phases so we're not ready to give you a deadline any more clear than 2008. But we definitely want to continue working on our current product line, like this TGB release, so people still have the game making tools they need.
#9
12/17/2007 (9:05 am)
Man you guys are busy! 
Associate Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314)
All praise be to Commander Langley!
And congrats to everyone else ;)