Plan for Ben Garney

The Forest Pack draws nigh! I recently sent out the final beta. A bit of marketing work from Jay and Benjamin, and a bit of doc work from me, and it will be up on the site, ready for you to add to your game! In case you missed my previous .plans, there are a bunch of screenshots here.

But what else is going on? Well, I've finally gotten my keyboard out of storage, and I'm trying to remember how to play the ol' piano. It's interesting - after four or five years respite, my co-ordination is shot, but I can still remember where all the notes are. I always wanted to pick it back up - maybe I'll have the fortitude to pull it off. :) If you have any good suggestions for sheet music, gimme a shout - I'm trying to find some songs I want to play, and that I know the sound of well enough to teach myself...

My pet project, the TSE terrain, is also coming along well. I'm finally putting texture blending back in, hampered only slightly by some buggy drivers... Maybe I'll be able to post a screenshot or two someday. :) Believe you me, this new terrain is going to kick some ass - but I think I'll save that discussion for another day. ;) Let's just say it's going to deal with both bigger and smaller areas of terrain much more pleasantly than the current system.

We're labelling 1.3, too. This is going to be the leap-off point for a lot of really awesome TGE development.

So let's talk about that very briefly.

There are two major factors in any technology's adoption. The first is what it can do - there must be a certain minimum level of functionality. The second is how easy it is to use - if a technology is too abstruse, it is essentially doomed to the back shelves.

I can safely say that in functionality, TGE is competitive or ahead of every other engine tech out there. We've got incredible networking - TNL. We've got incredible rendering - TSE. We've got a rockin' price point - far, far less than five hundred thousand bucks a license. :) And we've got a great community!

But TGE isn't being adopted as much as it could be. In fact, there are a lot of people who are using other technologies that certainly don't have as much to offer in terms of rendering, GUI, physics, networking. Not naming names... :) But these products seem to have carved out a pretty succesful niche market for themselves. Why is this?

I believe it comes down to ease of use. Torque is a complex body of living code. There are many factors interacting at nearly every point of its design. It is powerful, and once you have mastered it, it is incredibly powerful. But that learning curve can tend to be more like a rocky cliff for many people. :)

So, with this in mind, we're working on making Torque a lot easier to use. We've already done some work in that area - little things like having it tell you when you're abusing the collision system, or asserting instead of crashing in many cases - but there's a lot more distance to go. And that's what TGE development after 1.3 is going to be all about.

We are going to make it easy to write powerful, flexible, useful editors, so that we can have a lot of high quality tools for people to use. We want to make it so that non-coders can work with Torque - maybe not to create cutting edge games, but to make visualizations, to make prototypes, to plug their art into the engine, and so forth.

We are also going to make a lot of changes to the engine so that you can work with it more easily. This codebase is around ten years old, and from time to time, things must be done that break backwards compatibility. That's one of the major reasons that we're making the 1.3 release - so that there's a "last chance" for people to merge to before they have to worry about changes breaking their code.

The gloves are coming off. The version after 1.3 is going to be different. It's going to be better. There are a lot of tricks left in the ol' GG bag, and I intend to pull a lot of 'em out. :)

I'd love to give you a list of promises of stuff that we're going to fix, but I don't think that would be appropriate - the meeting to plan this all out is tomorrow.

The RTS Pack is also coming along. As I mentioned on the forums, Josh and I recently rescheduled so we could spend some quality time working on it. There's just a few things remaining before we can ship. A few bugs, a few features, a few docs, and then we'll be all set.

Have you gotten your IGC tickets yet? Another meeting tomorrow - some IGC planning. This year's IGC is going to be even better than last year's. We've got some great speakers. GG will be bringing an awesome game to the mix (*coughzapcough*) and I'm looking forward to seeing what the community's going to bring.

And just in case you like to procrastinate, we're having a Game In A Day the day before IGC. Show up early, or do it remotely - write something kick-ass and bring it to IGC. As we did last year, there'll be a show-off area where you can demo your games. We had a great after-lunch session today, coming up with some really cool ideas for that GID session. Let's just hope that we won't be too busy running the thing to participate. ;)

Oh - and the Torque torch is being passed. After 1.3 is labelled, I will be assuming the role of Torque Technology Manager. Mark, Tim, and Rick will still have a lot of say in how the engine is maintained and developed, but the day-to-day responsibilities will be in my hands. It remains to be seen whether this is a good or bad thing. ;)