Plan for Ben Garney

Wow, busy busy busy!

It's about 5am and I'm in the office furiously trying to get everything done before I head off to my vacation. I leave tomorrow morning. I'm going to spend the weekend in Portland, then Tuesday morning, I leave for balmy (?) England. I'll stay with Tom Bampton, then we'll drive out to visit Phil Carlisle. Then I spend another week or so travelling around Scotland and Ireland with an old highschool buddy of mine, before finally leaving from Dublin to head back home. All told, I'll be gone from work for two weeks.

A much needed break, and I'm glad to finally have it. I'm not going to be online or on a computer at all, and it's gonna feel great. :)

But - first, some nifty GG related news.

Torque 1.4 Release Candidate 1 is in CVS. This is a VERY EARLY release candidate, and not for use by people who aren't completely comfortable: setting up their own make environments, dealing with broken code, not having any documentation or support, using CVS, having to learn new things, or getting to see the very latest bleeding-edge in TGE development.

There are a LOT of fixes in this version of the codebase. Code cleanups. Many small enhancements. The fundamental changes for the component system are in. Some of Zac-the-Intern's excellent work on the GUI editor, soon to be followed by mission editor enhancements. Pat's ITickable code, for ticking time on arbitrary objects. A complete rearrangement of the GUI library, as well as some neat new GUI elements.

I've labelled the "old" HEAD as Release_1_3_1, so that it can be recalled if necessary. I've done my best to preserve the relatively small number of changes that snuck into HEAD after we branched to the internal SVN repository, too.

A taste of what's going to be appearing in CVS over the next month or two: MattF's new map2dif code, enhanced mission editor, fixes and even some useful new stuff from the GDC demo. And, of course, the things we're keeping in reserve as "surprises." ;)

The plan for the 1.4 release is pretty straightforward. First, we're releasing this early Release Candidate on CVS. I'm going to be gone for the next two weeks on vacation, during which time bug reports will pile up from those who care enough to try it. Hopefully the rest of the GG crew, as well as our AWESOME community, will be able to knock down most of them. I'll come back, dedicate time to fixing the remaining issues, integrate the remaining missing pieces, and do another RC, this time probably via an installer. Collect bugs. Fix them. Finally commit and label 1.4, and update the installers so that everyone can use it.

So, if you're feeling adventurous, feel free to try out what's in CVS. Be aware we are not going to offer support for people who have trouble (unless it's genuinely a problem on our end). If you can't get it on your own, or can't handle broken code, wait till we offer the downloadable version in a month or so. This RC is all about bringing the code out of the garage and letting other people poke at it - the next one will be more focused on actually being useful to real people. :)

Torque Developer Network. I'm just going to talk briefly about this. A lot of people lately have been commenting on how our docs need better organization and, much to my delight, offering to improve them themselves. If that's not a dedicated community, what is?! Really, the problem isn't so much the lack of actual docs (there are many of thousands of pages!), as it is the difficulty in finding them (on the user's end) and keeping them up to date (on our and the many resource writers' end).

With so many docs, it seemed a much better idea to simply dedicate a whole website to them, rather than try to keep them "inside" the www.GarageGames.com container. And that's what TDN is all about - making a home for all the docs that our community needs, making it REALLY easy to update them, and giving everyone in our community (coders, artists, experts, novices, employees, associates, or just plain members) a better platform to do all this on.

TDN is going to take a little while to get fully going. There's a lot of content to move into it, and a learning curve for everyone involved (especially the people who are going to be involved in the day-to-day running of it!). So, we're going to make sure we do it right, that it becomes a useful resource from day one, and take the time needed to get it solid and useful before we flip the switch and make it live for everyone. I've already spent a fair chunk of my time up till now laying the groundwork, and when I get back from my vacation, we'll really start going places...

As for the TSE Terrain, it's coming along pretty well. I spent a few days tweaking the very basic art pipeline I've already got going (it loads raw heightmaps and large JPEGs), as well as optimizing the rendering and loading code. It's still not totally hitch-free on my laptop (Inspiron 8600, 4500 RPM hard drive, Radeon 9600 Mobile, 1.8GHz CPU), but it's better than it was before GDC. I think there are still some improvements left in it, but it's getting closer to a point where we can release it without being ashamed of ourselves. :) It works on 1.1, now (very easy change there), and the rendering is a bit more optimal.

Lots more work to be done on the terrain, but I want to get it wrapped up soon and out of my hair. :)

Ok, I think that's about it. Now to check in the RC and make sure that at least the VC7 project files work... Then I'm free! Free! (The other project files will get updated a little later, don't worry!)