Torque Build Environment (TBE) Changes Course

Well, hello everyone! Sorry for my recent lack of .planning: don't think I'm not working on anything cool -- I'm just not at a stage where I'm ready to talk!

However, on the subject of TBE (the free Torque Build Environment, for those who don't know), there has been a major shift in direction and Jeff asked me to inform the community about it.

To cut directly to the chase: coinciding with the release of TGE 1.4, Garage Games is now officially recommending new users (and anyone else looking for a free compiler) to download Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Express, rather than using the GCC/Eclipse package we released last year.

If you've heard enough and you want to get started immediately,
Go Here For Instructions. (If it asks you to login and it doesn't work, keep trying, using your regular GG login information.)

If you want to know why we've made this decision, read on:



The reasons for this change are numerous. First and foremost, last year Visual Studio wasn't free, this year it is. (Unfortunately it is only free for a year, but it is most likely going to be quite cheap after that, and there will still be free options available; if there are problems next year we'll deal with them then. )

Given that the price to the end user is the same (free), it must be said that the price to Garage Games of maintaining support for an alternate compiler and IDE is significant.

To put it bluntly, for coding in C++, relative to Visual Studio... Eclipse bites. GCC is a pretty good compiler, but it doesn't have a very reliable debugger, and performance varies. A few times I have found dramatic differences in performance, and sometimes hard-to-track bugs, where the difference turned out to be simply that I had compiled my engine with GCC rather than VC++. Yes, these problems can be dealt with, one by one, but they all take extra time, and nobody in the office has a lot of extra time to keep throwing at this issue when there is another free solution sitting right there that works fine.

I hope I'm not breaking the hearts of too many fervent anti-Microsoft freedom fighters out there, (if this is you, what are you doing using Windows anyway??) :-) -- but the fact is, Visual Studio is a really professional product, and it does its job quite well. The debugger works exactly as you would want it to, the intellisense functions do their job, and most importantly, Visual Studio is, with a couple of exceptions, what everybody in the office is using. We can't slow down our own coding by using a second-rate tool, but at the same time we can't adequately support the MinGW/GCC/Eclipse development chain if we're not using it every day.

The release of TGE 1.4 brought this issue directly to the front, as it took several people (in and out of the office) several days of off-and-on work to get through the compiler and linker errors that came up when compiling the new engine under GCC. While this is great fun and all, we would much rather have our work go toward improving Torque.

So, there you have it. If you already have TBE and can't or won't use a Microsoft product no matter what, the issues with compiling TGE 1.4 did get resolved (thanks, everybody who helped!), and you can find instructions here

However, for everyone who wants to go ahead with Visual Studio Express, once again, you can find instructions on TDN here. (Again, if it gives you trouble logging in, try, try again! Ben is working on that. Use your regular GG site username/password.)

Thanks for listening, hope this helps everybody get on the same page! Good luck with it!

Chris