GDC & Forest Pack Tech Preview

Forest Pack Tech Preview 1

Over the past few months, with the help of coworker and awesome dude Adam deGrandis, the Forest Pack for TGE has been coming along in the background... and before I disappear for the next two months (see next section), I wanted to toss something out to the community. It is... the Forest Pack Tech Preview. Just a standalone binary that flies through a little test forest with a little bit of art. The code isn't quite final, nor is the art, but it's finally at the point where I really need more info than I can get on my own computer.

Thus, the preview. Give the preview a try, and if you can spare a few moments, toss us feedback at forestpack@gmail.com. FPS (go to console and type metrics(fps);), if it runs OK (no crashes!), any rendering glitches, what hardware (CPU and video card) you're running on... :)

If it tests well, then you might see a full release sometime after GDC. If not, then it's back to the mines for a while longer to tweak it back up to spec.

And that e-mail address once again - any questions, comments, feedback, problems, screenshots send to forestpack@gmail.com.

Thanks guys! I'm sure you'll give it a good pounding!

(Caveats: This build is partially based on Torque 1.3, so some older Torque issues might resurface; there are also some performance hits due to that. The final pack will of course run on latest Torque. The art is a tiny subset of what will come with the pack, and isn't necessarily representative of final art, either. A real demo of some sort will come later on. :)

Game Developer Conference: Where's Ben?

I'll be at the GDC this year. Because of this, I'll also be pretty much disappearing for the next five weeks. A lot of stuff has to get done between now and then, so I'm having to cut back on everything that's not directly related to making kick-ass stuff happen. :)

If you're working directly on a project with me, I'll still be staying in touch, but otherwise, don't expect to see much from me. :) The other GG guys will be pinging me about important forum threads & so forth, so I can participate if needed...

But GDC should rock. Lots of good stuff will be coming, I think. Maybe even a new Atlas code drop. ;)

Torque Developer Network

Done some work on this, too. Logins much improved, and auto-login was added, too, so now it'll remember if you were logged in before. (Don't worry, if you log out of the GG page it'll ask you for a password instead. :)
A bunch of Safari issues have been fixed, too, so the site should be much more usable for those of you on OS X. :)

You can read about these improvements in the TDN forums.

We also have some other cool TDN-related stuff that we'll be announcing in the near future. But more on that later... :)