So I now have Torque... and lots of questions...

My buddy Chris Sullivan and I have finally gotten his license reactivated and gotten the latest version of TGEA. He's worked on several games in the past and is the better programmer, but has grown to hate it, so is letting me get into the guts while he focuses on production and design. Our third partner is going to work on modeling and art. That should be a fine trio to get a decent demo out in a year... :)

My current assignment is to dissect the engine as best I can and figure out what it's doing so I can start on the framework for our game.

I'm a novice programmer... I can read the code, but can't see what it's all doing in my head. I look through the source for the Stronghold game, for instance, and recognize functions, loops, new data types... any individual thing I can dissect, but I can't seem to grasp the guts of the thing.

I hear that learning TorqueScript is important, and hey I'm always game to learn something new. But as I browse through the project, I don't see any TorqueScript to mess around with! Where is it hidden?

It looks fairly easy to modify terrain and import models/textures. But then I'll have a static world full of objects just sitting around, not doing anything. The scripts are what tell things how to behave, yes? I see an orc running around the demo, and I see his path, but where's the script telling him to follow that particular path?

I feel like I'm on the verge of understanding this, but I need some hints and pointers (<-pun!).

I suppose you'll be able to help better if I give some specific questions... they aren't necessarily related to my end goal, but will help me know where to look to change certain categories of things.

Where would I find the information on how high my character can jump and how fast he moves? I thought I found it in player.cpp (the block with maxForwardSpeed = 10.0f;), but changing the numbers didn't do anything, even when I changed them to 1.0f.

Where would I find the camera location/angle? It should be a simple matter to project the camera to be looking over the character's shoulder, for instance, or to allow zoom in-out functionality, but I can't find it.

Where is the information for interpreting input devices? If I wanted to re-code different default controls, or add new controls attached to my own functions, where would I do it?

When the player runs over ammo, it knows to add ammo. There is obviously some sort of script attached to the ammo object so when it detects a collision with the player it runs the appropriate functions, makes the object vanish, and adds ammo to the player. Where is that script and how do I access it?


I appologize for these very basic questions. I feel like all I need is a bit of a nudge before I can take off and start doing something real with TGEA.

We're planning on starting up a devblog of our project in the next month or two so I'll definitely post that here for you guys to follow, if you want. We're under the delusion that we've hit on an MMO idea that's actually new. :P