1.1 Release Timeline

#61 umm Phillip? miss a release date? When did GG ever announce a release date? i think there were more then a few features that were announced that were suddenly not in RC1, for example I know I was looking forward to the nice foilage update, that wasnt announced as a third party item till some time later. A good example is the non inclusion of items that were in the Beta but left out of the RC1. And some of it was explained. But some of it was a hmm issue. For example the FPS example from the previous left out, was this to facilite the FPS Kit sale in the future? Likely, same with the Racing Kit. Just small things.

#62 I'm saying that this is the reason why they don't announce release dates.

Foliage? As in the Forest Kit? Lets not bring that up again, as it was *always* a third party addon and has never been anything other than.

Racing Kit? I always thought that was a third party addon.

FPS Kit? Yeah, this one wasn't cool. Apparatus was the guy working on the art for this and he up and left 1/2 way through. Many of the cool changes that were made for the "kit" were infact incoroprated into the base engine. Things like altfire, additional animation support, etc. I can't remember them all off the top of my head.

#63 ..what a terrible thing to do..'leaving half way through'.
- He needed head-meds IMO.

#64

Quote:
No, it was never explicitly promised, but the perception was when T3d was first advertised, we were showed some really nice movies containing, items like the Pacific Demo(the forest kit), the Wetness and Percipitiation Blog by Brett, now dont you think its possible that this confusion occured becuase for a T3d blog, these items were presented and i dont see anywhere in the t3d blogs saying that it wouldnt be in.

In the very first Torque 3D Development blog you find this line:

Quote:
2. Shine some light on our development process by exposing feature targets early, even if they end up being cut for the final release.

I'm really not sure how we could have any more clear about the fact. Even the fact that the blog series has the word Development in the title should help to imply that we were giving a view into an ongoing and changing process.

As soon as it became clear that Wetness wasn't going to be in Torque 3D 1.0 we told you.

We have always been extremely clear on the facts that the Forest Kit and Racing Kit are 3rd party addons and that the in-game browser demo at GDC was just a quick experiment by Josh Engenbretson and not intended for inclusion in Torque 3D.

#65 We removed the Warrior Camp art assets because they were unfinished, unoptimized, and in general did not show off Torque 3D in a good light. From the very first Beta onward there was a readme file included that pointed out that the artwork in the Beta wasn't to be considered final.

#66

Quote:
Foliage painting is an industry standard for engines for quite some time now, so for me its clear that I expect that this industry standard is covered by T3D 1.5, at very very latest with 2.0

Its one thing to cut potential things like clustering, pvs optimizations and alike (portal optimizations are part of the engines and must apply to anything, including foliage of all type) as well as art assets, thats understandable that one wants to sell that on its own as it is its own thing (comparable to speedtree). But there is nothing, really nothing, that would reasonably explain to my why foliage / detail object / tree painting and auto placement, standard features by 2008, so expected in a 2009 new release, were impossible as part of T3D and require an addon.

First, Torque 3D 1.0 includes basic foliage and shape painting already (you can tie GroundCover to the various TerrainMaterial layers). So I am not really sure why you think that we "cut" this feature.

The Forest Kit is a combination better tools and rendering techniques aimed at making the foliage capabilities even more powerful and easy to use.

Second, I'm not sure how this qualifies a "standard feature" in modern game engines? What criteria makes it so?

#67

Quote:
asking themself if we will pay for the engine license, the upgrades AND for standard features ripped out into addons (thats my personal understanding of the Forest Kit requiring the modifications from 1.1 to work and thus beeing postphone till post 1.1)

This is pure paranoid conspiracy theory fantasy.

The reason that Forest Kit isn't being released until Torque 3D 1.1 is because we kept Sickhead so busy working on other aspects of Torque 3D 1.0 that they didn't have the time and resources to finish the Forest Kit for the 1.0 release. Additionally, Sickhead is rolling many, many improvements into the core of Torque 3D 1.1 to make it easier to integrate the Forest Kit and to improve its functionality. These are improvements that every Torque 3D owner will receive for free no matter what the cost of the Forest Kit ends up being and are things that Sickhead was under no obligation to give to our customers.

I would also note that the invitation to add functionality to the core of Torque in order to make 3rd party addon developers' lives easier has always been extended to those developers (including and especially AFX).

Quote:
I doubt that others get first hand free support on their work and such insider knowledge

We don't tell every 3rd party addon developer everything we are thinking but a vast majority of the ones who have come to us with a product and have wanted to work with us are added to the Torque 3D development mailing list and receive a ton of "insider knowledge".

#68

Quote:
No inhouse team or team with significant control over the path of a technology must be in the position to release addons. Thats a clear conflict of interests.

We disagree. It is perfectly reasonable for us to trade preferential treatment of a 3rd party addon developer for work done by them on our product at better rates. This is a very common business practice in all industries (do you seriously think all business relationships are made of money?).

We do want to make sure that there is reasonable baseline functionality in our product and in this specific case we feel like GroundCover, fxFoliageReplicator, fxShapeReplicator all do a good job at this.

#69 @Matt, Wow, that's like saying I had my fingers crossed when I told you about all the upcoming features, so nothing counts. Nice.

#70 John,
That makes no sense.

Having our "fingers crossed" implies that we kept it a secret that some of the features that we were giving very early insight into could change during a very long development cycle.

We were neither shady or underhanded in this. We explicitly stated in the very first Torque 3D Development blog that this might happen.

We expected that most of our customers would have enough experience to understand this without it needing to be spelled out but we made the effort to do so just to make sure there was no misunderstandings.

Yet, somehow, people continue to cling to totally unreasonable notions and expectations.

#71 I did the in game browser stuff over a weekend as an example of what a motivated guy can do with Torque 3D in very little time :) It was never presented or documented as a feature of the engine. It was shown as a demo from the GDC floor, where lots of demos are shown.

Quote:The reason that Forest Kit isn't being released until Torque 3D 1.1 is because we kept Sickhead so busy working on other aspects of Torque 3D 1.0 that they didn't have the time and resources to finish the Forest Kit for the 1.0 release.

I can vouch for this...

Quote:Additionally, Sickhead is rolling many, many improvements into the core of Torque 3D 1.1 to make it easier to integrate the Forest Kit and to improve its functionality.

+1 for Sickhead!

@MattF: Thanks for all the information and your candor, it is appreciated

#72 I don't quite understand several voices of the community..
- People wanted 'more and better'. 'More and better' is now available (in an un-polished state, soon to become polished). However, with T3D's arrival(and before)..the complaints are pointed towards: the price being too high, or that there isn't enough bells and whistles, or somehow things are being scam'ish. Heh..some of you guys are harder to please than my fiancee and THAT is saying something!! (Oh man is that saying something. .Seriously. That is saying something. ;) )

I do feel for the current TGEA users unable to upgrade:
- I'll be the first to say that I had a problem with TGEA...anyone who has read the posts of my 1st year of membership here, knows this. I was *peeved* at times & in all seriousness, it does take quite a bit to get me 'peeved'. Yet, no matter the emotion involved in the situation, I kept pushing the envelope for GG to make things "better" because it is what I wanted/expected and I knew that they had the resources to make it happen. Not that the 'griping' helped any, but I consciously had to make that decision to "gripe" at times so that I could get some attention from the staff because *I wanted answers.
- We all wanted better tools and a stable/fixed codebase that wasn't so hacked by pitchforks, axes and then hammered back together with cheesewhiz as the glue(delicious). ..and sadly, TGEA is still left in that state. To this day TGEA does not have the complete feature list that was advertised on the day that I licensed the engine. Do I wish I could blame it on them being "coniving" or "just not caring" ..well, I wish it were that simple! But it isn't..please read my short'ish internet Matlock post here to finish this sentiment.

But I do have to say that things have turned around a bit:
- Things have been changing around here for the better, yet I can see why GG may change back to "grrr" once again. People aren't providing "input", people *want* to control things and retaliate in the case of non-compliance. ..and let's face it, some posts are downright nasty.

..anyways..
I am near satisfied with T3D & I am confident the next few point releases will nurture that satisfaction feeling. I do feel bad for those that bought TGEA and don't have the cash to upgrade to the 'working' form of the engine. (No need for a retort there..we all have read the "finished & stable jargon" reiterated by reflex after a TGEA-comment) :P

To sum up:
I don't want to see GG leave the smaller indie/hobby developer behind(I really don't think they are doing this in any way, shape or form.. honestly), however if it means moving forward with Tech while also gaining more skilled community members while losing the "rah rah rabble rabble" mentality...then I have to say "go for it".
*There's no success in having 2 million friends when you have no money to put food on your table.

[hollers] Get your ulcer medication here. 2 for $1! [/hollers]

P.S. this post is not directed at anyone in specific

//edit: I would like to a see a SickHead Engine one day...maybe lucky number Dx13 ?

#73 Personally it sounds to me like GG really needs to have a serious look at it's project management process, reading through this thread and others I see some very worrying trends.

It really does appear that there wasn't a clear scope for Torque 3D and more of a case that people were let loose to see what features that could get done and pushed into the engine (of course I'm sure it wasn't that bad but still there appears to have been no concrete feature goal).

Seems like a lack of coordination between Gerhard and what others were doing with statements of his stuff having to be rewritten late in the day.

You enter a public Beta phase and still appeared to have no defined scope (or weren't sharing) what features were in or out.

The results of that poor planning to me seem to be:
- Documentation seems to have really suffered because of it so rather than the "Torque 3D will ship with the best documentation ever" kind of comments what actually is shipped with 1.0 I'd say probably covers less than 10% of the material

- Customer confusion, lots of unhappy comments - some justified and others are just going over the top with things, sure there are always bugs but they're minimized by having GOOD process i.e. feature complete for Beta 1 and then 5 rounds of nothing but bug fixes, not still adding features all the way up to release - you just ask for issues that way.

I just don't buy into the whole we can't define features ahead of time - I spent 2 days last week with SAP and Business Objects going through the scope and feature sets for the next 3 releases of some of their products (Apr 2010, Nov 2010, Mar 2011). If they can define 18months ahead of time what's in scope, how can you be so unclear even a month or two before release?

Despite how this may read I'm really not venting at GG or wanting people to feel under appreciated - I just feel that you guys can do a lot more to help yourselves (and us) with a little more direction and process.

For features lists what would be useful is to adopt something like the MoSCoW method that you can share with us all what is definately in, and what is maybes and won'ts.... Put that in one central place that's kept up-to-date and you solve half the confusion and frustration with people having missed odd comments or blogs scattered around the site.

#74 @Matt: "We do want to make sure that there is reasonable baseline functionality in our product and in this specific case we feel like GroundCover, fxFoliageReplicator, fxShapeReplicator all do a good job at this."

I would fully agree on that, if it wasn't mentioned several times by devs that there is no interest to support the replicators at all.
The replicators are in, so anything is in at all, not to offer the user a baseline option, at least by the way its talked about the replicators, thats what I as user am forced to assume. Already in TGEA the replicators were basically unsupported, some "integrated user resource taken over from TGE" to sense wise quote dev statements from back then.

That is what I meant and talk about when I talk about conflict of interest. I've nothing against great additions, but if the base line is inexistant (It took countless hours to create a forest with a few paths through to cut out mini replicators along the path as I was unable to missuse statics for that purpose for design reason, that can definitely not be considered baseline by the level and official statements of where GG and the devs see the technology in relation to others)

If your official line is that the ground cover + replicators are the official system, please get them on a base level too.

For me, two things are basically missing.
Add them and the shape replicator is all fine as a baseline support:

1. dynamic imposters for lowest detail level on the shape rep. not some mesh lod billboard. Thats baseline for grass and trees for years now.

2. Implementation of a system alike the occluder volume resource for TGEA, that allows the user to define areas within a replicator where no replication can happen and that without missusing dummy objects / tsstatic and the spawn flags..

That would be baseline.

But saying that replicators are the old thing and that you don't have any intend to change anything on them / support them means that they are deprecated and that we will see a real system integrated into the "1.0 release". Now the only thing known in that direction at all is that there is one thing comming, but that that is going to be sold as addon.

So to clarify that: were all those statements about the replicators beeing "dead" / done incorrect then? will we see the shape replicator beeing handled as the official thing and brought to a base level?


I know sickhead is doing great work and I'm gratefull for it. I wouldn't have bought T3D if I didn't think it was great.
Nobody denies that the FK will add great extra value and I don't mind paying for extra value.
But at the current time I'm looking to find the 2009 appropriate base line for doing trees.

So any chance you could share what we will see in relation to tree spawning and functionality in that relation for T3D 1.1 / the next 6 months?


@Andy: fully agree with you.
Should a subscription system beeing considered, its thought required anyway that the milestones for the next 12 months with at least the must happen and the likely to happen points are handled publically and are fullfilled, as nobody is going to subscribe into the blue at least not if the fees are correspondingly low.

#75 @Josh: Well, the ingame browser feature as well as the wetness have been listed on the frontpage of the T3D preorder page since day one, along all other new features.
As it is not explicitely market as an example of what can be done and was listed on that page, it is basically a feature as it is presented as a reason to preorder / early adopt the tech.

I guess all the fuzz about those two things wouldn't exist if GG just would put the wetness as well as the ingame browser thing up as a resource so people have a base to work with and potentially expand upon together.

But instead its kind of a hide and seek game beeing played with both, "we didn't advertise it" while not just handing it out, which to most sounds like "great, we know what we are going to be meant to pay for later on although it was showcased and on the official advertisement page when I bought the tech". By no means I think that this is the intend nor what GG wants to imply with it, but thats the feeling people are getting because everything related to the contract between us and you and future update is still completely unknown and shady, even though we fullfilled our end of that contract already.

#76 Hell, I'll be happy when we have full docs and no show stopping bugs. You can't ask for an easier to please customer than that, can you? Unfortunately, still waiting patiently for those two things.

#77 Warning: Your experience with beer may differ from that of those in the commercial. Empty beach, chair, and amply-bosomed woman not included. Some refrigeration required. Void where prohibited.

#78

Quote:amply-bosomed woman not included

You PROMISED!!11! Reneging on this promise won't work!!!!!!!!1!