How bad is iTorque?

#21 Marc is right about the physics in iT2D blows. Just to be fair, i'm talking about just simple physics not being handled properly out of the box -- everyone here knows about objects getting stuck while colliding and other weird stuff.

With that said, iTGB is great for 2d... good scripting language.. great visual editor... good APIs (the non-broken ones :).

Now if only we can get a version with all the bugs fixed so we can start talking about new/improved features.

@EE - I like how you keep it real... ha.

#22

Quote:With that said, iTGB is great for 2d... good scripting language.. great visual editor... good APIs (the non-broken ones :).

Fully agree :)
The editor is the solid and time saving aspect and the scripting language, while not 100% proof, is still very solid and powerfull once you learn how it works, how datablocks work and how packages can be used for UnrealScript alike state handling (ai will thank you) :)

#23 Personnally I don't make much use of the editors. I think the GUI editor is poor, and I've never used it, and the scene editor has limited use in my opinion. Most of the time, I prefer to do everything in script and code. That is a more flexible and more customisable approach in my opinion.

The thing that I've liked mostly about iTorque is that is a very good learning platform. Because we are focused to think outside of the box, experiment, and tweak code to make what we want, this is a great platform for learning how to make games. I've learned a lot working with iTorque and I feel as though I now know enough to make effective use of some of the other engines. Also, the community is very knowledgable, although unfortunately the community is shrinking somewhat compared to earlier in the year when I first joined.

#24 I'm in the same boat as Mark - I don't use either editors; level or GUI. I do like the fact that Torque gives full access to the source code - we have used this extensively in IWT 3.0 to access some of the iPhone features that are not out of the box with iT2D.

#25 Scott your game is a bit special isn't it? :)
Most of the stuff can't be defined in the editor at least not without taking at least as long as when done through code due to the invader alike logic :)

Though I would have assumed that you at least would have done the basic movement paths for the "follower proxy object" through the editor. interesting :)


But I don't see how one would do an RPG or iso / heavy tile based game without the editor, that would to me totally defeat the purpose ...

also if I didn't use these things and see no use for them I doubt I would use iT2D over Cocos2D as the major additions over cocos would be missing (to me objc is no harder than torque script, normally even simpler due to the heavy iphone focused work the past 16 months)

#26 Marc, I did try the editor, in fact I evan had a go with the path editor but found it too cumbersome. Once I'd figured out how paths are "made" it was quicker to build them myself with paper and pen ;-) Agreed with you on tile based games - they would be a nightmare with pen and paper and pretty slow.

The GUI editor is also cumbersome,e specially when you have gui controls which are by default not visible and it is game logic that makes them visible. I'd like to see a "photoshop" approach where I can switch on/off GUI layers; that would be very useful.

One benefit of *not* using the editor is that it does force you to go and look at the APIs on the TDN network and here you can learn a lot about the objects, capabilities, default values etc.

#27 Agreed the GUI editor is not fully up to it. I none the less use it to get the base in and then do the fine tuning part in script code ... I think thats about the most productive way unless the UI is simple (background image + buttons or option screen which is about the same ... though for both I would likely kick in UIKit I guess ...)
Its simpler than wasting an eternity with pen and paper or photoshop position measuring like a morron and alike ;)
especially due to the fact that nested guis can be a nightmare to setup purely code.