Displaying a scene without starter kit

#1 You need a GuiTSCtrl and a GameConnection. That should be enough to get going. Oh yeah - and a control object.

#2 What is the difference between GuiTSCtrl and GameTSCtrl? Which one of them it's better to use?

#3 GameTSCtrl is a subclass of GuiTSCtrl which cooperates with the other "game" code. Use it unless you have reason to do otherwise.

#4 The last question: what do I need to create a game connection? I want to make a singleplayer game, so maybe I can make it easier than it was in FPS starter kit. What is the easiest way to create it?

#5

new GameConnection(foo); foo.connectLocal();

Voila!

#6 :) I found something useful: www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5190
but I'm still not certain how to connect the gameConnection, GameTSControl, and the MissionGroup form *.mis file.

#7 The GameConnection will automatically register itself in the engine; the GameTSControl will look up that registration, and scoping is done by the control object, which is normally created by script. The .mis is just a script file that creates a bunch of objects in the game world.

#8 Is there some different control object than a GameTSControl? I missed something?

#9 A control object is the object which a given player is controlling in the game. The GameTSControl is just a GUI control. A control object is something like a player or a vehicle, which the player is controlling. You set it via setControlObject on the GameConnection.

#10 Everything is fine but I can't see anything about that in script files of fps starter kit.

To sum up:

canvas.setContent(PlayGui);
exec(%missionfile);
new GameConnection(connection);
connection.connectLocal();

What else should be done? I saw something like

RootGroup.add(connection);

and some groups like MissionCleanup, ServerGroup. What are they for? I'm very confused with that.

#11 [soapbox]

I'm not trying to be negative here about your project or what you are doing, but the sequence you are going through right now is exactly why many, many people feel that ripping everything out from TGE (the "min app" concept) is a counter-productive concept.

Right now you are spending a lot of time trying to get things ported back into torque that you ripped out yourself when you went with a "min app" concept.

Instead, you could be spending the time learning about the inner workings of the engine, and focusing on the things that will make your game have a "fun factor".

[/soapbox]

#12 I'm not writing FPS or racing game so I need to modify a bit code of starter kits. To do this I need to know exactly what each line of code does, and how it can be changed. Ripping off unnecessary(e.g. multiplayer) code increases readability and clearity of it. When you rewrite the code, you need to know what is it doing and you can change it freely. I know I'm going to have something similar to the starter kit, but then I'will understand it. I need this knowledge to write a good game using TGE.

#13 You don't need to know everything about the engine and how it works to write a good game. You learn about the parts of the engine you need in order to modify them.

#14 Like I mentioned, I wasn't specifically disrespecting your particular project or project needs--it's just that many people think they need/want to "start from scratch", and rip out all of the functionality they wind up putting right back in again.

In my personal opinion, it's better to use either of the starting kits as a baseline tool, and learn the things you need to learn by evaluating each of the systems in the starter kit, and (successfully) taking out functionality, instead of trying to rebuild functionality from scratch. It tends to cause less effort in the long run, as well as having you view all of the functionality in a particular starter kit--which tends to show you examples of how to implement various concepts that you will probably wind up using in the long run, possibly with modification for your particular game.

In any case, I didn't mean to hijack your thread, but with that title and the search tokens that will appear for people in the future, I wanted to briefly inject an alternate opinion! Please don't let that distract from your questions.

#15 I just want to interject a quick thought...

I'm with you, Stephen, with regard to not tearing everything out of the engine. I think it is very important to have a code base that does all the necessary bits. It makes it easier to learn and then adjust the code incrementally rather than trying to understand and rebuild all the necessary code all at once.

Having said that, I'm glad Marcin has been asking some of these questions... this thread has clarified a couple things for me that had been a little unclear previously. Ask away, Marcin! =)

#16 And remember... once you get your game going you can always trim stuff down. ;) Measure twice, cut once!