Skin TGE interface tutorial begins

#1 Thanks for the work you're putting into these! What I've seen so far is really helpful!! ;)

#2 Brandon, I just "sat in" on your intro to skinning the engine, and I must say, I am very impressed. I like your style of teaching, not TELLING the person, but almost like your learning WITH the person. What you are showing is similar to what a person would do you find out on their own. Luckily, you give a helping hand. I plan on watching your entire library of videos.

Now, the forums system you have set up... I just cant get my mind wrapped around it yet. Not that its not a good idea, no.. quite the opposite. I have never seen it done this way, in that the forums are actually BUILT INTO the video itself. It makes total sense, sorta like asking the person beside you whats going on, WHILE watching a movie, fantastic idea.

I agree with Rodney, the work you are putting into these videos is enormus, but the end result certinly shows it, Extremly well done.

#3 I love the idea, but it doesn't seem to be working in Safari... unfortunately I don't know enough about either Safari, or flash, to work out what the problem might be...

Thanks,
Gary (-;


EDIT: It occurred to me what an obnoxiously useless comment that was. In more detail:

When I try watching the tutorial, the flash seems to load. The control bar at the bottom does something representatively useful, and I can hear you talking once I click play. But the video appearance doesn't change, from that thing that's there when it first loads.
If I leave it running, then parts of the video that would change appear from time to time, but not predicably.
About halfway through, I hear three different versions of your voice, at different points in the tutorial, playing simultaneously. I think this may be something else going on on my system, though, as I've seen it before.

The 3ds max export video seems to work fine, as does one small video describing one quick tip for using 3ds [which I fail miserably to understand, mostly because I don't know *anything* about modelling...]

Thanks,
Gary (-;

#4 Great initiative, great stuff.

#5 Thanks for all the positive feedback, it's nice to give back to such a supportive community.

@Gary: Here's what I think the problem is: On the videos that just have 1 .swf clip they play fine on your computer. The "standard" one clip video player is from TechSmith and only requires flash version 5. I went through and "enhanced" the stock player to stream in multiple clips and make it appear to be one big clip, when it is actually two or more. These features require flash7 actionscript2, so that is why you hear multiple clips playing at once. (I think). I am guessing safari is not flash7 actionscript2.0 compatible?

Just a guess on the problems you are experiencing, but maybe they will support these features for your browser soon.

B--

#6 @Brandon: Thanks for the update. Honestly, I know absolutely nothing about safari or flash, just that they are what I use. Ho, hum.

Thanks,
Gary (-;

#7 Update: The rest of the video has been completed and uploaded.. It is a "rough draft" and will be tweaked as user feedback comes in.

A quick link to the tutorial page is torque.smdlabs.com/media/freeTutorials/skinGUI/page1.htm

Also, the last page contains an .rar file with a blank template and the working GUI image from the tutorial.


B--

#8 Good stuff Brandon.

#9 Nice series you have going (including the scripting and others too ;))

One suggestion though - in the "Testing" phase of the GUI tutorial, you spent a lot of time making a double-size graphic and then the engine bombs when you run it. Rather than just showing the error message and saying basically that must have been too big, why not show what was wrong with it that made it crash? Not everyone watching the tutorials may have access to the source code so if there is a size restriction in there or something, maybe you could mention that in the video?

Just a thought ;)

#10 @Rodney: I also wanted to go there, but I can't show any 'engine source' in the tutorials.. Your right though, I can add in another clip near the end that explains the issue without showing any source form the engine.

I'll add that, good idea!

B--

#11 Yeah, that's what I had in mind. I know you can't show the code, but just something like "The engine limits you to 256..." or whatever the problem ended up being (I haven't actually looked at that source file to see :)

Hmmm... just thought of something. Do GUI graphic dimensions have to be in powers of 2 like textures?

#12 Very Nice work. This is a great intro for someone new to Torque. Nice teaching style as well. I am looking forward to seeing more of your videos.

#13 @Rodney: I went in a added a clip to the end of the testing video. I didn't save the large template from the video, so I made another one with the same dimensions to reproduce the error, but couldn't get it to crash.. It worked fine. Go figure! haha, I speculated in the video why it crashed the first time, and think it had something to do with me extending the canvas size in the first attempt, but I can't be certain because I didn't save the file that caused the crash. Oh, well. Thanks for the feedback; I hope the new ending wraps things up better. It's always good to have a "happy" no crash ending. :)

B--

edit: Thanks Gabrial, there should be pletty more.. God willling.

#14 Brandon,

In the template setup tutorial, the reason the first image (the 1st larger image) doesn't work is that you overran the 1 pixel border between the lower lefthand corner and the lower center imgage.

Look closely at the image right after you produce the error.

~ At least that's what I think happened. =)

#15 @Kirby: hahaha, good catch.. Thats' it.. I'm not sure how that happened. No more tutorial work for me after midnight! :)

B--

Edit: I went ahead and added another 30 second clip to the end of that video to reveal the "real" problem. Thanks again for the good eye's Kirby!

#16 NP.

I've had more than my share of headaches over little things like that. (C;

BTW:

I got side-tracked and forgot to mention how great these tutorials are!

I know my way around Torque fairly well and still find these useful.

~ Great work. Keep it up!

#17 UPDATE:

A new step has been added to the tutorial that walks you through the actual process of replacing current GUI images as well as changing the default colors.

Here is the link: torque.smdlabs.com/media/freeTutorials/skinGUI/page6.htm

B--

#18 Fantastic tutorial, helps a ton, thank you Brandon!

#19 Your welcome!