Feedback on the Torque 1.4 Getting Started tutorial

#1 The idea is just great! and the manual itself really good for novice users... and it's organized well ... short but informative.. good work!
and btw, this "tutorial.base" is really nice thing by itself for starting-up a new projects ;)
Thanks a lot!

#2 The tutorial was GREAT! It gave me confidence to start using Torque more again. Getting a small simple game like that up and running does wonders for the confidence even if you did use a tutorial.

#3 Dream come true!! When I went thru the T2D getting started tutorial, all I was thinking was 'I want one for TGE!'. I loved it! Great job guys!!!

#4 Yah, the tut was awesome man. Gives you just enough data to understand many of the basic systems. People who are just looking to learn the engine could pick up the tutorial minigame and expand on it to learn additional systems.

I *thought* I did find a minor issue in one of the steps... something that people should be able to figure out anyway... knew I should have written it down. *sigh*

I will give the scripts a glance to see if they jog my memory. On the other hand I could just be up too late with too much turkey in my belly...

-Unk

#5 It was great. It's something that TGE has needed for a long time!

I did notice, on OSX, that I could not select new textures in the texture painter. I could change the default to the dust texture, but couldn't add new ones to paint with. I didn't have that problem on Windows when I was playing with 1.4. I ran through it on both to see if any of the common features weren't working quite the way I was used to. That was the only one, and it was probably something goof that I was doing). I'll play more this weekend while working on my essay on love and French NeoClassicism (yay me).

But these are some of the entry-level documents that I think people have been asking for for a long time. The current (HUGE!) document set is great for people who have a good base or already have gotten their feet wet with other engines or are programmers by nature. This is an excellent first step in providing easy-access to TGE!

#6 Great work!
This is the kind of thing that really help noobs and make them keep going!

#7 RE: my previous post I think it WAS the turkey... because I can't see anything differant between the tutorial and what I ended up with. *shrug*

-Unk

#8 Great start... however, having a problem here for some reason. After going through till page 11, where I save my GUI. I noticed two things. I removed the graphical bar at the top, so I added a Quit button under my Start so I can close the problem out. 2nd, when I click on Start after putting loadMyMission(); in the command field, it gets to the loading mission page and just hangs. Won't go any further and can't get back into my mission. Any ideas what I did wrong?

EDIT: Thanks Paul.. I'd just like to add here.. that for someone reason it saved my mission I created from the Tutorial in the old tutorial.base /client/mission folder. Don't recall the tutorial covering this in case this happens. But I just moved the .mis and .ter files over to the GameOne folder instead.

#9 Hi Jon,

Yep, you have to make sure that when you save your mission name that it is exactly the same as the mission name in the main.cs file (the one in the GameOne folder). In the main.cs file at the very bottom of the file there is a line that says: 'createServer', make sure that either you save the mission as the name in the string, or fix this line to reflect your mission's name. Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Paul Mikulecky
Lost Pencil Animation Studios Inc.
http://www.lostpencil.com

"The art of character animation is to try
to catch lightning in a bottle.... one volt
at a time." Brad Bird

#10 I guess I should read it, shouldnt I lol.

#11 Definitely well done. Good job.

#12 Absolutely fantastic. I just purchased TGE in October, and have started the first Finney book. While trying to be patient I have been getting frustrated because nowhere was there such a tutorial until now. The first thing I wanted to do after downloading my purchase was to make a simple, stupid "game" just to see what it takes to put a player in a world and interact with a few objects. This tutorial hits the spot exactly. Not too long and not too short. It touches on the essential game elements which is exactly what a noob like me needs.

Now if I only had a complete TorqueScript reference that listed all of the commands, their parameters, return values and a description of what the method does. I've seen lists of commands but most lack any description of what the command/method does and very few describe parameters, method actions and return values. Torque has a reputation of being hard to learn, which scares off a lot of potential new users and sales. I have to agree that it is hard to learn but I think it is only because of a lack of a Getting Started tutorial and a lack of a comprehensive single TorqueScript reference. The first issue can be considered compelte, now the reference should be the highest priority.

Great work on the tut!

Don Leuenberger

#13 @Josh,

Couldn't find the tutorial. Is it included in the demo version ?

How to download it ?

TIA

Bruno

#14 It is in the example folder after install.

#15 Okay - I had a chance to play with things a little bit over the weekend. Here's my feedback.

First off - criticism aside, this a SEVERAL steps in the right direction. This is something Torque really needed - a very, very stripped-down "starter kit" that was more focused on presenting the bare bones of what needs to go into a Torque game to make it work than showing off the details of how to do something more elaborate. Congratulations.

However, the tutorial needs some expansion. For one thing, it cheats. There's some hardcoded values in the existing scripts that perform some magic on the back end assuming the user is following the tutorial. The biggest example is the "loadMyMission()" function, which loads up a hardcoded mission name the user should have created as part of the tutorial. There's also a bug that goes back to the "tutorial.base" directory for data (the player shape? I can't recall) instead of the new directory.

The danger of this is that the new game developer, flush with excitement over how easy the tutorial was, will find that his first steps beyond the tutorial are much, much harder than the tutorial itself - because he was really just "filling in the blanks" in something that had a lot of work done for him already.

This can be easily remedied by some kind of appendix to the tutorial about "where do I go from here?" Some exercises for the learner to try out, and some explanation of where some things can be found and modified (like the loadMyMission function).

#16 @David Blake

So I'll have to download the new 1.4 from CVS and install it to check it ?

#17 @Bruno, Go to your "My account" page and download from there.

#18 Thank you very much!
this is finally a tutorial even i - the eternal newbie - could handle!

would love to see more like this -
PLEASE !

and btw.
the launching commands on Mac finally work
what a great and improved version!

#19 Rawi, I'm working on a follow-up: oh so cleverly named "Getting Started - Continued".

So far it's to cover:

Altering player variables from Torquescript
The schedule command
The dump command
More on passing commands between server and client
UI icon(s) for showing player status
Whatever others suggest.

So expect to see some more. I'm not looking to make it much larger than the original "Getting Started". Maybe make it a few sequential issues or something to keep the size down. Hopefully there are a few more people who want to get involved and will write up some articles as follow-ups, it would be a good thing.

I have other ideas, some of which have been done in other tutorials though. So I don't know what I'll do about that.

#20 I have a thick pile of a4 prints with forums posts and bits of info from gg website; around 1300 pages; took me a whole year to collect that info and put together something logic about TGE; i am not saying that the online docs aren;t good. they are a great start.

So the GettingStarted is welcome (for the new ones at least); and the TDN is even more welcome; And i plan to throw some stuff in there too, soon enough.