TorqueX equals an incomplete TGEA

#1 This is why our policy has changed from giving out all kinds of information on what we are doing, to giving out no information whatsoever on what we are doing--because no matter which we do, people complain.

None of the people working on Torque X have anything to do whatsoever with TGE-A, and they never have. Thomas came from TGB, and Adam as well, and they have been able to leverage literally years of R&D back into a new engine (Torque X) extremely rapidly due to the nature of Torque X, and the efforts of so many people that have been doing R&D for so long: John Quigley and Clark Fagot's work on the core Torque X, Clark Fagot's work on component based OOP engine structure, Ben Garney's work on clipmapping and chunk based LOD terrain, and dozens of other systems researched and developed by dozens of other people at the company.

I am not going to give exact numbers (mostly because I don't know them myself), but I do know that there is extensive work being done on the Torque core technology (meaning TGE/TGE-A), and I'll probably get shot for this by marketing, but I will also say that you will hear some announcements in the coming weeks and months about some of the cool things being done with our baseline core technology as well.

#2 (EDIT: Stephen's post changes what I said)

I can't speak directly for James, Stephen, but I can voice my own concerns. I suppose I'm just wondering where TorqueX fits in the whole "family" of products. When TGEA came out it was clear that "this was the future." Then TGB was developed, but its purpose was clear and didn't "coincide" with TGEA.

Now Torque X is being developed but I'm not sure where it fits in. Right now its kind of a "plug-in" for TGB (or TGB is a plugin for it), but is it going to be a full 3D engine like TGE or TGEA? Where does it "sit" as far as comparing features? Is it going to make TGEA obsolete?

#3 I guess the best way to look at is is a comparison to Toyota and the vehicles they make:


--The Corolla (or whatever is current) is a really really nice car for families, gets great gas milage, looks pretty nice, and can cart around a reasonable load--but you wouldn't want to open up a furniture delivery company with it as your main vehicle.

--Toyota also makes trucks--now, they aren't the most industrial versions, and rather sporty instead of "workhorse", but they get the job done if you are delivering custom made chairs and tables to individual customers.

Now, both of those vehicles are going to share some technology--and the R&D on the ignition system, brakes, and security systems are common to both, and the second vehicle designed can leverage on the first and be produced quickly, with less effort.

The important thing to notice though is that even though one company makes both vehicles, they are intended for different markets--and completely different uses.

Torque X and Torque Game Engine (and Torque Game Builder for that matter) are all different products, with different usage intents, and different markets. Mark's assumption that Torque X is kind of a "plug-in" for TGB is completely incorrect, and unfortunately a mistake on our part in how it was patched in to the TGB beta/marketeing program early on--but they are totally different engines, totally different target markets, that happen to share a relatively similar editor interface.

Torque X is in c#, designed for those that want to work with the XNA/GSE drive that Microsoft is behind. It's strong for going right to a retail XB 360, and yes it will be fully 3D. It can also be used to make Windows games, but that's the extent of it's cross-platform capability, and it's certainly not intended at this point for making commercial games (not through lack of design or intent on our part, but due to legalities left to Microsoft to handle regarding XB360 distribution/sales, etc)., although some people are using it for such. A lot of Torque X's theory and technology is built off of either the core Torque suite, or R&D done as a result of that suite, but it's a completely "from scratch" engine.

Torque Game Builder/Engine/Advanced are c++ engines each targetted for different markets--casual/2D, broad spectrum end user machine, high end shader focused markets, each has it's own intended engine to use. Again, some of the R&D that went into Torque X is going to make it's way back into these products--we've already seen a form of the component system made public in Torque X show up in TGB, and it's an incredibly good system--a smart person would realize that we like it a lot.

The fundamental thing I'm trying to say is that each of our products is different, and intended for different end users and customer markets. We're not dropping TGE-A for Torque X, and we're not dropping TGE for TGE-A, and we're not dropping TGB for anything else.

Yes, the products are going to evolve, and will have synergies and parallel development (and in some cases, mutual development), but that's the whole purpose of products evolving, and a company providing multiple products--so they can best fit the needs of the people purchasing them to the best of our ability.

#4 @stephen: I'm not complaining I'm voiceing my concern and giving my opinion on things. and While I disagree on you companies policy of silence"I think it on magnifies the problem" I do understna your reasoning for doing so. You can never make everyone happy. and It is human nature for people to grumble wehn they don't get what they want. silence only fans the flame. contructor Started alot of this and that was be cause claims were made and date"that were years off" were given. And instead of doing the responsible thing it was decided that silence was the best choice. If someone from GG had come out and said hey we F'ed up and constructor is gonna be another year or so away. Yes there would have been some flames but most people would have acceped it and understood.

Anyway As for the point I was trying to make "but obviously did a lousy job of" was It seems that there is constantly something new going on at GG and while this is good don't get me wrong. I cannot help but get a strong sense that the these thing are comming at the expense of exiting "incomplete" products.

I am not saying that you are pulling people off of TGEA to start other projects. But I would say that at least from my "uninformed, but hey that was your company's choice" perspective it would seem that new resources are being added to the new projects and not to existing ones.

I have been in this community for a long time. "back when the doors opened and this engine was gonna be called V12" there was a lot less complaining when everything was made public. this was a bug list and the names of the people that were working on it. and things moved at a pretty good clip. but there was never very much complaining becasue GG worked with the comunity. Over the years everything has turned top secret and the community has more or less shutout of the operations of GG.

no more public bug tracking
no more CVS
no more information.
No more openess

These are the things that are the root cause of so much bitching and complaining.

Hopefully one day thing will change but I doubt it. At least I have never heard of a company doing anything like that. It is more or less a one way trip.


IMHO GG was better when it "seemed like" it was a community first and a business second.

Again Stephen I'm not bitching at you I am simply uninformed "not by my choice" about what is going on at GG and like many of us wondering when some of the very obvious flaws in the products that we have purchased are gonna be fixed. these priorities are obviously set by people much higher up.

How would you feel if you bought a house and the builder said look we cant get your pluming workign right but we just got a contract to go build these houses right down the street and month after month. All you heard and saw was how great these new house they are building are gonna be. all the while you were sitting in your incomplete house with no plumbing? How would that make you feel?


Not that everyone is gonna just bolt but without the community there is no GG. "something to remember"

not that I think it will happend but, I hope that you guys can bring back the community interaction you guys used to have.

oh yeah and please fix the shadows on Atlas. And some documetation on the lighting system in torque and how to use that light information in peoples customer shaders would be nice too. I have read more [postings about these to thing more than any other really.

I have nothing but love for GG but there are some issues IMHO.

#5 BTW I thik the title was a bad choice inhind sight. but it doen't let you edit it after you hit the button. there was supposed to be question marks after it.

#6 Thanks for the information Stephen. I suppose the short answer to my question about the nature of Torque X is : "Torque X is torque for XNA." It seems more research into exactly what MS is doing/planning with XNA will yield answers to what Torque X will be about.

On another note, I am disappointed that you were clearly forced into the decision to not release your development time tables. It does make it difficult on our end to do clear project planning when we don't know what new features to expect or when, but we'll deal with it if that's the reality.

I sincerely hope that the community can, in the future, mature to the point where GG can once again be more open with their information and have everyone be reasonable about it. Until then, thanks for all the information you do share, Stephen.

#7

Quote:
On another note, I am disappointed that you were clearly forced into the decision to not release your development time tables. It does make it difficult on our end to do clear project planning when we don't know what new features to expect or when, but we'll deal with it if that's the reality.

Honestly, we are too--you see it often, and we're trying again with Torque X (to be more informative about the product's general development lines, and neat and new cool stuff), but we're doing it carefully.

It's part of the reason why I responded so strongly to the OP here, and I apologize if it came off too strongly, but it's important to do this right so (hopefully) we can get back to being more open.

We work on some seriously cool stuff, and it's human nature to want to talk about it, and yes, show off. But sometimes plans change, sometimes research efforts turn out to not work properly, or need dozens of man-months to re-architect. Atlas was a perfect example--more than 2 years in development, and early on it was blatently obvious that an in game real time editor would be pretty easy--but as the research went on, and the iterative development took place, it became not trivial for quite a variety of reasons, and therefore the first (and second) iterations of Atlas publically released have a more restrictive pipeline.

Unfortunately, the early research and expectations got branded as "developer promises", and instead of using the system for what it was originally designed for (specifically, real world data brought into a virtual space), we get frustration that it won't do what people want...

We want to avoid this at (pretty much) all costs for the future--and what that has meant is never talking about R&D, and simply releasing when it's ready for release so there are no built up expectations. As I said above, we're trying in a small way with Torque X to talk more about stuff we're working on, but I will be up front: if the negative feedback in both the short and long term makes it not worth while, we'll wind up having to stop again. Nothing against the OP here, that's just reality.

#8 Yeah, I hear ya Stephen. I'm a professional software developer (in my day job) and we deal with exactly the same stuff. Things change, you hit "land mines" in the design. Things run overtime, people get sick, whatever. When we tell our customers feature X won't be ready we get a bunch of negative feedback as well. So, I understand it's just "how it is" in software development.

It's just disappointing (there's that word again) that the majority of people can't be as understanding when schedules change. Like I said, all I'd like to do is use the info for project planning for our game. Here's hoping that these new "experiments" with Torque X go well in that regard.

In the mean time (and while I have your attention ;) ), perhaps the communication of what is in each release when it comes out could be enhanced? Unless I'm missing something, GG doesn't seem to have an "official" change log or release memo or whatever? Perhaps if you "bragged up" what you did accomplish in each release that would help build up some good will.

Right now, the "thinness" of information doesn't do anything to mitigate people who are waiting for feature "X." For instance: people waiting for an Atlas editor. Every time a new release is announced they ask, "Does it have the Atlas editor?" Perhaps if the answer was, "No, but look at all of this cool stuff we did!" Maybe, that would give people enough to play with while they wait for the feature they really want.

Well, this got a lot more long-winded then I was planning but, I think all that I've said was relevant.

#9 Personaly I am happy editing atlas with L3DT I really enjoy it. The Problem I have with Atlas is that it is a incomplete solution. It need interior and Static DTS shadows before it is even useful. for DTS I guess you could do datablocks to get shadows "huge pain" but Difs that is a whole different animal. Perhaps a Secondary shadow map could be used and then multiplied with the existing shadow map at rendertime.

#10

Quote:it's certainly not intended at this point for making commercial games

I strongly disagree with this and I know several people who would as well. I just released Simian Escape using TorqueX and it's fully commercial. We have our 2nd TX game within 2 months of release and we're starting our first 3D XNA game(since Clark wont show me 3D TX love =P) next week which has a 4 month dev cycle.

As per the OP, it's been said before that no one from TGE/TGEA's active dev team is being used for TorqueX. I wish people would do their research before posting concerns that are in a flamatory tone...

#11 Well it doesn't matter what I say it think obviously the powers at GG don't really care what we think or they never would have taken this approach to begin with. I admint I find the approach that you guys have chosen a bit negative and bad for the community as a whole. But hey what do I know. IMHO you guy need to be a bit more thick skinned. Just shutting everyone out because you can't handle the complaints of a minority just seems... well sorry I can't thikn of a better term but "juvenile".

anyway this topic is proving futile as it not like. well, nevermind. This is all falling on deaf ears anyway.

#12 What I'm hearing from Stephen is that they shut down the information posting because of complaints by the majority. I'm sure they wouldn't have done it if there was only a "minority" complaining.

In the mean time, I think the best way to change this decision is not to complain further about it and throw out "terms." I think the best way to affect change would be to show GG a change in attitude.

#13 I think that GG should still tell us of upcoming tech, but just set a more realistic time frame.

#14 I'm sure they think their estimates are realistic at the time, but things change. Even if you do the standard Project Management technique of padding all your estimates by 30%, you still might not hit those targets. Then you have to push back the release date, or cut the feature list, or burn some overtime. Those are your 3 sides of the Project Management triangle: time, scope, and money.

Employees don't like doing #3 all the time, and your customers complain if you do #1 or #2. The real solution is people being understanding that things change. Complaining about it does nothing.

#15 @Mark - Amen. Fully agree. If someone wants more info: stop bitching and start communicating and participating.

@James - If it's futile, then stop complaining and throw a spell check on your threads, they are becoming rather hard to decode.

#16 @ All the Bitchers stop complaing:
Every engine has its ups and downs. Thats why people work on them (GG used to give updates all the till everyone started complaining about it). GG is the only game company that lets people know whats going on.
Epics Unreal Engine, The Crytech engine, or even the C4 engine doesn't give updates till they are ready to release the upgrades.

So to all the BITCHERS: Take a can of SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!!!!!

#17 James,

Links to the Lighting System documentation:

Torque Lighting System

Dynamic Lighting for Custom Materials ( also the original thread if you're interested)

#18 Thank you this applies to 1.01?
I know several people that will be very happy to have this information thanks.

#19 No problem. Yup, the docs apply to TGEA 1.0 - 1.0.2.

#20 Is 1.0.2 comming out that soon?