TGEA 1.7.0 Beta1 feedback

#1 ...

#2 It looks so great! Thank you all the crews for the great job.

First, I roughly ran all the demo and all of them goes smoothly on Windows Vista, Gefore 8800 GTX.

BTW, I couldn't open ForgeSoldier.max file with the 3dsmax8.

Does it need any other plugin or do we need other version of 3dsmax?

Thank you.

#3 That is high praise indeed. When finally out of beta, expect it to be even further refined and polished.

I will ask about the 3dsmax model.

Glad to hear people are enjoying the beta :)

#4 Must say, nice to see the openness returning a bit. Particularly if the incrementals are kept up to speed. Makes merging in and studying changes quite a bit simpler all arround.

#5 Love the new update very nice. One thing I noticed was the GroundCover class, I'm guessing this is the foliage system that we saw in Legions, and I played with it briefly. Very nice, being able to mix shapes and foliage. One thing that did disapoint me was that it was legacy only. While I think the new legacy terrain is a big step forward, Atlas still seems to have better performance. Another minor annoyance is that you can not use the editor in full screen any more.

Great to see anti-aliasing in there, performance seems improved (the terrain_water_demo doubled in frame rate from 1.03 to 1.7). Kudos.

#6 Everything is looking good here, only nagging things is the FPS Creator Content Pack 1, looks like Kork having a bad day since it's only raining on him and its in a square at that heheh, either way GOOD job GG.

Everything seems to run at super speeds running on a Intel C2D system. With the Foliage demo I got insane Frames then the demos without foliage. Weird.

Really liking the Documentation that comes with this also, no more having to scour forums for the basic things.

#7 @JC - We, us here at Sickhead, wrote that code specifically for Legions. We were on a deadline, Legions used TerrainBlock, so GroundCover uses TerrainBlock. Making it work with Atlas shouldn't be difficult if you wanted it.

As far as TerrainBlock performance... if time permits (and Matt allows me)... i'll be replacing the TerrainBlock renderer in the next beta. It should perform as well as if not better than Atlas and still have all the realtime editing features it has now. I've already done this for our own project and shared the code with GG for Legions. I just need to cleanup my "done on a weekend" code and get it into the beta.

#8 @TOM: Thanks for the clarification. I'm actualyl going through it right now and porting it to Atlas. Having a couple issues, but I think I can get it ported. BTW man, I love the GroundCover system, great work there. Performance is good, and the customization options for shape frequency, etc are nice. That's a big improvement IMO over Shape/Foliage Replicators.

#9 Great work. I was upset that SplashData was not put back in though. I would like to see it added.

#10 Holy crap, that's awesome Tom, I hope we see that code soon!

#11 Adam: Really? I seem to remember noticing it was back in when I had Kork take a bath in the Stronghold mission. It looked horrible as it was a straight port of the TGE splashes, but I do remember seeing it.

I'm quite pleased that there is finally some movement on TGEA. This IA merger deal looks like it just might pay off if this is the result of it. It feels like GG finally hired someone to actually manage the application. Hopefully things continue to get better. My frame rates sure did!

Quote:The rendering engine is based on TGEA, with an updated GFX to support both gl and d3d, as well as both shaderized and fixed function rendering

Quote:Juggernaut has an updated gfx system which supports D3D8, D3d9, and OpenGL as well as fixed function rendering

That's from the included readme. Am I missing something? Should I hold off on my plans to dust off my G4 and give Unity a try for cross platform game development?

#12 @Adam - I second Jacobin. SplashData is in and working. You just have to launch a gameExample that has the splash datablock defined =)

#13 I got the groundcover working with Atlas today. I need to clean the code up a bit and post it in another thread either tonight or tomorrow. It's a little bit hackish, but wasn't too hard to get going.

#14 I see. I was just shooting into the water, I didnt jump in.

#15 @Cornell - Thanks for noticing the docs =) I thought everyone would be too busy drooling over the new features to notice. Matt L gets the credit for the overall offline html format. His tools and doc generators made that happen. I'm just filling out the sections, which is why I've created a separate Feedback Thread for Documentation.

TGEA 1.7.0 Documentation Feedback

Btw....I'm still drooling over the "MegaTerrain" and ground cover features. Awesome release!

#16 Is a T2D folder like the T3D folder intended to be included at some point? This would be HUGE for us. We own TGB / TGEA / TGE / TorqueX, and we are currently attempting to integrate TGB / TGEA. Should we expect the T2D folder in the final release?

#17 Jay,
No, we don't plan on including T2D in any version TGEA at this point.

That said...

TGEA 1.7 came from the work that our internal engine developers put into a project codenamed "Juggernaut" which was aimed at being a unified version of TGE, TGEA, and TGB. A lot of progress was made in integrating TGB and some of the bug fixes and directory organization changes you see in it come directly from that integration. However, TGB never reached a fully working status as part of "Juggernaut". It was close but it was never completely there and the decision was made to spend the time finishing up development on the TGE and TGEA side of things first because it was a huge win for those customers while shipping a reorganized version of TGB wouldn't have been much of a win for people who use it.

Moving forward it is our hope to further unify the codebase internally to make it easier and cleaner for us to develop against and you will hopefully get to see the fruits of those labors. The way TGEA 1.7 is structured currently it *should* theoretically be easy to drop in a T2D folder and rebuild your projects if and/or when we finish getting TGB fully working on the Juggernaut codebase. When that will happens depends on a *lot* of different factors which are not really appropriate for us to discuss outside of the company so I can't make any promises or even allusions.

The other tricky bit with combining TGB with TGEA goes beyond just simple code integration. The TGB editor is quite different from workflow and functionality than the TGEA Mission Editor and it is no trivial thing to put them together in a meaningful way. We have some *long* range plans in this area but they are even less appropriate to discuss.

I won't even delve into how you would go about selling something like that (multiple skus vs higher price point for a single product...etc).

We do recognize the desire and the need for something like you are asking (especially in the XBLA space) and we are spending time on it but for the time being do not expect or count on anything from GarageGames in that area.

#18 I want to give a big hug to all the GG team. I love you all. The main demo looks spectacular and vivid even in this (a server):

Attempting to create GFX device: RADEON 9250 (D3D9)
Device created, setting adapter and enumerating modes
GFXD3D9Device - using 'd3dx9_33.dll' for dynamic linking.
Cur. D3DDevice ref count=1
Pix version detected: 1.400000
Vert version detected: 1.100000
Maximum number of simultaneous samplers: 6

Thanks for sharing this masterpiece with us. Time to kick some orc butt and squash the bugs!

#19 I'm not worried about the TGB editor. We have a working version of TGE + TGB, and we have worked out a pipeline for getting TGB-esque assets into the project that would traditionally use the TGB editor. (It's actually pretty painless.) What we are doing now is taking the next step and integrating TGB / TGEA. We know it's feasible and has even been done before ( http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/4280/13914 ). It is absolutely necessary for our next project, and we were hoping that this new release would bump us forward. Instead it looks like we can't ignore the performance gains, and we'll have to ditch all of the work we did combining TGEA pre-1.7 ( 1.1?) and TGB 1.7. I was just praying for a miracle that the functionality was already there, we were just missing the T2D project folder that would be akin to the T3D folder. I understand that we can't expect your folks to just randomly start doing projects that only a handful of your customers / potential customers want though. Like I said, I was just hoping the work was already done, and it wasn't released with the beta for whatever reason.

That readme.html in "..\Torque\TGEA_1_7_beta_1" containing a bunch of stuff on Juggernaut is really confusing. You should probably take that out of future beta releases. And the "buildresults.html" that's listing "Unit Test Runner" and "T2D". It was these things, among others, that gave me a false hope.

Matt, please email me at jeremiah.verba@nndsonline.org to discuss this further.

#20 How hard would it be to make the ground cover use the terrain texture for placement instead of the terrain? I only way this because I have roads and citys in my levels and I dont want trees and grass on my roads. :)