Hardy Hello and some questions on TGEA
by William Gifford · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 06/10/2008 (2:42 pm) · 1 replies
First off, sorry for the mis-post in the TGE forum. This was meant for TGEA. Secondly, I'd just like to say hello to everyone here in the GG forums. I'm a long time owner first time poster! ;) The sun, moon, and stars are finally aligning in such a way that I'm finally getting to dive into TGEA and create something, hopefully, fun and exciting. I'm a 5+ year professional software developer in th EDA industry here in Oregon. I'm finally starting to move down a path I've been wanting to do since playing Crescent Hawks Inception way back in the day. I've got a room full of rack mount servers and a small team of motivated individuals working on our project. I'm excited to start contributing to the community and also learning from it.
So to the learning part. I appreciate that the TGEA engine is a fairly hands on engine and am quite familiar with jumping head first into a code base. However, I just need a little nudge in a direction so I can pay attention to the right things.
1. Not terribly important to me but has anyone split the TGEA into a static library? Is this common practice with this code base? I like to treat things I don't write as 3rd party. However, as I've been going over the code it all looks pretty intimate. Meaning, I'm going to be modifying engine code more often than not to get the desired results I'm looking for.
2. What is the purpose of T3D code base in the project? Is it necessary for day to day engine duties? It looks to me like it is very specific to the fps style demos and the such. Could I remove T3D and the core features of the engine remain intact? Obviously the demos wouldn't work...anyway I'm identifying things I would use and things I wouldn't for the project. Is it common practice to modify/remove/delete these things in non-standard fps projects?
3. I understand the client/server concept but I am trying to relate it in terms of the project we have going. We are basically making an online only game (not a MMO). It looks like I would need to use TNL (for encryption mostly) vs. the built-in TGE networking API. We figure for internal prototyping we can use the built-in API but for production this would not be a smart choice for security reasons (plain text pass words, unencrypted packets, etc...). I'm getting the feeling that for anything other than the stock demo FPS it's going to be a fair amount of work. Is this the case? Does someone have examples they can point me to where people have handled online non-fps games with TGEA? On a side note this might a good demo as this is where the industry is heading IMO.
Thanks for your time and patience in reading this. Also thanks ahead of time for any helpful tips...
So to the learning part. I appreciate that the TGEA engine is a fairly hands on engine and am quite familiar with jumping head first into a code base. However, I just need a little nudge in a direction so I can pay attention to the right things.
1. Not terribly important to me but has anyone split the TGEA into a static library? Is this common practice with this code base? I like to treat things I don't write as 3rd party. However, as I've been going over the code it all looks pretty intimate. Meaning, I'm going to be modifying engine code more often than not to get the desired results I'm looking for.
2. What is the purpose of T3D code base in the project? Is it necessary for day to day engine duties? It looks to me like it is very specific to the fps style demos and the such. Could I remove T3D and the core features of the engine remain intact? Obviously the demos wouldn't work...anyway I'm identifying things I would use and things I wouldn't for the project. Is it common practice to modify/remove/delete these things in non-standard fps projects?
3. I understand the client/server concept but I am trying to relate it in terms of the project we have going. We are basically making an online only game (not a MMO). It looks like I would need to use TNL (for encryption mostly) vs. the built-in TGE networking API. We figure for internal prototyping we can use the built-in API but for production this would not be a smart choice for security reasons (plain text pass words, unencrypted packets, etc...). I'm getting the feeling that for anything other than the stock demo FPS it's going to be a fair amount of work. Is this the case? Does someone have examples they can point me to where people have handled online non-fps games with TGEA? On a side note this might a good demo as this is where the industry is heading IMO.
Thanks for your time and patience in reading this. Also thanks ahead of time for any helpful tips...
Associate Ross Pawley
2) T3D folder is not just for FPS type things. It has a bunch of different stuff that is integral to basic functionality. Look a little closer. However, I do find that it's probably easier to derive your player class from GameBase and just pull over bits that you might need from ShapeBase, which is rather monolithic.
3) I don't know if 1.7 has encryption routines built in. It very well might. It's networking is based on TNL, after all. Dreamlords is a prime example of a large MP game made in TGEA. If you're not afraid of writing some code, it's not a ton of work to make what you want happen.