I need to talk to a fairly experienced torquescript programmer

#1 Why don't you just post your message in the forums so that everyone can help at once without having to add you for chat, and others can reap the benefits of the knowledge as well? That's what makes this community so good =)

#2 Second Ted's suggestion. If you need to speak instantly, you should think of entering the garagegames IRC channel (irc.maxgaming.net #garagegames), so you can IM multiple programmers at once, we're all willing to help.

#3 Well I would go to the IRC channel, but I don't have an IRC client anymore and I don't much feel like downloading one, which is why I wanted to talk one on one with a experienced person in Torquescript. I have no knowledge in it, and really no experience with the torque engine other than having the All In One Guide to 3D Game Design book or something, whatever it's called. Therefore, there are some questions I have to see if this is the right engine for a game I want to create. I know it's a good engine, it's a powerful engine, but I don't know if it can support the kind of things I have in mind.

#4 Well, I recommend that you just post your questions here. Most of us don't want to add random strangers to our IM, so you'll probably get a lot more responses by posting in the forum. Maybe the engine is right for you, but unless you provide more information, we can't help.

#5 Well for starters it's a space based game. I want to have the ability of space flight, some space combat, and docking/undocking on ports and planets. To dock/undock, a clip scene would be shown showing you dock/undock, and if docking you would end up in a planet level while if undocking you would end up in space sort of deal. That doesn't seem too awful farfetched to me, but then there's also colonization I want to deal with. Adding to these planets I want to be as simple as using a control panel to select a type of building to add, add another city, etc. which will take x amount of time and x amount of currency. Those are the biggest problems I could see with making this game. If those things are possible, this is the right engine for the job because the rest of the things should be just fine.

#6 ossie,
all of garage games' engines (TGE, TGEA, TGB) have free demos which are the complete product except for the C++ source code. this means you can use them to try some prototyping of your game, write as much script as you want, and see if it's the right thing for you.

#7 Thank you for your suggestion Orion, but that doesn't really help me. I need to know if this sort of thing will work, and I'm not going to go through and write a bunch of code just to find out this isn't going to be the right engine. Now if someone could answer if the things in my last post, if they're possible, that would help a lot more.

#8 Yes, it's possible. The whole docking/undocking "cover-up" with a video is a fairly standard process. Your "colonization" idea sounds like typical RTS building behavior. It all has been done in Torque.

#9 One thing I should add is this is going to be first person in walking around, but third person in flight. Does that make the colonization process any harder?

#10 Nope, it's a simple one line script call to switch from 1st to 3rd person -- can be done at anytime. Doing so wouldn't affect any other game logic at all.

#11 Great, much thanks to you. In that case I have reason to believe this is the right engine for this game, so thanks all who replied.