Simpler Tutorials?

#1 An "Overview tutorial" may work well for newcomers, for the first minutes with the engine.

However I would rather support prioritizing developers rather than people understanding for first time what a game engine is.

Im no talking about your son, as I dont know his age, nor his background and experience, but is important to remember that Torque is not a toy.

If Mich and the guys diverge resources to create material for people with no experience at all on development, it will impact on the material produced for actual developers.

#2 First they want a more detailed documentation, now it's too detailed! ;)

Just kidding.

You mean like step by step tutorials?

@Novac - the "overview tutorial" is a nice idea!

#3 There's plenty of basic "how to place an object/landscape/water" type tutorials in the docs.

Maybe a better explanation of exactly what you'd like to see would help.

#4 For a potential customer, I think they would be swayed by a tutorial that has precreated items, and about twenty-thirty steps to create a simple working game. After that they can dig deeper. Unity has a few tutorials like that and just seeing if I had missed anything like that here. There are simple things I learned how to do with Unity going through the tutorials that I don't even know how to do with the Torque products.

#5 I think there is definitely a reason to create tutorials that are geared toward newcomers. You will notice a lot of the new Getting Started sections on the site target them. Some of our new tutorials, like Adding A Player are very basic.

#6 Leathel, a few links to those tuts would be useful to understand better what you mean.

#7 If there isn't anything like that, then maybe I will make some notes and see if can make something up out of the game my son and I are going to work on together.

#8 Hate to post links to another company, but if GG wants them removed, go ahead.

unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/3d-platform-game

#9 Maybe Im missing something? That tutorial has 122 pages. The current Torque tutorials are much more simple than that.

I leave the topic here, there is not much for me to add to whats said.

#10 I think I get what Leathel is getting at, the many of the torque tutorials assume you know quite a bit, and tbh it also assumes you know a lot of terminology, not just game dev stuff but torque specific stuff.

There needs to be a list of tutorials in a structured order somewhere for the real newbies, and on top of that, if you write a tutorial that assumes you have prior knowledge then link to the tutorials that explain that prior knowledge.

While the editor tutorials are fine and dandy for learning how to make levels, they aren't remotely helpful with regards to scripting, and before somebody chips in and tells me there's pages on scripting, thats like handing the c++ specification to somebody and expecting them to learn programming.

There are very few tutorials that actually help you extend the game, very few tutorials that teach you how to do something like add a new character, and dont point me to steves reseource for that either, its pretty useless start to finish, which is a shame really because steves resources are some of the best, in fact if i were to pick out the best tutorials most of them would be his.

How do you add a new character?
why do the animation not work correctly?
why are animations hard coded?
why does the console get spammed with errors because char x doesnt have all the hard coded animations?

these are just a few question on one subject, that i just ignore completely because theres actually next to no information on it at all, and if there is, its buried so deep I cant find it.

I'm all ready an willing to be proven wrong, but aside from the editor tutorials and a nice gui inventory tutorial, there's next to no links to tutorials that i could find in the official docs.. I even spent 20 minutes earlier looking for Steve's fps tutorials to link for somebody else, in the end I had to go to Steve's profile to find them and linked the first one.

So yes I think there needs to be more step by step tutorials, and decent links to those that already exist, I think 90% of the site needs to be archived out of the way since most of it is beyond broken simply by the virtue that torque has evolved so much the past couple of years or so. Trying to shoe horn TGE resources into T3D requires a level of programming skill thats quite high imo.

I'm stopping there, because i dont want to start responding to the first response to this...

#11 Part of the 1.1 push was the beginning of some new formatting for the website. This change all exists under the T3D product page and helps to call attention to some of the oft overlooked tutorials in the docs. The Changing the Player tutorial is the Adding a New Player tutorial from the docs in Artist Guide->Tutorials.

We did have an importing art tutorial planned at one time for 1.1, but were forced to cut it as it was too large in scope for the release.

#12 In my opinion the Documentation is little more than Editor hand-holding and some reference material, with the Templates and Demos as the actual example projects to learn from; so I kind of do see the point of the request if imagining a beginner's viewpoint looking at the mess that is Torque 3D's template project structure.

But as I'm not a beginner it's hard to see the noob perspective, which is true as well for those writing the various guides and Documentation. Every Resource I've submitted assumes some previous familiarity with Torque, as do most others. I think Steve shows a great example with his Tutorial series and it's direct "how to tell stupid how to do it" -- my words so sorry if that is offensive ;) -- approach that coaches the beginner through each step, but it's still a step or two removed from the do-this-first kind of tutorial that people keep asking for. The Documentation is teaching people how to crawl and we're showing them how to run and how to jump and other acrobatics, but no one is teaching them to walk.

But where to draw the line between teaching &learning and hand-holding for those who won't? Most guides, tutorials, etc., that I've seen (especially that other engine) have a bad habit of blindly telling someone to (1) do this, (2) and do that, (3) and this is what you get -- which teaches absolutely nothing! Afterwards the same people who needed that simple tutorial then require more advanced tutorials, and then even more advanced specific instructions to build their game.

I think that what is needed is for someone to explain the layers of the Templates/Demos in a step by step fashion, not telling you what to do but explaining what's going on. Begin from main.cs and explain why there is the core directory and why the game scripts are loaded as a 'mod' on top of that, and everything else that is part of the example projects.

Better yet, do away with the core and have a barebones template that does nothing more than initialize the various sub-systems and present the user with a blank screen. This is what a "real" Tutorial or guide should build from.

#13 I think many of those Tutorials I refer to might be community based, so wasn't really asking to have GG set resources away from what they are doing, just asking if there was anything like that already created that I didn't know about.

I didn't know about Steve's tutorials. Have to check out that FPS one. Thanks!

I also see what I can make as I go through the process with my son. It will be interesting to see what areas of terminology need to really be pointed out to a beginner.

#14 I think BloodKnight said it best at #10. I have been using Torque since GG was re-established and almost called it a loss, because I couldn't figure a thing out. Documentation was all over the place, the engine structure and code execution was a ghost I couldnt see, I almost dropped it and went with UNITY for the vary reasons Leathel has stated, better tuts. My wife encouraged me to try buying some books as a last resort, so I did and they are the reason I stayed with Torque. It looks like though, GG is trying to fix things.

#15 I Could not agree more! The tutorials, whenever I have read them seem to be missing information as well which does not make it easy. Seems like better tutorials and more broad tutorials would be great something that will take you from crawl to jog and allow us to run.

Example of missing information. GUI's Tutorial:

Its actually pretty good of giving you an idea of how gui's work but they did not cover a few items that need to be covered. The tab system is not covered here and was handy I figured that out on my own. The Dropdownlist box's are not covered and I cant seem to figure out how you would fill the list's let alone use them to pull info from the server. There are a few others they do no explain how they work at all.

The above leaves gaps in our knowledge so that when we try to move on to a run not only do have to try to do this missing the understanding we dont even know some of the basics yet. Course I dont expect that a set of tutorials will teach me everything but it will allow me to take info and try to peice together working code and such.

Just my 2 cents. More TUTORIALS for the WIN!!!!!

#16 My two cents: at the bare minimum, some structure would be great. There are a ton of good resources and tutorials out there, but they're scattered all over the place. Especially in the mess of different documentation websites, help files, and TDN pages that relate to T3D. Organising everything, or at least links to everything, in a more central location would be a good first step.

Which seems to be what this new web stuff is about, so props to GG for that ;P. But it's still all new content, as opposed to organising the masses of existing valuable content.

Quote:Better yet, do away with the core and have a barebones template that does nothing more than initialize the various sub-systems and present the user with a blank screen. This is what a "real" Tutorial or guide should build from.

This reminds me of a great old tutorial that attempted to walk you through building a game in TGE from pretty much an empty directory. Unfortunately it only really got to the stage of loading a GUI, and was pretty much unfinished past that. But it taught me all I know about the directory structure of the examples and how they get initialised, and was a great help in just understanding how all the script files interact.

#17 We are working on a really, really, polished tutorial for 1.2. We've hired a documentation writer from Microsoft who really knows what they are doing. Myself and Dexter, who have both been professors in the past, are spending a lot of time reviewing them. Lastly, we are testing them with new users once a week from now until launch. I think you guys will be impressed.

#18 Are you looking for stuff like this:
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/DTS/Blender/Creating_an_Advanced_Character

This is from here"
tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torque_Game_Engine

Is that the "type" of tutorials you are looking for? I really liked contributing to TDN a while back. I could document approaches and come back 6 months and not have to try and remember how to do something. If we could resurrect TDN that would help immensely.

"Better yet, do away with the core and have a barebones template that does nothing more than initialize the various sub-systems and present the user with a blank screen. This is what a "real" Tutorial or guide should build from." I would definitely like to see that. I think out of necessity I will have to develop that. Can stuff still be put on TDN?