Ask GarageGames - What Do You Guys Want to Know?

#1 Hi David, is there a general set of information you're legally-allowed to divulge?

#2

Quote:
What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

giggles ... hides

#3 @Steve,
European or African?

@GG,
Components. What can you tell us about components? I saw there is progress being made on the T2D component system, but what about T3D? If this gets worked on by GG then it will save me a task.

#4 " I saw there is progress being made on the T2D component system"

frank,where u get that?
any thread link?may be i have missed it

#5 David, any plans to re-brand GarageGames or Torque in the foreseeable future? I personally think it's a little overdue. Just sayin'.

#6 Awesomeness thread!
Is there any plans for improvements to the resources page? Maybe a "free asset store". Lots of useful resources gets lost in the dust!

If someone else were to develop a improved resource page or a "free asset store", would you embrace it?

Edit: tried to update it to avoid misunderstandings!

#7 Any news regarding Windows phone 8 deployment ?

#8 @Ashan,
I thought I read that in the T2D blog. I am not sure where I got that now. I was dead sure I read it somewhere. Maybe I dreamed it...hmmm...

@GG
Okay, is there going to be a component system for T2D? ...Please...

#9
I shouldn't start a thread an hour before I go home and am feeling like crap!

Quote:Hi David, is there a general set of information you're legally-allowed to divulge?

Nothing that legal has gone through. I won't be talking about our NDA projects or some of our internal development efforts, recruiting, marketing spend, etc. If you ask something I can't talk about, I'll let you know.

Quote:David, any plans to re-brand GarageGames or Torque in the foreseeable future? I personally think it's a little overdue. Just sayin'.

We are not currently looking at re-branding Torque or GarageGames. The last time (TorquePowered and the confusion with InstantAction) caused a number of problems. I still get questions about our InstantAction engine that was used in Tribes. We have created separate branding for our beginner tool, 3 Step Studio. It is built on iTorque 2D/T2D's tech and we have made a large number of advances in the current engine structure by creating a real-world application. We are eating our own dogfood, and finding the pain-points in our products to fix them. It is still in alpha and not really oriented towards the more advanced crowd here at GG, so rebranding was a good option for it. It is for the very beginner who does not know how or where to start in game development.

Quote:Components. What can you tell us about components? I saw there is progress being made on the T2D component system, but what about T3D? If this gets worked on by GG then it will save me a task. ... Okay, is there going to be a component system for T2D? ...Please...

Melv and Mich and the 3 Step team have implemented a module system into the codebase. It is discussed in more detail in Mich's blog comments here. This is one of the pieces we will be moving into the combined iT2D/T2D codebase. This update will be a free release to licensees of these engines.

Whether or not it is componentized to the level that you need or require is a different matter, but it is leaps and bounds better than the monolithic process that is in the current engine. We have not moved towards this with Torque 3D at this time.

Quote:Is there any plans for improvements to the resources page? Maybe a "free asset store". Lots of useful resources gets lost in the dust!

We have a lot of long-term plans to update the site to a more robust, community-oriented space, but it will require a lot of really hard decisions such as whether we archive the existing forums and resources and build a new system that allows proper tagging (for resources) and use strong out-of-the-box software like vBulletin or Invision Powered for our forum solution. Those major backend decisions will affect people in much larger ways that the site update in 2009 since migrating from the current cobbled system to an OotB solution is a nightmare. We are looking at a number of processes to enhance the store and make it scalable as well as OotB solutions on that front. Right now the biggest problem that I deal with in the store is that non-US citizens have to either have a business in their country of origin to get an EIN over the phone from the IRS or go through a 6+ month process for an ITIN. Recently the rules changed for ITIN's so I don't know if we can even help in the process like we have in the past. It may take even longer than 6 months now.

Quote:If someone else were to develop a improved resource page or a "free asset store", would you embrace it?

We've always supported others creating storefronts and resource pages as long as they adhere to the engine license. That will not change, but you should have some more options in the near future.

Quote:Any news regarding Windows phone 8 deployment?

We are working with the platform on some of our Innovation Friday projects to get a better understanding of what it has to offer, portability, etc. We are all very excited about the Surface and have been testing W8's betas for quite a while. We have not looked into the specifics of porting Torque to it at this time, however. We are getting a feel for the development workflow, usability guidelines and requirements, SDK particulars, etc.

#10 Please don't touch the forums.
What are the chances of new and old resources appear in the new forums?
Who's gonna do it?
Don't reinvent the wheel.
You will only brash away community or what is left of it from these forums.
And I doubt that newcomers will find empty chests appealing.

I personally would have to move to somewhere else, since I use heavily the current forums and resources.

#11 The forums would not go away. They would be archived in a read-only search state so that all of the information is accessible. This is actually something that we talked about in 2008/9 and decided not to do.

EDIT: But you do bring up a good point about empty chests, which factored strongly in keeping the forums but simplifying some of the backend...which as many people still remember, caused a number of posting problems.

#12 @Vlad
I would actually expect the opposite from revamped forums. As you say, don't reinvent the wheel and that's the inherent flaw in our site as whole. Every new feature added to the site is reinventing the wheel as the site is a complete custom job that is difficult to work in, leading to all those seemingly simple to fix site bugs that irritate the community and lead to less posting.

In the past decade out of the box solutions have made things far easier to managed and add new features to a site. Many of the items in the site wish list would be achieved with an out of the box solution.

My personal favorite of the various approaches that have been discussed over the past year or so, and keep in mind this my personal opinion not a declaration of what we're doing, is to rename the current site something like archive.garagegames.com and spin up a new site using out of the box solutions. The archive site would be set to read only, leaving all that information still available and searchable, but dropping the burden of having to migrate almost 12 years of posts, resources, blogs, etc.

EDIT: One day I'm going to learn David's dark art of saying what I want to say in a couple sentences instead of a novel. ;)

#13 Having a beta of the new site to coincide with the preview releases of the new engines would be a good way to fill up the forums/blogs/resources prior to the change.

#14 Yeah. That's how I've seen a lot of tech communities transition their sites.

#15 @David,
Suppose the T2D module system does fit my needs, is there a possibility I could port it to T3D, and upon approval from GG, share it with the T3D folks? Having similar and possibly compatible component/module systems could make it much easier to integrate 3rd party resources in the future. It would be really awesome to be able to create a resource for one engine, and be able to use it in another engine because the component system is similar enough.

I think I may have asked this next question before: Is there an effort to bring the libraries and source files in T2D to be in parity with the T3D codebase? For instance, MemStream.h/.cpp would be the same in both codebases, simobject would actually be in SimObject.h/.cpp, etc.

Thanks for doing this Q&A session BTW.

#16 We are definitely open to the possibility of porting the module system to Torque 3D.

I'll have to get Mich to answer that one. I don't believe there is parity between the codebases in terms of source files. I do know that there was some work on updating the libraries to more recent versions.

#17 The main libraries I am considering right now are MemStream, the hash functions, and the string functions. These seem to mainly be support libraries. For the hash functions and string functions I probably have just not found where they are in T2D. The MemStream class in T2D does not support the dynamic version of itself. It has the fixed size version, but I use the dynamic version (grows as needed) to create strings with the SimObject representations. It is not a big deal to add that functionality, but it would be simpler and compatible with both engines to use the MemStream from T3D. I am sure there are other areas like that between the two engines in the core/base libraries.

Now, I did ask Michael about waiting until T2D comes out to begin my port. He suggested I wait, so it might be better to comment/ask questions AFTER the new code comes out. It would also save myself having to port twice.

#18 One thing that would awesome to see done in 1.3 is seeing the terrain blocks fix ie: in particular this www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/110063

#19 Keep that in mind for a roadmap addition. Hopefully someone can isolate the cause. It seems that there was a topic back in TGEA days about stitching terrains together (the user did not want to use ATLAS due to huge disk requirements and terrain compile times). I'm probably way off, but in that topic, it was about problems blending across stitched areas since they were separate terrains and not meant to blend together. This could be an artifact of that hard edge.

#20 Alright, the announcement is up. We are releasing T3D under the MIT license. Plus, the community gets to set the roadmap for the engine. Back in 2007 we discussed wanting to be more transparent with the community. Unfortunately between licensing and the amount of backend webwork to create the transparency that we desired, it ended up not happening. Finally, we are able to work under a strong permissive license that allows a large number of experienced developers to have access to Torque and also allow all of the great third-party developers making stuff on top of Torque to not be constrained by a license like the GPL.

For more information on the release, check out Eric's blog here:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876

For more information on the technical details, check out Dave Wyand's blog here:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21875