Getting ready for Torque 2D 3.0

Hello everyone,

As some of you may or may not have noticed, we are around 3 weeks away from the 1 year anniversary of Torque 2D's 2.0 release with a MIT license. There are quite a few changes in the development branch compared to the master (hello Android port) and, as a community, we should take the opportunity to use the upcoming milestone as motivation to get Torque 2D 3.0 released and out there for everyone to enjoy.

So what does this mean?

1. Where possible, those of us with write access to the official repos will merge the various feature branches that are still out there into development - provided they still play nice with the current dev branch code.
2. Frogger and Simon Love have shown off some cool new feature improvements in Linux support and Xbox controller/Spine updates respectively. Hopefully we can get them in, even if their current state is not 100% feature complete.
3. There's a couple pull requests still in the queue, it would be nice to get community feedback and testing on them.
4. Issues list - it is not realistic that any of the highlighted issues/bugs will be fixed for inclusion into 3.0, but I'm sure everyone in the community would appreciate someone taking the time to tackle any of them.
5. If you have any fixes or feature improvements hiding in your local repositories that you would like to share, now is the time to submit them.
6. Target is to have development merged into master by Feb. 5th.

Contributions

While code submissions are one of the most visible ways to contribute to T2D, please keep in mind that it is not the only way you can help. Even if you only know a bit of TorqueScript - learning to compile the engine and helping test either the development branch itself or various individual features branches/pull requests - and then providing feedback, good or bad, would be a huge contribution in and of itself.

Take Frogger's Linux branch as an example - it took me all of 15 minutes to download a zip copy, compile it in Xcode and load all the Sandbox toys to see if his changes had any negative effect for Mac users. It's not the most thorough testing in the world, but at least it prevents show-stopping bugs from slipping through. And no C++ or Git knowledge was needed to make that happen. Simple messages on Github or the forums here telling those of us with write access that stuff was tested on X platform and it works or doesn't work are a huge, huge help - and it's one of the only key ways we can move forward as a community and keep Torque 2D's evolution on track.

Change Log

So what's been added to development as of Jan 15th?

- TAML supports reading and writing in JSON format
- Batch renderer now works exclusively with triangles instead of quads
- Fixed SceneObject.applyForce and applyLinearImpulse
- PR #56: Added signum convenience function
- PR #9: New Gui Object: GuiGridCtrl
- PR #68: Added missing TorqueScript methods to ParticleAsset/Emitter/Player, renamed a few static fields for consistency (breaking change)
- PR #70: Fixed ImageAsset typo
- PR #69: CompositeSprite fix
- PR #83: TextureManager fix
- PR #84: ParticleAsset creation fix
- PR #85: ParticlePlayer stop fix
- PR #88: Added functions to get the explict width and height of cells to ImageAsset
- PR #97: Fixed AABB size in ImageFont
- PR #99: Fixed TAML bug with ImageFont
- PR #104: Fixed TAML bug with ShapeVector
- PR #101: Added Mac OSX 10.6 support
- PR #95: Added linear interpolation and smooth step functions, SceneWindow now uses these
- PR #106, 113, 114: Fixed various OpenAL issues
- PR #110: PointForceController fix
- PR #113: SimXMLDocument crash fix
- PR #116: Replaced most ConsoleMethod (and functions) with ConsoleMethodWithDocs for easier Doxygen reading, moved most console methods into their own ScriptBinding.h files.
- PR #121: Behavior support for ScriptObject
- PR #123: Angle/polar coordinate issue fixes (breaking change)
- PR #125: Input bug fix for OSX
- PR #126: Fix assert conditional in consoleNamespace.cc
- Android platform support added
- PR #136: Xbox 360 controller support