iTGB 1.3 Planning

#161 Ditto to Mike's post.

05/02/2009 (11:03 pm) <- Mike's post date as showing on on my browser... eh?!

#162 The webteam pushed out an update to fix some date issues. Logging out and back in will fix the display and work correctly from now on.

#163 Has anybody been able to get the TGB Platformer Kit (PSK) to work with iTGB?
I mean having the behaviors work on the iPhone?
If so, could you please be so kind to post the exact steps on how to achieve this?

Many Thanks

#164 Thanks for that!
Now you just need to fix iTGB ;)
Only Joking (well kind of)...
Just getting fed up of the silence I'm sure if you were looking in from our point of view, you would be feeling the same now.

#165 If I compile with simulator 3.0 and GCC 4.2 work correctly!

but with Device 3.0 and GCC 4.2 I have this error:

"CoreServices/CoreServices.h not found"

any ideas?

#166 so, now I got 1.3 to work. is there any way to play music from device library?

#167 @Eyal yes but you lose massive frame rates so it's not usable except in places where framerate isn't important.

Oops no not from the device, only your own music. You'll have to write the device functionality yourself.

#168 For astro bugs it's not an option but for slow puzzle games it would be nice to just listen to your own music. I did recieve a call while Xcode was loading my game and it worked great. I wish u could just play a playlist and start your game without stopping the iPod music.

#169 When can we expect to see Michael Perry's blog? Does anyone know what it will entail exactly.

Does anyone know what kinds of things we need to do to take full advantage of the new engine? iT2D beta seemed to cause a performance decrease on our game.

#170 We're still waiting for the business side to dot the i's and cross the t's before Mich releases the full announcement.

#171 Tell your business side that your customer side is rapidly defecting. :-)

When one of the selling points of your product is the active community supporting it, it looks really bad when that community gets _months_ of silence on the forums.

I'm a long time buyer of various Torque products, but right now I can't feel good about any of them until you guys start really ramping up support for your existing customers.

I think it's not too hard to fix - you guys really aren't in all that bad of a shape. It's more just the perception. More frequent communication will really fix this. Tell your engineers to post updates on the forums, tell your business people to re-prioritize towards more frequent updates to address the little problems that really hurt this product.

When your product is really mostly working great then you can have longer periods between releases to add functionality. But when it's in the shape that iTGB has been in since the release, then you absolutely need to have frequent updates to fix the stupid problems that continue to plaque it.

I really want this engine to work, as I'm a big fan of it. And I know I can spend a few hours to go ahead and fix it up to where it should be as a released product, but when the other major engine for iPhone games (starts with a U) just works out of the box, I find myself just using that one instead.

Again, no disrespect, just finding this situation almost amusing in its sadness.

#172 I agree :-(

#173 Perhaps we should start talking about the competitor's products.
Maybe that will get their attention.
I will start looking for alternatives to iTGB.

#174 I have switched to Shiva almost entirely now since shipping my iTGB game and getting slammed on loading times. Though there are some things I miss, like source access, it's a world of difference between the product's quality level and the attention it gets from the developers. Granted, it's primarily a 3D engine unless you can think 2D in 3D.

#175 I noticed that GG where in Develop this month talking up the new TGE 3D.
I'll be amazed if they get anyone that has bought the iPhone versions of the engine buying it and the poor reputation they are getting because of this isn't going to help them much. I've seen people on game sites complaining about iTGB
It's a real shame as I'm sure iTGB could be really good if they could just knock out a few of the major bugs. Any other company would be falling over themselves releasing quick little bug fixes. These guys take 5 months+ to release a beta upgrade without any docs at all and leave the users guessing what the new features are and fail to fix any of the major bugs. I don't believe that they have some one working on this full time and if they do, he wants a kick up the ass.
If it wasn't for the forum users, iTGB would be useless.

So when are we going to get some feed back? It's been over a month now of silence!

#176 I think the time for niceties is over. This engine has existed for more than a year and there are more frustrations than improvements. Are you guys understaffed? Every new release doesn't reflect months of work. Heck, the community does a better job. Don't even get me started on that piss poor excuse for a documentation.

No wonder why Michael, at first it was Brett, doesn't want to be the face of this product anymore. The countdown is starting for you now David.

There's also a worrying trend on these releases, every time the forums get riled up, for some reason a new version just happens to be ready in a short span of time compared to the months of silence.

It's either you guys take this engine seriously or atleast have the decency to give us our money back. Flash CS5 is just around the corner, it has the same cost as iTGB and most likely just as slow. Like Mass Effect Galaxy slow. . .

Quote:
For one thing, they are slow. And that's not slow as in "tactical," but slow as in something was not optimized before the game was thrown on to the App Store. Often, the game drops to an unacceptable frame rate -- it becomes a slide show. - IGN Review, Mass Effect Galaxy, Made with iTGB

. . . but it will work right out of the box and will have continued regular updates instead of *cricket sounds*.

#177 As far as loading speeds go, that's fairly easily remedied. I was able to rip about about 20% of the engine in 5 minutes and I sped up the loading time by several seconds. Custom / delayed datablock loading can speed up load time as well.

Framerate isn't that big of an issue either. Enabling the optimizations and turning off features that aren't needed (networking, profiling, etc) boosts it up a bit. Knowing your bottlenecks and cleaning them up helps as well.

I wouldn't say there are more frustrations than improvements. MP3 support and PVR sprite sheets have been huge additions. The memory leak (when the wrong settings are enabled) is frustrating. But I was able to work around it until someone posted the fix.

In a few days I'll have video up of my next game -- which is a kart "2.5D" racing game built with iTGB. I think it will highlight that the engine is more flexible than has been demonstrated to date.

#178 I mentioned the alternatives in another post, and GameSalad, albeit limited, is available with iPhone publishing, and a few titles in the App Store to boot. It's a self-enclosed game development platform. Granted, it's missing a lot and it is beta, but at least you have direct access to the developers, which is a lot more than can be said here.

Folks at GG, there's this thing called Twitter. It's like SMS, but for the web, and it's only 160 characters. Surely, with the thousands of lines of code piling up in the Torque engines, you can type out an extra 160 characters or less to tell us what's up. No need to get a press release agent, or send to a publisher, proofreader, or copy editor just to make an announcement. It's a version history log, for heaven's sake.

#179 Does anybody here knows if the keyboard support was rolled into the beta?

#180 @Eyal if you go back to page 5 I list a summary of what was included. There was one item included that I don't know what it is. But no the keyboard support was not rolled into the beta.

I based this list on a recursive code diff and looking at all of the changes relative to 1.2.