Nucleus : Cross platform Torque 2D/3D Editor and Debugger

Hi everyone,

For those of you who don’t know who I am; I was the original developer of the Torque 2D engine before it became Torque Game Builder. Before that I wrote a bunch of extensions to the Torque Game Engine known by the “fx” prefix i.e. fxSunLight, fxShapeReplicator, fxFoliage etc. Several years back I quit my job and jumped on-board with GarageGames and have been working on Torque technologies ever since, most recently 3-Step Studio and Torque 2D.

So it’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog but now that the Torque 2D MIT is starting to spin up for a release, I’m going to start writing up what I’ve been doing in that space covering the changes from when I started on it to what I did recently.

This blog however isn’t about Torque 2D, it’s about a product that I’ve been prototyping for a little while with a working title of “Nucleus”.

Nucleus is a concept for a powerful code-editor that supports debugging of both the Torque 2D and Torque 3D MIT code-bases. It will be a cross-platform editor that will initially work on Windows and OSX platforms with a Linux release sometime later.

The editor would be based upon Qt and use Scintilla for the code editor. Some of the initial features would be:

• Cross platform product (Win32 & OSX with Linux to follow)
• Syntax highlighting and folding (per language)
• User-defined syntax highlighting (per language)
• Nearly 90 programming languages supported (including Taml and TorqueScript) via Scintilla
• Auto code completion
• Tabbed code editing
• Powerful docking system
• File extension to language mapping feature
• Image viewing
• Torque 2D & 3D debugging (with new telnet debugger) - Breakpoints, call-stack & locals views etc.
• Engine types resolved via Nucleus remote debugger (not via an engine text dump)
• Supporting legacy Torsion debugging for older binary-only releases [possibly]
• Lots of editor customization
• Per-project customization including GUI layout, multiple locations, multiple executables to spawn etc.
• Plug-in system for extending Nucleus itself (new lexers, tools etc)
• More!

I also intend to release the Nucleus remote debugger source-code (not Nucleus itself!) for free under the MIT license and try to get it included in both Torque 2D & Torque 3D repositories. I have already put a fair bit of effort into prototyping the debugger and it works well already. It provides a fast telnet connection between Torque and a debugger based upon TorqueScript calls. It supports multiple debugger versions and connection without the need to modify any source-files (amongst other features).

Anyway, the main point of this blog is to to try to gauge the interest in such a product. This product would be produced and published by me in my spare time and is not an official GarageGames product. I'd probably be selling it at around the same price as Torsion and would be available as a limited demo.

In short, is this something that you think would be worth the several months of effort i.e. would you buy it?