Greetings everyone. For all licensees of Torque 2D 1.7+ and iTorque 2D 1.5+, you have received a free update. Read this blog for details on the improvements, changes, and important notes. Most notable, the platform code for each of the products have been updated to match what will be in T2D MIT.

Torque 2D and iTorque 2D Updates Available

The Next Step

Greetings everyone! I'll keep this blog relatively short considering the impending release of Torque 2D MIT. If you are currently a licensee of Torque 2D 1.7 or iTorque 2D 1.5, you should have a new download in your account. This represents the final update for the legacy versions of Torque 2D and iTorque 2D. We know several folks are trying to update or finish games with the existing technology, so we decided that the platform improvements made in Torque 2D MIT should be released to existing customers for free. This does not give you access to all the new features of T2D MIT, but it does extend the life of the legacy products enough to finish off any existing games you might be working on.

OS X Update

We have made many improvements to Torque 2D and iTorque 2D to keep pace with Apple updates over the years. More and more code the engine relies on was being deprecated. This primarily affected the desktop editor and runtime, but the iOS side took an occasional hit as well. I'm talking about the use of Carbon. For those who have not been developing Apple products, Carbon is the old framework for building desktop applications. Apple changed gears and has been pushing its newer framework called Cocoa.

For a while, internal Torque devs like myself would have to swoop in and apply a bandaid patch that kept the engine at least compiling. When Mountain Lion dropped, all of Carbon hit the deprecation list.

With all that in mind, we decided to refactor the entire OS X platform in one major dev cycle. We ripped out all of the Carbon code and started with an empty platform layer. While some of the old Mac code was brought over, nothing related to Carbon has been ported. The OS X platform for T2D and iT2D is now running standard C libs and Cocoa.

Windows Update

In the process of refactoring our OS X platform, we were forced to make improvements to the general platform abstraction code. This immediately affected our other platforms, such as Windows. We managed to fix a handful of blogs and reorganize the platformWin32 source code a bit. While small, every little bit counts at this point.

iOS Update

This section is specific to iTorque 2D 1.5 licensees. The 1.6 update provides more support for iOS 6, iPhone 5, and more varied resolution support. We managed to fix several crashes and the orientation handling. A huge thanks to Paul Chan for his GLKit resource, which made it a lot easier to finish this update. Additionally, while working on T2D MIT, Melv managed to repair font rendering on iOS without having to generate a font cache every time. The fixes for resolution and rotation have been tested on iOS 6, iOS 5, iPhone, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 5, and new iPad.

Miscellaneous Tickets

The following tickets were opened and closed during this final update. Some are from past bugs, while others were introduced when we made improvements:

• ITGB-315 iOS - Running on device not working in release.
• ITGB-328 iOS - portrait - Touch controls are offset in portrait.
• ITGB-325 it2d - Default mainScreen.gui has min extent set to larger than portrait resolution.
• ITGB-323 iOS - running a game in portrait orientation results in a black screen after splash.
• ITGB-288 Universal App Rotation Bug
• ITGB-324 it2d - legacyt2d - OSX - Crash frequently when exiting the editor if you save changes.
• ITGB-207 getGameDataDirectory returns wrong path on device (no longer applicable)
• ITGB-312 OSX - Debug - Crash attempting to save a level.
• ITGB-295 Final getiPhoneKeyboardInput Crash Bug (deprecated)
• TGB-579 OSX - Cannot delete assets from the editor.
• TGB-577 OSX - legacyt2d - Edit Effect Graph on a particle crashes the editor.
• TGB-573 TGB - Reload Textures causes a crash.
• TGB-575 legacyt2d - Cannot play the game more than once from editor.
• ITGB-319 it2d - Testing a game for iPhone in portrait mode runs in landscape mode.
• ITGB-313 Win7 - it2d - Create emitter button has no icon on it.
• ITGB-300 Windows - iTorque game builder doesn't restore when you close a test run of the game

Final Notes

The iTorque 2D update does have an orientation issue with devices running iOS 5. I will be posting a separate thread about how to handle the issue. On that note, anyone who will continue to use this codebase even after T2D MIT is released, you should still consider making use of the iT2D CE repository. Any future fixes to the iOS platform for T2D MIT might still be portable to the legacy iT2D, so you should keep an eye on both the MIT and iT2D CE repos to check for updates.

Wave Goodbye...

This concludes the final blog for the legacy 2D engines. They had a great run and could still be useful to a lot of newcomers. The future now consists of T2D MIT, so keep your eyes peeled for another blogs in the next couple days to talk about the steering committee and the release. Thanks to everyone for all your support over the years on both TGB and iT2D.