Introducing Torque 3D Project Manager 2.0

Introducing Torque 3D Project Manager 2.0

On December 19, 2012, we launched T3D v2.0 as the first new release under open source. Then on January 10, 2013, the T3D Steering Committee presented their proposed roadmap for v3.0 to the community for comments. With the release of T3D 3.0 coming next week it is time to unveil the updated Project Manager.

Where to Find the Project Manager

The Torque 3D Project Manager is its own project which may be found here: github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D-ProjectManager. You may also download a precompiled package from here (see the ReadMe for installation instructions):


Project Manager 2.0


The Torque 3D Wiki now has a new page describing how to use the Project Manager: github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D/wiki/Project-Manager

What’s New

With Project Manager 2.0 comes the ability to choose which modules will be compiled into your project using its interface. You’ve always been able to manually modify your project’s project.conf file to add and remove modules. You could then run the generateProjects.bat file to automatically rebuild your game project’s solution files and recompile the engine. Now the Project Manager can do it all for you from this interface:


The new Project Modules window

At the top of the window there is a dropdown that allows you to choose which Move class you would like to use. This is especially handy when working with one of the new input devices T3D 3.0 provides. The middle section of this window is where you may choose which modules will be compiled with your game project. And if a module requires a pointer to a directory (such as for a 3rd party SDK) you may enter that information here as well. Clicking on the OK button for new projects, or the Regenerate button for existing projects sets everything up.

All of this is described on the Project Manager wiki page: github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D/wiki/Project-Manager

The Project Manager and Torque 3D

The upcoming Torque 3D 3.0 will no longer have the two PhysX templates included with it (Empty PhysX and Full PhysX). These templates were identical to the regular ones but with the addition of the PhysX module being compiled in, and the PhysX DLLs being included. With the recent changes to T3D’s Project Generator that will automatically copy any supporting files from a SDK, and with Project Manager 2.0 allowing you to easily choose which modules are included in your project, these PhysX templates are no longer required.

And while Project Manager 2.0 is meant for the next release of T3D it is also possible to use it with T3D 2.0. The only difference is that a couple of buttons on its interface will have their text slightly cut off due to some required changes to Engine/bin/tools/style.css. You could either live with this slight imperfection, or copy the style.css from the Torque 3D development branch into your T3D 2.0 directory.

- Dave