Game Development Community

Did I miss something?

by Neill Silva · in Torque 3D Professional · 01/15/2010 (6:02 pm) · 8 replies

I thought that GarageGames was working on actually documenting their engines this time around...

So I am wondering if I am just completely missing the documentation or if the few pages available is really the full thing?

#1
01/15/2010 (6:45 pm)
www.torquepowered.com/documentation/torque-3d

offline docks are not updated all the time you need to check the online docks at the link above.
#2
01/15/2010 (6:48 pm)
We have also had server issues for the past month, which have made it difficult to push new documentation.
#3
01/15/2010 (7:34 pm)
Any timeframe for implementation of particle docs?
#4
01/15/2010 (7:36 pm)
@Neill - No time frame. I'm wrapping up 1.1 docs this month before moving on to Torque 2D, but that doesn't mean I will not be circling back to Torque 3D docs in between.
#5
01/16/2010 (10:38 am)
GL with T2D 3D is so much fun.
#6
01/16/2010 (4:53 pm)
I'd love to help by providing some basics on working with the game classes in code, like how to handle network updates for new variables, properly use masks, describing where common game events that may be a bit obfuscated in Torque compared to other engines take place, but I'm not sure my unique style of writing is really appropriate for software documentation or even especially helpful. I mean, look at what I just wrote about my writing.

By the way, the rendering docs which I just bothered to read? Very helpful, solved an annoying issue I'd been having with a custom object type since moving to T3D. Guess I never bothered to look b/c I'm used to having to plow through this stuff on my own. Thanks for taking such a detailed look at a subject (the new rendering core) that's largely alien to me and probably others.

RenderDelegate ... the answer to all my objects-that-don't-have-meshes problems. I know this is massively off-topic, but we're talking about docs and I felt it was worth saying nice work on this one.
#7
01/21/2010 (9:24 am)
Adding Doxygen tags to each area of code as it's touched would be a good start. Although I'd prefer tagging the entire code base at once that would be a mammoth task.

It's as simple as //! sentence =D
#8
01/21/2010 (6:32 pm)
The most important documentation for a beginner in TorqueScripting, I found, was the section under:

http://www.torquepowered.com/documentation/torque-3d

Then click, in the left panel, Scripting, and then Advanced. The three subsections under Advanced contain the most useful information, particularly the section titled "RTS Prototypes". This contains the information the beginner is most likely to want to know right off, such as spawning players and enemies, changing camera behavior, etc.

I believe that some small percentage of this perennial question could be ablated merely by moving the RTS scripting section ahead of the appendices detailing the World Editor with a section title such as, "Skipping Ahead to the Interesting Bit".

Requiring newcomers to "review everything in the documentation" as suggested in another recent thread... there is nearly a decade's worth of accumulated, inaccurate, unfinished cruft written in the limited vernacular of the gaming enthusiast spread out among half-a-dozen subsystems and half-a-dozen dated books spanning seven related-but-eccentrically invidualistic engines... it's a bit much.

On the other hand, leaving the answers to the most-asked immediate questions in an obscure subsection is a very good passive polling technique to find out who *did* read the documentation. There is that satisfaction in maintaining the tradition.

In all due seriousness, Mr. Perry is to be commended for pulling together what he has to date on T3D. It's by far, far and away the most accurately documented engine I've seen from Garage Games to date, and I have found it very useful.