Web Deployment...is it working yet?

#21 i appreciate the responses and the action on GG's part. Like I said I am not demanding this now, just hoping for a workable solution in the future. I understand there are more important things on the grill. Especially with the documentation. As seen here I am not the only one wanting this feature and if asked properly you would get tons more responses to it.

I guess what i was trying to say about IA and T3D is that you advertise IA basically from the same page. The link is up there. We click on that and see GG has the tech for it. The lack of clarification on the site

Quote:Web Publishing - Deploy any Torque 3D project from the World Editor to a web browser in seconds with our web publishing option. Torque 3D supports all major browsers and operating systems, including IE7, FF3, OS X and Chrome.

only helps to sway us into believing the same tech is being used. Nothing to say its not. I guess its like Iphone advertising a new phone. On the same page is a link to apples touch screen technology showing people using Iphones and touching the screen and playing games. It says on the phones web page with the ability to make calls just by touching the screen.
You get the phone and low and behold you can only make calls using a special section of the screen. No games, no web browsing, no navigation. Apple tells you sorry for the confusion we never said we integrated our touch tech into that phone.

Once again I still am loving T3D, its a great product and well worth the money..binary version ;) I don't mind waiting for a true option of web deployment if it is a future upgrade.

Thanks again.

#22 Honestly, I had the same thoughts as hallsofvallhalla. For my work, we were intending to shift to Unity for the web streaming feature, then T3D came along, with their variant of web publishing. Of course, having used TGE/TGEA for sometime, I was perfectly happy with this, and bought a copy of T3D for both my company and for personal use.

I too was blind sided and under-whelmed by the web publishing aspect, I still work with T3D for some of my personal projects, but upon seeing that this was what GG meant by web publishing, and does not seem to have any intention of changing it, the place i work for has since switched some projects over to Unity, and its working well.

If anyone's interested, the 2 aspects which got me buying T3D was web publishing(scrap !) and Collada (DTS export from maya has been pretty much a nightmare for my artists ! The current collada system is still far from perfect...). I'm just wondering, will there be new DTS exporters to tie in with the updated Docs as I'm considering just going back to DTS.

This 2 factors aside (unfortunately, the main 2 reasons i even got T3D...), I think T3D has been pretty good.

#23 Cai, could you share with me what your artists find troubling about Maya DTS exporting ?
- I have been thinking of making my "Doit!" tool for Maya and I am curious to see if I can help people with that process.

Other than that I agree with your post 100%, collada is not perfect by any means. As for DTS exporter chat: People in IRC channel were told, over 1 year ago, that GG hired a guy to work on the DTS exporters. We've heard nothing since then..people have asked about this & their question is ignored. Perhaps you'll have better luck getting an answer since you've pointed out that you're disappointed in certain things.

I would hope they will be writing DTS exporters to support DTS version of 26 (or higher) features. ..but chances are they'll just point @ craptastic-collada. :/

#24 The problem with Collada are the inconsistent exporters. Regarding Maya, both the built-in FBX/DAE and the OpenCollada exporters have different issues. But it's still a lot better than being constrained to the DTS exporters.

I always found FBX exporting much more reliable, but the major problem is that the FBX SDK is only distributed in pre-compiled form, which would cause a few problems in making it built-in into T3D. However, it shouldn't be hard to write a tool that converts FBX into T3D-friendly Collada.

#25 Manoel, could you elaborate on this:
"..But it's still a lot better than being constrained to the DTS exporters."
- for who exactly ? ..and why do you think that ?

#26

Quote:
People in IRC channel were told, over 1 year ago, that GG hired a guy to work on the DTS exporters. We've heard nothing since then..people have asked about this & their question is ignored. Perhaps you'll have better luck getting an answer since you've pointed out that you're disappointed in certain things.

Last I heard there wont be an more DTS exporters and that the next step will be to completely replace DTS with a new Binary format that is more up to date and easier to maintain. DTS is almost 15 years old or so now.

#27 In hopes of allowing this thread to get back to its original intent, let me address the DTS exporter issue:

The game studio portion of InstantAction hired a developer whose primary job was to update the DTS exporters about a year ago. In the end he did not deliver what he was supposed to and he left the company when we moved from Eugene to Las Vegas. Unfortunately, that means that we in the Torque division were unable to get updated exporters from him and out to you guys.

In the meantime, however, we have been aggressively updating our Collada pipeline to make it more and more robust. In almost every case where we have been provided with a model that imports incorrectly, Chris Robertson has been able to address the issue in less than 48 hours. Additionally, he has been working hard to extend the Collada import pipeline so that it as fully featured and even beyond the capabilities of the DTS export pipeline.

In fact, out of the 3 demos (Chinatown, South Pacific, and Sector T3D) that we showed at GDC this year, I believe there was only 3-4 DTS models vs the hundreds of Collada models in those demos and the only reason they were DTS is because they had been exported years ago and there was no reason to update them. Both of the fully animated Player characters in Chinatown (modern military character) and Sector T3D (futuristic robot character) were completely Collada based. Given that animated Player characters are the most complex models to do in virtually every engine out there, I would say that is a pretty big indication that our Collada import pipeline is getting pretty close to maturity.

Moving forward in the future, we are planning to update our binary format and to fully document that new format so that, if others want to write their own exporters, it is much easier to do than it has been in the past. However, we currently don't have any direct plans to write a new binary exporter for ourselves given the current success of the Collada format.

#28 @Eb:

I worked on seven retail games using Torque in the span of 5 or so years. The required setup for getting a DTS exported correctly was always a constant source of QA issues. Someone forgot to name something correctly, or there was missing information on the dtsScene.cfg file, or things plain crashed for no apparent reason once in a while and it took quite some time to figure out which was the offending node/mesh/material.

Not to mention the exporter hunting when upgrading the 3D software, and the inability of adding custom features without having to modify both the exporter and the loader code (which was far from "easily readable" back then).

Exporting a collada model/character with barely no setting up and having it work properly (most) of the time is like a dream coming true. And if I need to add custom stuff to my files, it's much easier to write a tool to write DAE files than it is to write DTS.

#29 Thanks for sharing that Manoel. I had assumed everything you said, but I was curious if there was any other reason of which I was not aware. I appreciate that you answered that in a serious manner. ;)

@James: I had my hopes up for a moment there ;)

@Matt: Thanks for clearing the air on the formats/exporters but why no comment on the web-deployment topic ?

#30 I think Mich already addressed it reasonably well. We will work on the wording on the product page to make it clearer exactly what our web deployment solution entails.

To be fair though, you can test web deployment with our freely available demo. To liken it back to your analogy, if you bought the car expecting the "heated seats" on the window sticker to work one way when they work a different way (they are heated after all =P) but didn't bother to do the free test drive of the car that the dealer encouraged you to do, then you are partially to blame for the misunderstanding and I can see why they might be unwilling to give you a refund.

I do think that there is some looseness in defining what exactly "web deployment" is. We went a different route than Unity and Flash because it makes a lot of things a *lot* simpler for the end user who has modified source code (impossible with Flash or Unity). We did borrow heavily from the QuakeLive model of "web deployment" and do give full source code for the web plugin so that you can modify it to fit your needs (if you are a Pro user). You could also probably get a fairly basic "streaming/download" system going inside a very thin Torque client (small installer) with the HTTPObject or TCPObject which are exposed to script and leveraging the Live Asset Updating but we did not have the time to build an example implementation of that for you (people have done it in the past with desktop versions of Torque and I am sure there is a resource or two along those lines). Ultimately, all we are talking about is where the downloading progress bar exists: in the browser, in the plugin, or the level loading scree. No matter how you cut it, you are still delivering the same data at some point. Our simplest implementation just delivers that data up front rather than delaying it and it does provide a very clean starting point with no built in assumptions about how your game needs its data delivered (which can be tricky).

That said, I can see how some people might have to wrong expectations and we should be better at managing that. Here on the forums and in person, we have been very clear about what exactly our web deployment solution looks like but perhaps we could make it clearer on the product page.

#31 I am not asking for a refund by no means. I was a bit angry at first but the engine has impressed me. I am happy with my purchase. I am a binary user so modifing the current plug-in is not possible for me but maybe with my web knowledge I can get something working. I guess my biggest problem was the confusion on the website.

I had actually watched some demos of T3D and seen them running through the browser instantly, could have been instant action. I am not sure why no one at GG understand why that can be confusing. Sure if you work in GG and instant action is in the other end of the building then yeah there is a separation but to us it is one building and one company. Not saying it makes a difference but you have got to see where the confusion stems from.

Anyways the response here from GG has been great and I thank you. I still am recommending T3D to people that ask about it and still a fan. Especially after the responses from employees here. You guys have really changed for the better over the years. I built a MMORPG using the TMMOKIT when it was first released ages ago and I was not impressed with Customer service at all. Total difference now. Kudos to GG!

#32 It's pretty possible to re-produce the Instant Action user experience with the default features. Using the javascript-torquescript interface it's possible to keep the embedded plugin instance invisible and put the download progress bar in the HTML itself.

Downloading the binary files takes some work, though: either integrate libCurl or use the TCPObject binary transfer resource. We need a built-in method for transferring binaries.

#33 What is that: www.torquepowered.com/community/blogs/view/15934

Josh Engebretson is a guy who's been around the Torque community a long time. Known for doing some of the most interesting code mashups imaginable, Josh has experimented with GRE inside Torque, Ogre inside TGE, Python scripting in Torque, TGEA inside TGB, and lots more.

Josh did all this cool stuff all while creating and running a profitable Indie MMO called Minions of Mirth with his wife Lara. Now that Josh is at GG, he's doing equally cool stuff.

With InstantAction.com proving what's possible with web gaming across all kinds of game engines, operating systems, and browsers, we thought that it was definitely time to bring this functionality to Torque.

Do I misreading something or what?

#34 agreed, I agree Josh is an amazing guy. I am using the T3D and his TMMOKIT to build a game but where is all this advancement at?

Sure you can suggest I do it myself but isn't that what the engine is built for? To cut my development time in half?

I honestly don't think GG realizes how incredibly awesome this would be and profitable. T3D in the browser, would rock like a box of Socks! And I don't mean that silly Instant Action.

"Whats that? You are using free version of Unity and its lack of shaders to build a 90's style FPS through the browser? Hmm I am using T3D with its massive features to do the same but it is next gen. Hold on why I join your forums and steal all your players."

" What you built a RTS with T3D and I can play through the browser! Holy crap that's awesome!"

"You have a death match game through the browser with next gen graphics?? So you mean I should buy Torque instead of Unity, UDK, DXStudio, or any of the others?" O

see the possibilities are endless.

h wait DXstudio has web deployment! Nevermind then...

#35 I think that right move is to add support of Googles Native Client technology, which will allow you to distribute your binaries without installing any plugin, thing like InstantAction but better as you don't need to certify anything =)

#36 I think you need to see this new feature from Kronos Group:

code.google.com/apis/o3d/

drawlogic.com/category/torque-3d/

www.khronos.org/

They work on JavaScript Implementation.

#37 drawlogic.com/category/torque-3d/

O_O The above link says T3D coming soon... Anyone want to come out and confirm/deny/nothing to do with us ?

#38 Torque 3D already supports web deployment out of the box (has so for nearly a year).

However, we have no plans to support Google's Native Client or O3D.

#39 so i can build a game and deploy to the web? OR do you mean I can build a game and deploy it to work in a browser? HUGE, MASSIVE, GIGANTIC, difference!

Web Deployment means you can play your game through the web not just a browser. Meaning I don't deploy a 500meg file that the end user has to download to their local machine then play through their browser. That is the most pointless idea I have ever seen and whom ever came up with that idea is sitting at the bank right now laughing.

Web Deployment is streaming the data in bits to actually play through the web. Browser client is all I have seen which once again is useless in every way. If something has changed then I apologize and thank you for fixing. Remember IE and Firefox does not mean web. That is like saying if you put out a java client that you now deploy to a cell phone! Simply not true.

#40

Quote:...the end user has to download to their local machine then play through their browser...

This is how it works, the browser is nothing more then a render window. I also see no point at all in this feature (some one please correct me if i am wrong, or if there is more depth to this feature). Personally i find it insulting GG expect T3D users to be excited about this, and when one hear/see/read web deployment they are NOT thinking Render in a web browser from the clients computer just as if it had opened its very own window!.

Heck i have lots of files that open in a web browser, text files, all types of image files... I think i will start advertising my 2D texture artwork as Supports Web Deployment! Im also gonna advertise as, "Y2K compliant" and "100% digital!"

Web Deployment... Im surprised GG did not list that a long time ago, as technically, by using the exact same GG logic, simply downloading the game could be deployment from the web = Web Deployment!

OK, that was a fun rant. I was not going to say anything on this subject, but it is very very clear now after official GG clarifications to Hallsofvallhallas queries that 'the GG folks' DO NOT feel as if they lied about this feature. Perhaps it is not a full on bald-faced lie, but indeed a very dirty sneaky greasy ratty sewer type of lie. And it do indeed fall into the classification of 'misrepresentation' of the product.