iTorque 2D Status - 7/2/2010

Hey all. We have not forgotten about you. We have been very "heads down" the past week or two. In an effort to improve communication for all our engines, each product manager or producer will post a monthly update (at the very least). I still plan on posting small updates in individual threads, but these monthly update posts are a big round-up of what's happened and what will happen.

Where are we?

We have had three main tasks to work on:

- Bug fixing
- New documentation
- New demos

What caused the delay is that QA and the community discovered critical and blocker bugs during the week the installers were created. We had the option of releasing with a promise of 1.4.1, or delay to fix them. When you see this list, you will understand why we delayed:

ITGB-56 Image Scaling Issue In editor

ITGB-62 tile maps not showing up when clicking play game in the editor

ITGB-61 Open XCode Project button does nothing

ITGB-63 Opening and canceling the Edit level datablocks dialog causes duplicate image names in the image drop down menu in the Particle effect emitter rollout

ITGB-64 iPodExample Release Does Not Work

ITGB-59 IphoneExample Project not compiling in XCode

ITGB-58 Missing Executables

ITGB-57 Corrupt Particle Effects

ITGB-60 ImageMap and their datablocks removed on exit

We would not be proud or comfortable with a release containing those problems. The good news is we have fixed:

ITGB-56
ITGB-62
ITGB-61
ITGB-63
ITGB-64
ITGB-59
ITGB-58

That only leaves two critical bugs to fix. Several of the bugs were difficult to reproduce, especially since a few were only happening on a specific platform. The good news is that our QA process has continually improved so that down time between testing and released has been reduced.

On the documentation side of things, I have finished up a tutorial for a new Aquarium demo. It is a start (new project) to finish (running on device) guide that covers the following topics:

* Project creation
* Loading assets
* Modifying ImageMaps
* Creating animations
* Basic scene editing
* Scripting
* Particle effects
* Deploying to an iDevice

It features:

* New fish assets, optimized for the iPhone
* Demo has decent performance on 2nd gen iPod touch
* Screen shots for every major step
* When printed out, page count is at about 60+ (very comprehensive)
* Will be followed up with a video tutorial shortly, as well as a 2nd video showing how the demo can be rebuilt from scratch in 2 min by a Torque expert

The engine will ship with the finished demo created by the tutorial, with a few extras such as touch recognition and reaction.

When will it be ready?

The release candidate goes into QA's hands on 7/3/2010, and the community will get it on 7/5/2010. If it clears QA certification, the build will go from RC to live release.

Disclaimer: All time frames in this thread are estimates and should not be considered final