iTorque2D and Platform Starter Kit - First Impressions...

Hi all,

This is my first post, I signed up last night. :-) I bought iTorque2D last night along with the Platform Starter Kit, here's my noob view of the whole thing. I have written this in an unbiased way, please don't flame me as I genuinely feel there is value in sharing what I have seen so far. I really would like answers to my questions as well, if there are any. :-)

Firstly though, so you know a little about me, I'm a microsoft technologies solution consultant / lead developer (C#) by day with 12 months exposure to xCode and Objective C. I've been coding for over 20 years. Enough of that, here's what I think so far.... :-)

I knew of GarageGames from years back with the early versions of the Torque game engine. I was looking for something that would get me into game generation on the iPhone/iPad quickly, even though I have a good grasp of Objective C i really didn't want to be building up a library of gaming functions for another platform. I code for a living and the thought of doing all the grunt work for a hobby project as well kind of bores me, hence why I'm here.

My reasons for buying Torque over other engines I looked at? Well, I coded through a few iPhone game dev books, this was my initial idea - take a simple engine and expand it. Most of them appear to have little optimisation, which you would expect from example code, but also the ones I tried were buggy and too limited.

Then I looked at SI02, which looks amazing. I've exposure to 3D coding, no problem with any of that. I stumbled across SOi2 when I saw a book on Blender/SI02 and iPhone game dev. Looked perfect so I downloaded the engine, only to find that the licensing model has changed and it now costs a fortune. Also the engine calls home every time you compile so you have to be always connected to develop with it. Oh and if a new version is released you need to download that before you can do anything else, you essentially are coding against a moving feast because any new version would potentially break code you've already cut and tested. In the end SI02 was nothing more than a wasted month acquiring Blender skills from a book that was completely out of sync with the current version of the engine in question.

Then I stumbled across iTorque. Looks good. I remember Torque 3d was a complicated beast years ago but at $99 I'll give it a pop. I'll also get the Platform Starter Kit, that way I can knock up a Mario-esque platform for the missus and see how the scripting on game entities works as well. Essentially a paid tutorial with some reusable assets, can't go wrong here, I thought...

Ok so xCode 3.2.5 is installed along with the iPhone 4.2 SDK, all working and tested since Apple released 4.2

Install iTorque. Nice and easy.

Read

Read Code

Code

Looked at the example game in iTGB and then loaded it up into xCode. Missing Base SDK. No problem, double click the project and set Debug, Release and Shipping versions all to use Latest (4.2) - still no worky.

33 errors and hundreds of warnings....

A quick look on this forum tells me that the default project is using the wrong compiler settings, so double clicking the targets and setting their compiler to 'latest' fixes that. This is not a setting I've played with in the last year, I didn't even know it was there. I suggest that this is fixed in the download to stop other people having a Friday night full of developer toys out of pram ;-)

Ok, so now everything is up and running, the example runs on the phone and in the simulator, and of course within the iTGB environment. I've dragged some trees into the scene and had a play, looks good so far - we're on a roll :-)

Time to read the documentation, or skim it at least and work through a few tutorials. On to the iTorque documentation - I'm still looking for all the checkers art and the Project/Resources drop down menu from the Component Tutorials / Adding Assets / Importing Resources section. Are these part of iTorque2D?

Ok. So I gave up last night and went to bed. Don't get me wrong, I've not been put off yet! I was expecting a bumpy landing as this is a huge engine and will take a while to wrap my head around it. So, I will check out the forums in the morning. Hence this post.

Now for the questions...

HORROR! What's all this about buying an engine from GarageGames and the devs are no longer working there? Have I purchased something at end of life with no support? Is that why iTorque is $99 ?

What's all this I read about the Platform Starter Kit that I purchased not working with iTorque2D? I've emailed the guy who (I think) created it asking for a copy of the iPhone version but have yet to have a reply. If it's not compatible have I burned that money? Can I get the iPhone version, or a pointer in the right direction please? Is there a guide for installing this with iTorque as the readme says it's not compatible? Something the website should have mentioned before purchase I think, especially with the 'no refund' disclaimer at purchase! I'm sure this will be easily resolved, I can wait while I play with the core engine...

Do I have the right documentation? I purchased iTorque2D and the PSK and downloaded the iTorque documentation from the 'My Products' area - is there another version of the docs that refers to assets in the engine I purchased, or can I download the checkers images, the raincloud particle settings etc from somewhere on this site? Could someone post a link please?

Is the default project going to be updated to remove the compiler issues that new users experience when first loading up into xCode?

Are people working on removing all the unused variables and the 400+ compiler warnings? I've always considered compiler warnings == errors and with a code engine that I've paid money for I'd expect the code to have no warnings. Just my opinion.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good iTorque2D resource with examples? Are there any on the web that you would recommend?

As I said, I was expecting a bumpy landing but I think so far I've made a good decision. Time will tell, in the meantime I'll go back and have another bash with it.

Nice forum by the way ;-)


D.