Advice requested on starting with Torque
by Daryl Wilding-McBride · in Torque Game Engine · 09/09/2003 (2:47 am) · 2 replies
Hi All,
I bought Torque and since then I've been trawling these forum threads and reading all the the resources I can find. What I'd like to find is a guide or similar to show how to write a main.cs script from scratch. Something analogous to "Hello World!" in the game world, like displaying a ball on a flat plane and moving it around using some keys. Then adding other balls and maybe then collision. I think I'd rather gradually build up my knowledge that way, rather than modifying a game where I only understand about 0.1%. So, I have some questions for fellow beginners (and post-beginners):
(i) Does such a guide exist?
(ii) Is this a common way to get started?
Thanks,
Daryl.
I bought Torque and since then I've been trawling these forum threads and reading all the the resources I can find. What I'd like to find is a guide or similar to show how to write a main.cs script from scratch. Something analogous to "Hello World!" in the game world, like displaying a ball on a flat plane and moving it around using some keys. Then adding other balls and maybe then collision. I think I'd rather gradually build up my knowledge that way, rather than modifying a game where I only understand about 0.1%. So, I have some questions for fellow beginners (and post-beginners):
(i) Does such a guide exist?
(ii) Is this a common way to get started?
Thanks,
Daryl.
#2
The thing to understand it the there is the Torque way or the highway. Torque is alot more "sophisiticated" than most "game engines" in that most game engines are actually rendering engines with a hard coded game wrapped around them and some netcode tacked on. Torque is mroe flexible in alot of ways but more complex, and it can be completely inflexible in other areas and still be just as complex.
09/09/2003 (6:19 am)
The main problem is what you want is NOT really how Torque works, Ben is right about having to rip out alot of stuff to make that simple of an "demo". There is a lot of configuration and bookkeeping in Torque just to get to the point you are talking about, which is prety much the demo app.The thing to understand it the there is the Torque way or the highway. Torque is alot more "sophisiticated" than most "game engines" in that most game engines are actually rendering engines with a hard coded game wrapped around them and some netcode tacked on. Torque is mroe flexible in alot of ways but more complex, and it can be completely inflexible in other areas and still be just as complex.
Associate Kyle Carter
2. Not really.
The way I got started was to grow familiar with the codebase over the course of many months, as I incrementally wanted to perform various tasks with it. At this point, about a year later, I feel comfortable ripping things out and doing extensive modifications to the engine.
The problem with the approach you outline is that a lot of the stuff in Torque is only necessary or useful for complex scenarios such as you would get in a finished game. To get it to the state where a simple example like that would be useful (ie, any simpler to understand than the demo app available now), a lot of that would need to be ripped out! Which would mean that after you understood the demo app, you'd still have to go back and understand all the added complexity.
I would suggest reading the engine reference, especially the overview section, and possibly looking at other game engines to see how they did it (for instance, the quake source is available). Torque is much more understandable in context of other game engines.