New 1.5 Demos

#1 very nice and encoureging.never had thought 2d can be so similar in looking like 3d version.no plan for 2d but now is thinking to give it a try to itorque2D when this demo will release.

#2 @muzaheed - Thanks. Our artists are taking the 3D models and scenes from Torque 3D and rendering the frames out to sprite sheets made for iT2D. While the engine does not have shaders, they can applying lighting and shading ahead of time to match the scene.

The great part is these demos will have behaviors tied to them, so it will be very easy to spin off your own version with little effort. I have a full blog for this being posted on Monday.

#3 This is awesome!!!

Anytime frame when 1.5 will be released :)

#4 Looking very promising!

#5 @George - Hmm, timeframe...you know we typically do not like to provide dates or promise something mid-development. I can tell you how development is going, though. I will be posting a full blog on Monday, but I can talk a little about that now.

We are currently in the middle of our last development sprint. iT2D sprints are two weeks long. The work covers fixing major crashes, resolving the backlog of bugs, creating the demos and writing the documentation. By myself, this would have taken another 4-5 weeks (not including QA). We have six people working concurrently to make sure the work is finished in this sprint.

Once we complete all the tasks for this sprint, we go into QA. The QA team gets a full week to hammer on the engine, demos and docs. They will find bugs, trust me. As they find and report them, I will work on fixing them. When they are finished, I get one final week to resolve the remaining bugs. After that, QA gets another full cycle. If all goes well, we then package a release candidate.

During the QA cycles, Associates and select iTorque 2D users will receive a build. This will provide us with early feedback and testing from outside the company. All Associates get a build and I have already picked out my list of users. This list ranges from veteran users down to people who have signed up as recently as last week. This will give us the broadest spectrum of quality and usability testing.

I am feeling really confident about the timeline, but anything can happen during development. Almost as tradition, we are running side by side with a beta of iOS. The GM of iOS 5 will be dropping very soon and we will need to test iT2D against that. We are dedicated to compliance and do not want to release an engine that does not work with the latest iOS SDK.

I think that about covers it.

@Scott - Thanks!

#6 Beautiful graphics in these demos - that will really encourage the new users to try them out.

A couple of questions...

In the motion demo, is it smooth with accelerometer only input (not gyro) or is it still quantized as seen in the 1.5.1 preview?

Have these demos been tested on iPad and if so do the landscape orientation changes happen correctly?

#7 Screenshots from the new demos look great. A suggestion i have for the demos that i would have found very handy when first starting out with iTorque (and im sure others would too) would be to have demos which include multiple scenes (so newbies can look at the demo source to help get an idea of the right way to change scenes, i ran into the GPF issue because i was changing scenes from a callback) and also things like how to do the popup menus (ie using menus created from the gui builder). I would suspect that pretty much anyone who makes a game will likely need both menus and multiple scenes.

Cheers
Craig

#8 @Conor - The answer to both questions is "yes."

@Craig - It's actually a single demo. The first thing you when it loads is a level picker menu, which is actually a level itself. There you will be able to pick a demo to play, which will load a new level. So the Deathball mini-game is a level, the Soldier shooter is a level and so on.

As for the GUI, that might be difficult. We are making the interface using sprites, since I have been encouraging users to move away from the base GUI system.

#9 Mich - awesome news.

By the way, I think Craig might have been referring to iOS popups and the Xcode GUI builder rather than the Torque GUI system.

#10 Please continue to improve the GUI system. It is an awesome feature of TGB.

#11 Sorry everyone. I said there would be a blog yesterday, but I got a slew of new bug reports from team members. I decided to work on those instead of focusing on a blog. Hope you all understand.

#12 When we don't see you on IRC, we know you have real work to do ;)
(Although rumours about a bus accident DID float about…)

#13 Don't worry Mich ;)

#14 I updated the the original post with two new screenshots. Let me know what you think =)

#15 Nice! So I take it we're getting a whirlwind tour of engine features?

#16 @Ronny - You nailed it. I didn't want a demo focused around one particular 1.5 feature. I want the demo to reflect the engine in its entirety.

#17 @Michael, looking excellent, love the gfx :)

#18 @Michael - Im having a problem with the feature demo in 1.5, i installed iT2D 1.5 onto the mac, opened the xcode project for it, changed the iOS deployment target to 4.1 (as my iPhone is on v4.1) and built/deployed it to the phone. It loads ok, but i cant interact with anything, its as if the touch functionality isnt working at all. I havent touched anything with the demo, i literally installed 1.5, opened that project and compiled/deployed to my phone. Could it have anything to do with me changing the deployment target to 4.1? I dont have a device with 4.3 on it to test with.

#19 @Craig
The Feature Demo is behavior driven and dsos have to be generated for them to work on the device.

#20 @Scott - ah makes sense, thanks. Figured it was probably something stupid from my side :)