Some thoughts on the T3D community size

#21 Well, I got T3D about a year ago and what sold me was the price and full access to the source code. Now the price is even better. Personally, I think some of the packs that are for sale should really just be in the github repo. If the money isn't really there, why not just contribute?

Why isn't Torsion MIT?

Oh yeah, one other thing, from my experience, any time I try to do anything with Torque Script I seem to run into bugs in C++ code. For me this isn't a huge problem as I can just go fix it and submit a pull request, but this would put off plenty of other people. Sometimes its fairly annoying because I can search the forums, find someone else that had the problem and the fix is in the forums, it was just never put back into the source.

One of these I just ran into was making it so you could map a joystick axis with the default control options dialog.

#22 Torsion is not MIT because it is owned by Sickhead and they are still making money off of it. It's not up to us to decide whether it is in the repo or not.

#23 @Scott thats a tricky topic, some of the packs aren't in the GitHub repo because they are too gamespecific I guess (see: AFX) but the ones that aren't could potentially be included in the repo, but that completely depends on the guys that developed said product.

Edit: To expand on why I say it's "tricky", it's really important that if you are going to take such a discussion it's very important not to hang out the developers of packs as "bad guys" and try to pressure an OpenSource release, tbh it's kindda none of our business.

Specifically for Torsion:
I believe I read somewhere that Sickhead games had considered releasing Torsion as OpenSource but because it still gave them a decent income they were holding back (can't blame them tbh).

#24 Ah, ok, I didn't realize Garage Games didn't own Torsion.

Edit: @Lukas I'm not labeling them as bad guys and I agree, a lot of the packs don't necessarily make sense to be in the repo. I just saw your Trello board and that's a pretty good start if we can get people to actually start contributing like that. There's a lot of dead and half written code that needs to be cleaned up. I've been thinking about looking into what it would take to update to the latest version of PhysX. One way I was thinking of doing this would be to use the PAL library http://www.adrianboeing.com/pal instead of T3D having its own physics abstraction layer. That would add support for just about any physics library. Or I could just create it as a pack ;)

There's one card on your Trello about PhysX vehicles, there was a pack called Drive that already did this, but its something that should be in the repo. The boat class that I'm making is based off PhysicsShape, if someone wants to make a car one I could help, but I currently have no interest in doing it myself since I'm not doing anything with cars in my game. PhysicsBody would also need additional functions like applyForce and applyTorque. The only thing it has right now is applyImpulse.

#25 A number that I find underwhelming would be the 14 contributors since T3D went mit...

#26 @michael: I wouldn't be overly concerned about that 14. That's not how many folks have tossed in tweaks, that's how many folks have authorization to commit directly.

#27

Quote:14 contributors

Not fair to say. Many have contributed with solutions in threads when people had an issue. If the only way to contribute is by doing engine tweaks and bug fixings then I think many people should stop being game developers and just jump into tool development instead. Not all people wish to only do engine programming. The whole idea is to develop games with an engine. Beside that people post their ideas under blogs and resources and I call people who do that for contributors.

#28 Making a game takes a lot of time and effort. If you hang around these forums too much and there's no immediate necessity to do so (like looking for fixes or gathering recourses), and you are truly making a game; then you probably need a break or you're not very productive right now.

#29 Well said, Dwarf King.

By pointing out the number of forks, I meant just to highlight that there are at least that many people who had an interest in the engine that was more than vague passing fancy (the 1300 stars). And there are 330 watchers who are receiving notifications from T3D's issues.

Ouch Nils ;). Fair point, though lots of my forum time is when I'm out of the house and not developing anyway. Or when I should be working on something else :P.

#30 You cannot expect new people to jump right into contributing, it takes a lot of time to learn the engine. I noticed that an average contributer is someone who at least already has years of experience in one field and you cannot expect this from most people.
So if some hobbyist makes a fork now and also keeps learning constantly maybe in 1 or 2 years he will be experienced enough to contribute good improvements.

#31 What Duion said, it took me about 3 years to fully understand the software I work on for a living, I expect learning and fully understanding most of the T3D engine would take about the same amount of time.

#32 After being active with various Torque engines in an on again/off again fashion for the last 7 years, I have to admit that I've pretty much moved on. There are still some very cool things being done with Torque-tech, but until the GG community takes cross-platform issues seriously again, there isn't much for me here. There was a long time I would have recommended Torque, without reservation, to any beginning game dev hobbyist. Nowadays I'm more likely to point to Panda3D or jME (or even libGDX). I suspect there are even more bleeding off silently.

It's been fun, I've learned a lot and built some fun things, but I probably won't be back unless there's a big shift on the Linux/Mac front.

#33 Well then you will be back soon ;o)

Oh and thanks for introducing us to the plugin for Komodo :o)

#34 I wonder why you would waste the 7 years of experience?

#35

Quote:I wonder why you would waste the 7 years of experience?

It is not a waste to learn an engine. That knowledge can be applied to any game engine. The specifics no, but the concepts of how things operate are what is important. For instance, the art concepts you are learning apply to most low poly art. Importer specifics may be different, but the general modeling, skinning, etc are the same.

@Thomas,
Don't be a stranger. Let us know how you are getting on. We will cheer your success regardless of the engine you use.

#36 Dwarf King: is that a promise? I haven't heard a peep since Jeff Yaskus got bogged down and disappeared. Also, don't forget that the Komodo plugin is up on Github if you want to add features :) I have a lot of the machinery there for autocomplete features, but didn't quite finish that.

Duion: I'm not sure I'd consider it a waste. Built some really fun stuff with TorqueScript, learned a heck of a lot of graphics, C++, and parsers. Developed some skills as an artist. The only thing that isn't really transferable is the TorqueScript, and as cute as it was, I won't miss the rough edges.

The thing is, Torque wasn't built to do what I needed it to do, and it also hasn't been maintained to be multiplatform friendly, and as a hobbyist I didn't have the time/energy to correct both of those. I spent a lot of time reworking internals to correct the former flaw in faith that the latter would correct itself with support from GG and the community here. When it became apparent that that wasn't the case, I decided I wasn't going to fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy.

Demolishun: I'll try to post a blog when I have something to show :) I'm in the process of implementing an inferred rendering pipeline in OpenGL with CHC++ for culling. I'm building it on top of Scala to try and take advantage of parallelism, and have some cute integration with Jython for well-integrated scripting of game logic. I was thinking about trying out Haskell, but the library ecosystem lacks maturity, and if I'm going to use a managed-memory language, I needed to pick one where the garbage collector was not of the stop-the-world variety.

#37 Aside: Thomas, I encourage you to look into Haskell even if you don't want to use it in your engine. It will make you a better programmer ;).