Educational use of torque - a postmortem

Hi guys,

I'm writing up a sort of small "post-mortem" examination of a currently running module which I teach at the moment in which I am using torque as part of the course material.

I had originally planned on using a simpler codebase than torque, as torque IS a large codebase and can be daunting. But I figure these are all 3rd year degree finalists, they are all doing the module by choice (this is a course optional) and theyre all useful programmers.

I dont want to bore you with the absolute details of the module itself, but the module is all about 3D game programming. The module is split between 1 hour lectures and 2 hours of tutorial time.

I am basically using the lecture time to talk about 3D graphics and related engine issues (so things like 3D math, rendering algorithms, spatial structures etc).

But the tutorial time actually involves a lot of "hands on" time spent in torque.

I've started off the class by showing the students how to create a gui element, which gets them used to adding to the engine itself. We create a "blend" gui control, which allows us to explore issues involved with alpha blending in 3D in the "safe" environment of the gui.

Next we moved onto creating objects within the scripts (basically, how to get objects to be created in the world editor). Which led onto our first real "object".

This object was basically a version of the fxRenderObject, with some modifications to allow us to render two quads in 3D space, with an initial textured quad, then blending that with a "lightmap" quad.

The students get to do all of the hands on changes to get thier object in the game, including scripts, engine code, and the modification which we ran through in class.

Now we are moving onto issues such as BSP's and spatial sorting and we are going to extend the fxRenderObject from the original into a more useful example of lightmap usage. We are going to be making a .bsp renderer using the fxRenderObject as a basis and moving onto looking at the issues of lightmap usage, multitexturing etc.

So far we are about half-way into the course, so its a bit of a pre-post-mortem, but overall, I think I've been quite surprised how well these students have adapted to the torque codebase.

Our assignments have basically been similar to the "resources" posted on the GG website, with a specific game theme (i.e. make an obstacle for a sheep themed puzzle game for a casual audience). Those have been very interesting to watch!

More as we progress!

Phil.