Pre purchase questions.

#1 1) Yes you can pass references around. In torque script every object can be referenced by its handle which is a unique ID. For example you can do %player = new player(); then later do %player.shoot(); or pass %player to a function as %obj and call %obj.shoot() etc. You can also use the ID directly if you know it eg 1456.shoot();

For the scripting side of things, I'd recommend reading the public TGE docs that go over Torque script. You can also download the TGE demo to get a feel for scripting as T2D and TGE both use the same scripting engine.

2) There are probably several ways to do this. Off hand I can think of a few, such as using the custom data section of the tilemap. You could later parse this on load of your level and spawn particle emitters for any tiles that have the appropriate custom data entry. Another way would be to make use of an additional tile layer. This may be more suitable for a map/level editor though. I did read about plans for a scene editor, although I'm not sure how far off that is.

3) I'm not so sure about this. From what I've seen, circles are simply approximated using a custom collision poly that has more sides. I may be unaware of a feature in this regard though.

4) No idea. However, as an advantage for you, anything you learn script wise can be later used in TGE, which has taught me a lot. Also T2D can be plugged into TGE and used for all sorts of things, such as GUI's or embedded 2d objects (theres a video somewhere showing a T2D object been used inside TGE). Also the particle system in T2D is imo second to none.

Don't forget though that T2D is still EA. Although lots of it are in place, there will still be things missing such as realtime networking and more user friendly editors. All of which are been worked on for the final release though.

#2 1. Don't forget that %player will be a local variable, so if you define %player in your initPlayer function, it might not exist when you get to your playerShoot function. You could define it as $player which would make it a global variable.

2. There is a callback which gets activated when a tile comes into view, so you could spawn your particle emitter at that point. That would save having dozens of particle emitter going off all around the map when they're not on screen. The easiest way of doing this would be to have it as a seperate layer that moves with your map, and use invisible tiles as markers for the positioning of the emitters.

3. As mentioned, if you want a regular poly as your collision poly, you can just specify the number of sides for the poly to have. The more sides, the more circle like. You should be able to get a significant number of sprites zipping about on screen. I haven't actually run a test on my machine to see how many sprites/particles effects I can have going before bringing the system to its knees. Might be intersting to try it :)

#3 Hello,
Thank you for your replies, Great to hear about the scripting but I'll have to give it some thought.
I have to say the particle editor and physics engine does look very nice :)

#4 3. You can use this to see some results... keep adding blocks, each block is using full collision and physics also :)

#5 @Matthew

Non-T2D owners cant access that link, or perhaps its just me...?

#6 Hmm, sorry about that

try this