Student challenges

#1 I taught a course using Torque for the first time, this semester. I had not used Torque before, so one challenge was the lack of decent documentation. I've always been adept at picking up new topics/technologies. Just give me a text and some time, and I'm fine. In this case, I started off with Finney's book, but that was a disaster, and there were no other published texts to help me, just the fragmented official documentation, and ten million unofficial forum threads. Fortunately, thanks to Ed Maurina, I finally got a handle on what was going on, and I think my students learned in a visceral and personal sense, the importance of comprehensive documentation! By the end of the semester, they were scripting some pretty impressive feats...

Another obstacle was the lack of a reliable IDE. I know there were some Windows solutions, and we'd tried the built-in debugger, but as Mac user I couldn't use the former, and the latter was not robustly documented. Basically, we just went back to how they did things in the ... what, 60's? 70's? ... using echo() statements to see what was going on.

The biggest challenge I faced was the lack of graphics. I tried looking at Blender, but that was an absolute morass: sure, it's free, but the interface was a joke. If I had devoted an entire course to Blender first, then had a second course in Torque, things might have worked out better. As it was, I bought some .dts files from the GarageGames store, and I would have been better off doing that at the start, skipping Blender entirely.

Michael Rogers

#2 As for the graphics, why bother with Blender, when you can get 3ds for 75 pounds per student. Which means that you get full 3ds 8 with support for each student. That should solve your problems. There's enough free content online that can be put into Torque - ans used as an extra excercise - after some tweaking. Since you're a mac user, getting stuff for Maya is as simple.

Toby.