#1

Quote:No support, no Help for the beginner.

While TGEA is lacking in documentation, there is a wealth of knowledge on the GG site and TDN (when the site is up). I certainly wish there was a solid ground-up documentation effort for all of the GG engines, but that will likely never fully happen. The GG engines require more of a discovery and code-by-example learning process. Certainly there is a ramp-up time required to get comfortable with the engine and it can be very frustrating for new users.

But, I don't think any of the GG engines are for beginners. While TGB is the easiest of products to work with, it is still lacking in solid documentation to get the beginner game dev off his/her feet. But I don't think I would want that product focused entirely at beginners as it would likely have a limited feature set and lots of front-end non-sense for the experienced developer to be able to get his/her hands dirty. All of the GG engines assume the users have a certain amount of knowlege of game dev, and if it's too chalenging for you, then you probably don't have that knowlege yet. But Google IS your friend.

TGEA by far, IMO, is the last engine the average new game developer should start with. There is just too many important basics that need to be learned before diving into that engine. Certainly there are exceptions to this, as there are talented people out there with the learning ability and the drive to push through the challenges.

None of the GG products have a "Make Game" button, so they will take effort. Proper game dev isn't for the weak of heart. And if you can't push through the challenges, you aren't gonna make it very far.

There are other vendors out there who make game maker studios, and perhaps that's a better start for you.

Contact support and see if you can get a refund, or shelve your license for now and go learn in another arena for a while.

Quote:not finished product, just for those who have time to lose.

I beg to differ: www.garagegames.com/products/browse/game/?sort=all

Good luck in your pursuit, and don't give up.

#2

Quote:No support

Support is ongoing - there's just no hand holding along the way. It's an engine and it's always evolving, so it's hard to keep the documentation up to date, and bug fixes are always rolling in.

Quote:no Help for the beginner

Looking at your forum posts I see that you've asked a question or two and they were answered. I personally make an attempt to answer question for beginners when I see them. There are many other people who also take the time to help and to offer suggestions.

Dive back in, try to learn, because you can do a lot with this "unfinished" product. If you get stuck then experiment, research and ask questions.

Giving up only makes it a loss of time for you.

#3 I really hope that Michael and the other guys involved in documentation don't take comments like the above to heart.

The documentation for the 3 Torque products (TGB, TGE and TGEA) that I use to be great. Period.

Do you expect the documentation to be able to answer every question you could have? Do you want it to hold your hand and tell you how to implement every feature for your game? Making comments like "No support, no Help for the beginner" and "not finished product, just for those who have time to lose" do not help anybody, especially not you.

Don't you realise that every hour that Michael and the other guys waste responding in these threads is an hour lost developing their products, our investments?

#4 Hi,

I do not want to be refund, the problem is not the money.

I am developing in C++ since 1993, (Borland C + + 4.0), I am not a beginner in C++.

And I develop games since 1998, based on board ARM32 processor for the casino (real casino, not web)

2 years ago, I look the various 3D engine existing Irrlicht, Ogre, Nebula, Lightfeather etc
I never had a problem to a small sample myself. big forum, big community help etc.

our game is finish at 60% with irrlicht.

I wanted to switch to another engine 3d, more professional. (I have no doubt that is professional TGEA)

but maybe more small examples would be welcome.

I think the most Staff favors those who use scripts, but for security reasons I can not use the scripts for the basics of my game, perhaps for little task.

"Phillip OShea", I agree with you, but if there were more example, there would be less stupid question.
and I can not spend 3 months, just to see...

But if someone wants to make me change my opinion I am open to all.

Sorry if I offended some people.

regards
Hirogens

PS : scuse for my bad english..I'm french.

#5

Quote:I can not spend 3 months, just to see

I cannot believe that sentence, coming from a professional programmer. You cannot invest 3 months to study and learn a new Framework??

You better think in terms of YEARS to learn a new framework in deep. Go figure...

#6 What security reasons do you have that prevent you from using scripts?

#7 Hi,

"Novack"
No I can't invest 3 months, because we are very very late.
I can spend 3 months or more, if I'm sure to use TGEA.
I have a demo to my producer at February...

Normaly I would buy the "COMMERCIAL License", but I thought, test it before...

"Scott Burns"
For me "Script" may be, decompile-it.
I must be sure that nobody can decompil it.

regards

#8 A quick note on decompilation of scripts versus decompilation of C++:

As it stands right now, it is at least an order of magnitude easier to decompile a C++ compiled/linked executable than it is to decompile TorqueScript into a usable format. Why?

Because C++ decompilers have existed for years, but to decompile TorqueScript, someone would have to write the tool first.

In addition, if you are concerned about TorqueScript security, then there are 3 techniques off of the top of my head I can think of to make TS harder to decompile:

--MD5 check it, and don't read the files in if they don't match a predetermined hash.
--add a basic encryption mechanism when writing and reading .dso files.
--as you implied, do your code that needs true security in source code. Of course, evaluate why you are concerned about security in the first place before worrying too much about it. A game is not normally required to meet the same standards as gambling software/machines.

#9 " A game is not normally required to meet the same standards as gambling software/machines."

Says you...

#10 There are plenty of security options to try to prevent that. There are resources here on the site to have everything be within an encrypted zip, and of course there are third party DRM solutions out there. The thing to keep in mind though is that no matter what level of encryption and security you have you'll never keep everyone out. If someone really wants to crack your game and decompile it they will.

The dso files alone should stop the casual pirate, while encrypting them will likely stop the casual pirate who googles for a decompiler.

#11

Quote:No support, no Help for the beginner.

Quote:While TGEA is lacking in documentation

Oy...Does anyone bother clicking the links anymore?

DOCUMENTATION

Short list of links
Documentation Hub
TGEA Documentation Landing Page
TGEA Official Documentation
TGE Documentation Landing Page

FUTURE DOCUMENTATION PLANS

MAJOR Documentation Announcement 1
New Documentation System
Documentation Announcements
Week of Awesome News!
September Documentation Wrap Up
October Documentation Wrap Up

#12 "Stephen Zepp",

I know for C++.
Indeed I have never understood why everyone uses the C ++...
for me the C + + is not a good programming language, but the customer is king.

"Edward"
And I developpe all my software with standard gambling software.
I am of the industrial world.. I'm electronics engineer.

regards

#13 Sigh, another case of people not understanding that game dev is a long HARD process.

#14 My main question is why, with 3 months to finish a project, did you decide to change engines? Preparing for the next project, I can understand; changing during the initial development phase because another technology makes sense, I get. But with 60% completion and 3 months of devtime left, it seems to be a very, very strange decision to make. One that makes no business or development sense to me. Since you've made the jump, I would recommend reading through the links that Michael has posted and to do a thorough doxygen scan of the source and dig in deep. Because you just made a very strange business decision for being on the wire.

#15 I don't have say, that my game must be finish in 3 months.
I said

No I can't invest 3 months, because we are very very late.
I can spend 3 months or more, if I'm sure to use TGEA.
I have a demo to my producer at February...<=error it's distributor


we think finish on September for beta version.

And for "help", where is the "chm "or "hlp", oxygen is not a good documentation...

have a real forum ? Vbulletin, phpbb or other with possibility to make somes real searchs.

regards

#16 That makes more sense. I misread it and was thinking "three months! Are they crazy making a switch now?"

There is html help included with the distribution and Michael Perry has been working hard on the TGEA documentation push. You can see the fruits of his efforts under the documentation menu on the site.

If you are doing a massive source port, then the source code is the best documentation that you can have, and doxygen parses it and organizes it in an easily readable manner.

we are currently working on a new web site, but it hasn't come about yet. It will include new forums and search facilities. The search has become more of an issue as the community has grown and the amount of stuff to search had grown exponentially.

#17 I know this is a bit of an old thread, but I want to make a comment on it from the perspective of a new user.

I'm a professional C++ developer (I code interface software for scientific instruments), and I've worked on games as a hobby for something like 30 years (my first compiler was TurboASM for the Commodore 64, hehe). I've worked with C++ almost as long as it has existed, and have coded a variety of amateur game engines, though I've never managed to code a full game (I have the attention span of a gnat, hehe). I would consider myself fairly expert with using DirectX. So I have a pretty good feel for how games work.

As for Torque, I came here because I was tired of engine coding, which never turned out to do quite what I wanted to do. I wanted to code a game already, so I turned to Torque. I'm glad I did. I've had the package for a week, and though I'm still struggling, I've learned a LOT, and think I'm finally cresting the top of the learning curve, having finally managed to get an atlas terrain working (made with L3DT) and having imported a dif file of a building I created in Constructor, I feel like it's finally starting to come together.

But having said that, I can totally see where Christophe is coming from. The learning curve for this engine is steep, and unfortunately, the docs just don't help much in this regard. There is too much information, and much of it is out of date. So the first thing you have to do is hunt through the docs and try to decide what is useful and what is junk due to being obsolete (which in all honesty, is most of it). And if you don't know what you are doing in the first place, that's a difficult thing to do just right there.

I mean no disrespect to Michael and his documentation efforts. I don't envy his job, which seems to me to be something close to impossible. I'm sure he's doing a great job, but when the engine is constantly changing from day to day, there's simply no way to keep up.

The other problem is the search function. Sorry gang, but it is awful. I've never before seen such a terrible search system, and this is in a place that probably needs it quite a bit more than anywhere else. For example, I tried today to find the TGEA 1.8 release notes. No luck. You think I could type in "TGEA Release Notes 1.8" and find it, but what you get is page after page of useless stuff, none of it related to TGEA 1.8. The reason I was looking for them was because at some point I thought I had read (somewhere) that atlas now supports more than 4 alpha maps, but that was in the midst of reading a million other tidbits and it didn't register at the time, and now I'm not sure I really read what I thought I did. So I wanted to confirm that now that I had a bit of time with L3DT under my belt. But now I can't find it. I can find nothing on the site or in TDN about alpha maps and atlas, no matter what search parameters I use. Swell.

And I have to agree with Christophe about one other thing. doxygen is NOT documentation. It's fine for getting function parameters, but other than that, it's next to useless. It's okay if you already know what you are looking for and just need a quick reference, but please don't rely on it as documentation for the engine. That's not it's purpose, and should not be considered a substitute for good documentation. Anyone who thinks it is adequate has never attempted to learn a package from it.

Should the documentation hold your hand? No. Such a thing wouldn't be possible given the different tools everyone is using. But you know what would be really useful to the typical newbie? A mini project that takes someone from the base game and shows them how to add a dif, how to set up a terrain, how to add a dts, and maybe a bit of simple scripting. Give them something to start with so they don't feel like they've hit a brick wall right at the start, and they can take it from there. In fact, Michael had started such a thing, but only went three tutorials into it before he had to stop. That was the single most useful thing I've found on this site as a new person. Having a starting point upon which to build up your knowledge is priceless, and unfortunately, this package just doesn't give you that, it dumps a directory on you and says "there you go, good luck", heh.

Well, I didn't mean to be negative about everything. This engine does a lot of good things, and I'm not belittling that. Jeez, this thing is 10 times the engine of anything I built. I could go on for pages what I like about this thing. But it's not useful to hear about what works, it's useful to hear about what doesn't work, heh, so take it in that light.

Fix the search function. That right there would eliiminate three quarters of the repetitive newbie questions you get, allowing you to focus on the good stuff. I would suggest dumping this forum for a professional one. You guys work on the engine and let the php/sql people code the forums, it's what they do. vBulletin is an awesome forum, there's a reason why everyone uses it :)

Then somebody do a newbie guide. Hell, I'd do it myself if I had the knowledge, but unfortunately I don't (yet). But if I were doing it, I'd go over just the very basics, somthing like:

Chapter 1: Setting up a new project. Dissection of the directories.
Chapter 2: main.cs dissected (both of them)
Chapter 3: Barebones setup (getting rid of the starter FPS stuff, and what is important to keep)
Chapter 4: The basic class heirarchy (SimGroup, SimObject, etc) and callbacks (onStart, onCollision, etc).
Chapter 5: a typical mis file dissected
Chapter 6: getting an atlas file into your game (presuming you have one, generating one is not in the domain of this engine, and should be left up to those packages that make them)
Chapter 7: Getting a dif file into your game
Chapter 8: Getting a dts file into your game
Chapter 9: scripting and datablocks overview
Chapter 10: putting it all together, scripting an object to respond to a callback

These wouldn't be complex, just an example or two to give new people a baseline, some knowledge to start with which they can then build on.

Anyway, I've spent way more time on this than I intended to. I just thought it might be helpful to hear from someone who is new to Torque but not new to programming or games. In other words, your target audience :)

#18 @Ron: I assume you mean opacity maps, not alpha maps ;)

#19 - Doxygen
What you probably mean is that Doxygen-generated documentation is no *user* documentation. That's right. It's *code* documentation and for that purpose, it is very useful.

- User documentation
Torque may still be lacking in that department, though I think Michael Perry is doing a great job in pushing the state of affairs here.

However, though I know this won't be acceptable to many, my viewpoint is that, if you have some programming knowledge, there is always the code and the example data. If you want to know how something works and you can't find some ready-made documentation for it, just dive in and see how it works. Dissect it. Mess it up. Play with it. Actually, I personally find this to be the fastest and most thorough way to learn something about the tech.

#20 I do agree about the search function to a degree. It's not completely broken. With care you can get what you need out of it.

@Ron , I believe the resource you were looking for is TGEA 1.7.1 Extra Atlas Opacity Maps