iTGB 1.2 ETA

#21 This whole PVR thing is very disappointing. Now I know why the devs haven't taken me up on my offer to pay the $250/hr rate to get it resolved on my end.

That's all I cared about for the 1.2 release. The release will be mute for me.

#22 I wonder how much you would have to offer them to have it accepted? :P

#23 No support for PVR is a pretty big competitive disadvantage.

#24 Wouldn't call it competitive disadvantage.
Its inacceptable basically making iTGB no iPhone technology at all, as you lose 8 to 16 times the memory per texture without it, which is not acceptable within the restricted resource boundaries of the phone.

Please focus back on getting iTGB optimized.
Nothing against iTGE beta XY, but for the past months, iTGE was the only thing we have seen happening anything.
Whenever iTGB is beeing talked about, the main thing that it ends commonly with is that we find another major anti-iphone behavior within the technology.

I don't care where the tech came from when it comes to those behaviors.
iTGB was not a free addon to TGB Pro (like iphone support for shiva, thats cheaper than TGB Pro). I payed $500 to get an iphone optimized technology that works similar to TGB, which means that I payed good cash that you do the dirty work for me / us.
For that reason I would like to ask you to finally get back actively to iTGB and make it finally reach the advertised 1.0 state (iphone technology) after iTGE 1.0 went out before touching the same again.
We have soon waited for 7 months to get what we payed for and at least I am losing patience.

How many people with and without experience in this sector are working on the technology?
From what I have seen in 1.1 and the geometry handling code, I am forced to assume that you have no one with advanded experience in iPhone / powervr mbx development at all as I don't see the slightest ASM code for the iPhones vertex unit the iphone has and from update rate we see, I would guess that we are talking of a team of 1-2 fulltime developers (or correspondingly more part time developers) for iTorque as whole.

Please correct me if I am wrong as I would be more than happy to be wrong and see iTGB become a real iPhone technology with 1.2

#25 PVR still works on non-cell based imageMaps.

Quote:Nothing against iTGE beta XY, but for the past months, iTGE was the only thing we have seen happening anything.

Untrue. Over the past month or so, I have been extremely open and verbal about the work going into iTGB 1.2 in the forums, e-mails, and IRC. I have been splitting my own time between iTGB 1.2 and Torque 3D World Editor docs. At no point has development stopped.

I have also directly stated that Usability was the big focus this time around, but that we were still including some optimizations. We are seeing games roll out using iTGB 1.1, which tells us we are on the right path and that 1.2 will be a big step forward.

#26 The forums are the only way most of us know what's going on. So e-mails and IRC don't count.

Michael, are you able to spit out some details about 1.2 in this thread to cheer some of us up?

#27 @Ray - You should definitely attend our IRC Hour then. A lot of news and announcements are revealed there before anywhere else. It's also a good way to ask questions that get lost in forums or blogs.

As far as e-mail goes, I'm usually very good about replying to inquiries for the same reason that I can't scour the forums like I used to.

* New Build Project GUI
* Master Xcode project
* Automatic loading of current game's resources into Xcode
* MP3 support
* Automated building of Xcode projects from TGB editor. So the ability to launch your game from editor to simulator
* DSO compiling automated from Editor and Build process
* PVR command line hooks, to get PVR generation of your textures during the build process
* More iPhone OS functionality, such as the keyboard exposed via script
* Updated docs on creating a blank project, making a simple app, optimizing it, then deploying it to the simulator/device
* General optimizations of scripts and memory

After 1.2, we begin working on the 3.0 implementation. During that process we will be releasing hotfixes for bugs, memory reduction, full motion video support, etc

There is more, but I'm at the office right and have to buckle down. I can't hang in the forums like I used to and still expect to get the same amount of work done.

#28 * General optimizations of scripts and memory

Can you elaborate a bit more on the "memory" part of this? :)

#29 Well i definitely like the sound of some of those! Hope the release isnt too far off track, my new macbook arrived today and im going to hold off installing iTGB until this is released :)

#30 Any new word on the date for 1.2? I am pretty excited for some of the changes, but all I can seem to find for a release date is pretty loose estimates most of which were estimating a time that was in the past from now. Although I don't see everything by any means so I may have missed it.

Also I have been wondering a bit about audio, it is my understanding that .ogg files don't work in iTGB, so after 1.2 we will be able to use .wav or .mp3. Are there plans to add more audio file types? .wav is too big for my purposes, and .mp3 files have too steep a licensing fee... .

#31 License fees with mp3? Never heard of that. Can someone elaborate or refute?

#32 @Ray - A change to some script interpretation, a rendering bug that was causing multiple redraws, and a small memory fix that loaded textures not being used. After the release we want to integrate Melv May's memory reduction code.

@Zeinad - I'm aiming for it to be released before the end of the weekend. Torque 3D World Editor docs go out this Friday, so I'm thinking on that day or Saturday.

@Chris - There is a licensing cost for using MP3s in a game. This is not a problem for iPhone apps, though. The license is covered by Apple/iTunes.

#33 Excellent! That is awesome to know about .mp3's in regards to iPhone apps. I look forward to 1.2 even more now.

#34 Some of those optimizations are nice and should make iTGB a little less annoying.

Michael, is script to code still a necessity? Because I paid for this, "Powerful scripting language with thorough optimizations for rapid script execution," and I feel that it is a redundant step and a hindrance to the workflow.

#35 Got things downloading and compiling, so I have a spare minute.

@Ee - There are a couple games in the App store made with iTGB, purely in TorqueScript. Any behaviors written in C++ will execute much faster, though. It really depends on what kind of behavior you are writing.

#36

Quote:You should definitely attend our IRC Hour then. A lot of news and announcements are revealed there before anywhere else. It's also a good way to ask questions that get lost in forums or blogs.

Sadly thats not optimal for all, as the IRC hour is US focused with a very europe unfriendly time sadly (US past work time -> 2+ AM here).
I did attend it in different occassions in the past and would like to take part in it more regularly but at that day of time its not too simple to do so.

I commonly try to chime through the logs of past hours where available to find the relevant parts, but there is a lot of "non important" that makes this a time intense thing. A compressed blog entry after each IRC hour with the important news bits would be a great thing.

#37 @Marc - Umm...guess you haven't been following my non-iTorque blogs. We have changed our time for the past 3 IRC Hour sessions to accommodate our Euro members. Also, after each session I post a recap in the blog and/or the feedback thread.

#38 Oh?
I guess then yes.
Have not checked the time since back then, so I will check that directly. Thank you for pointing that out

EDIT: Ah, I see, now its 12 PM, thats better :)

#39

Quote:After the release we want to integrate Melv May's memory reduction code.

Can somebody post a link to where this is located for those of us who are new to iTGB?

#40 As far as I understand, nowhere at least to us.
Thats code that Melv (recently aquired as fulltime GG dev) develops for TGB and thus is likely only in the internal builds (1.8.0 I guess as it is the next version to come likely as iTGB already contains that version mentioned but TGB beeing at 1.7.4 only)