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   Latest Entry
   

   First update of 2025!

   By JeffR, January 19

   Greetings and salutations!
   It’s been a hot minute and a half since the last workblerg, admittedly in part because it’s a lot easier to just keep working on stuff rather than stopping to type a bunch about working on stuff, but ultimately a lot of people get a high-level sense of progress on the engine from these so really, I should keep up on them more.
   Not everyone is constantly hoovering up all the information in the various discord channels, after all.
   So, given that, there’s a lot to go over to get everyone caught up, so we may as well get cracking!

   What’s Been Done So Far?
   So, all told, there’s been 289 pull requests merged in since the last work blog. Which is a lot, to say the least. So why not go over some of the highlights!

   General Fixes and Improvements
   We fixed up a LOT of miscellaneous errors, warnings and other related issues that would cause message spam. Similarly we added various sanity checks in a whole bunch of places to catch overruns or out of bound problems which are obviously just generally a good thing.

   Less critical, but similarly important to the general application stability we did a pass in a bunch of files to ensure classes initialize their variables and clean up unused values, which keeps things behaving reliably, especially when you’re hopping between Debug or Release builds.

   Various mechanical bugs that got fixed pertained to:

   • castRay behavior
   • various bits of playing audio
   • Vehicle physics tweaks and corrections
   • Sound effect spam from impacts
   • Tweaks and fixes for player animations and callbacks relating to them playing
   • Datachunker and FrameAllocator refactor for better memory management
   • Sanity checks on prefabs getting child objects that have somehow ended up as null
   • Vehicle steering thread fixes so mounted objects work as expected on network
   • File write improvements
   • Resolved various crashes, in particular ones that happen on exit
   • Fixed up GBitmap getColor behavior and cleanups to the color pickers
   • Added setSkinName to TSStatic for consistency of utility methods

   Additionally, a few passes were done to comply up the code to some modern conventions, such as rather than simply marking everything as virtual, and letting the compiler figure things out - which didn’t always work consistently between compilers and platforms - we now use virtual on the topmost declaration and the ‘override’ keyword on all derivatives, ensuring compilers understand the design intent better.

   Another more general shift which is a ‘partway’ step for follow up work is templatization of Matrix math classes. While it doesn’t replace the existing Matrix math classes, the idea is that in the future we have templates defined for the various Matrix math classes so that we can utilize common code rather than duplicating and redefining everything for every permutation, such as 3x3, 3x4, 4x3 and 4x4.
   Having more common code via templates means less duplication, which means fewer places code could misalign in one spot but not the other.
   The idea would eventually follow a similar setup for most of our ‘multiple’ math types such as Point*F and the like.
   All told, we had 72 different PRs merged for various fixes, improvements and additions. Which is a pretty sizable chunk of the whole.
   GUI
   On the gui side of things, it wasn’t as monstrous as the general fixes, but we certainly had a good number of fixes and improvements there as well.
   Some key highlights:

   • Fixed a buffer overflow in GuiTreeViewCrtl
   • Updated editor theming to utilize the stuff Nils provided for a more sleek dark theme
   • Updated BaseUI in a myriad of ways to facilitate gamemodes selection and filtering(more on that further down) as well as improved handling of menu navigation with both mouse and keyboard as well as gamepad
   • Added the ability to enable search filtering in dropdown controls
   • Fixed various callback behaviors from some gui controls
   • Added a method to forcefully constrain the mouse to a canvas(Thanks Steve!)
   • Added the ability for MLTextCtrl to write out characters over type for a typewriter effect
   • Fixed guiObjectView control issues
   • Fixed up the state management for GuiBitmapButton

   This is less huge than the general fixes, but still some good changes in here. Probably the biggest specific changes were the updates to the Editor theme:
   Old:
   
   New:
   

   As well as updates to the BaseUI
   Old:
   

   

   New:
   

   

   In addition to the main menu stuff in BaseUI, the pause menu was updated to be the ‘Game Menu’ to allow easier slot-in of game-specific menus easily, even with just dropping in a module.
   For example, Catographer utilizes inventory and map menus for gameplay stuff, and you can see how dropping in those modules just registers the menus to the GameMenu below:
   The default Game Menu setup at the pause screen:
   

   And as you can see with Catographer like mentioned above, we’ve dropped in new pages to the menu, like the map, inventory or objectives menus. Which show in the top bar and can easily be swapped between:
   

   Much easier to expand the menu in a consistent, easy-to-use way for both the dev and the player, leading to a better experience overall. All you need is the hook against the callback which is invoked when the GameMenu is opened, and it looks like this:

   

   Editor
   The editor updates were the main focus for 4.1 and while we haven’t hit everything we were hoping to, the big focus was some important foundational updates to make working with and expanding the editor a LOT easier than it currently is.
   Some of the highlight changes are:

   • Added typehints in the SceneTree, as well as what primary asset is used on certain classes, such as showing the ShapeAsset used by a TSStatic below. All of which is data that the search filter on the tree can find
     • 
   • Added multi dimensional entries for certain math types in the inspector
     • 
   • Fixed up the forest element inspector
   • Expanded the editor number range to 7 digits
   • Formatting fixes for the several GUIs and editor windows
   • Added an ‘Add’ menubar entry that parses object class categories to automatically register spawnable classes to both world and gui editors
     • 
   • Added a class prototyping UI to easily block out derivatives and callbacks
   • Various fixes for IBL and probes
   • Adds a callback to objects so if the editor is saving, objects can do special logic in response. Such as resetting PathShapes back to start so they’re always in the right spot in the saved level
   • Updates Material and ParticleData fields to organize them sanely to facilitate shifting off of custom adhoc editor GUIs for those to using normal inspectors(more on that below)
   • Fixed presentation of bitmask/enum fields in the inspector
   • Ensures material animation flags are cleared when editing so they don’t ‘stick’
   • Fixes for arrays of imageAsset types so things correctly update in classes like guiBitmapCtrl when editing
   • Fixed guiShapeEdPreview not displaying IBL
   • Fixed animation scrubber in ShapeEd
   • Fixed some value irregularities with positions when editing
   • Fixed saving of Asset Browser position so it stays where you left it
   • Added search bar to Datablock Editor inspector
     • 
   • Properly preserves gridsnap settings between runs
   • Makes snap buttons visually synced to their value
   • Integrated SubScenes and SceneGroups into the world editor interface.

   For some of the more ‘meaty’ changes, specifically to facilitate that whole ‘easier to expand and work with the editor’ we’ve got stuff like:

   
   Programmatic action pallets
   You may not have ever thought about these:
   

   But in the original editor stuff they were explicit gui controls that were just added onto the gui stack of the editor suite. That meant that while it worked perfectly, expanding them was kind of a pain. It wasn’t easy to just be like “Hey, in this specific context, I want to be able to show/hide more buttons/actions on the pallet!”
   So I added a programmatic version of it. You shouldn’t even normally notice a difference, but it means that we can now inject in additional buttons in certain contexsts when needed.
   What might those contexts be, you might ask?
   A fine question!
   Here’s one example with SubScenes or SceneGroups(we’ll get to what the deal with those is further down, but think of them as ‘like prefabs, but rather than a dedicated file, they’re just child objects in a SimGroup you can control the position of’.
   

   So, because we may want to move the group itself and not the child objects in some specific cases, we wanted mode buttons to let you pop between normal behavior(moving the SceneGroup naturally moves all the child objects) and moving JUST the SceneGroup(leaving the child objects where they are, causing an offset)
   You can see it in action here:

   Those buttons for the ‘Move/Rotate SubScene + children’ only show up when selecting a valid object type, otherwise they disappear! And before, that would’ve been kind of a pain to do.

   Improvements To ‘In Place’ Workflow
   This is a somewhat perceptibly minor change, but can improve workflows a fair bit. Namely, it Adds some additional elements to the Datablock fields on Gamebase derived objects:
   

   The three dots button jumps to the datablock in the DB editor directly, which isn’t a big change. What’s more important is the little plus button, which if clicked, jumps you straight to creating a new datablock with the inheritance already filled in.
   So if we take our DefaultPlayerData there, hit the button(and select what Module it goes to) we see the Create New Datablock window pop up like so:
   

   As you can see, inheritance is already filled in to come from the DefaultPlayerData, so you can just make it and create it easily, That allows you to jam out derivatives right when you’re working instead of needing to pop over to the DB editor, track to the class, create new, select the parent DB, etc to create a derivative.
   You still CAN do all that, of course, but the idea is to automate those steps in the context of the + button on the DB field.

   Similarly, to facilitate the easy workflows when working with datablocks, especially because that list can get LONG, you can now search/filter the DB field dropdown too!
   
   When typing ‘dem’ it filters to the DB entry(ies) that have those letters in it:
   

   
   Library
   We updated various libraries and library-associated things here. This isn’t anything overly special, but it is important to keep track of!
   Here’s what was updated:

   • Updated SDL to 2.28.4
   • Added STB for image loading
   • Updated Assimp
   • Fixed up logic so when converting from assimp data structures to Torque, the matrices are correct.
   • Fixed various issues relating to using Theora
   • Changed to using libSndFile
   • Updated openAL
   • Fixed dynamic library builds on windows
   • Cleared out a bunch of temp files for Bullet that weren’t needed
   • Added support for modules to define the inclusion of libraries, so one can simply drop in a module into the data/ directory and regen CMake and it will detect and process not only source files, but cmake configs needed to build libraries such as libCurl

   Platform/System
   Likewise to library updates, this is mostly maintenance and upkeep stuff, though there were some important tweaks to various parts of how the CMake configs are organized/ran

   • Cleaned up fileModifiedTime stuff
   • Fixes up the libCurl module cmake config
   • Fixed issue with sdlCPUInfo with FreeBSD
   • Making startTime static to avoid collisions in the core/console stuff
   • Clean up display of optional core modules in the cmake config
   • Fixed the cmake config to properly add in the wind deformation hlsl and glsl shader feature files
   • Brought engine requirement down to C++17 standards from 20
   • Multiple various apple fixes to make it build more properly and pack files in a more ‘apple friendly way’
   • Fix so you can disable TORQUE_TOOLS flag and still build
   • Fixed zip archive reading
   • Adds a TORQUE_TOOLS_EXT flag for specialty stuff that you only wanna turn on very deliberately beyond just tools support, such as enabling the ability for the engine to run commandline calls.
   • Various cmake format/config changes in the interest of trying to cut down how much duplication and redundant defines/settings there are throughout various places

   Rendering
   Altogether there weren’t any sort of ‘gigantic’ changes for rendering on this one, since it wasn’t really the target goal. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t quite a number of fixes or improvements of render-related matters!
   Highlights:

   • Reverse depth & 32F buffer format
   • OpenGL fixes for HDR
   • Fix vert color swizzle
   • Optimizing Bins
   • Various lighting corrections
   • Adds ability for IBL to scale with ambient lighting so it works with Time of Day
   • D3DCompiler_47 dll to ensure deployed projects have it packed and ready when publishing
   • Make cubic reflectors respect detailAdjust
   • Fixed probe capturing behavior
   • Fizzle fix for GL
   • Fix Sun corona
   • Updates to GFX Shader handling 
   • Implemented IES light profiles 
   • Fix dynamic cubemaps on objects
   • Removes glowbin as a render pass
   • Added normal map handling to imposters with assets
   • Fixed cubemap baking DX11
   • Add skylight IBL display to Material Preview display
   • Tweaked attenuation for probes
   • Roughness corrections with mip ramp-up

   Overall there weren't big shakeups, but various fixes and optimizations and the like. Probably the biggest specific visual change was the IES profiles which allow lights to load up mathmatic representations of certain lights in real life to make them have more real penumbra patterning like so:

   

   Scripting
   For scripting stuff, we had some various fixes and improvements, but a couple of big changes as well.
   Highlights:

   • Console Refactor
   • Add localization utility methods
   • Fixed type bugs for TS
   • Fixed an error in the DB substitution logic
   • Fixed evaluateF argument handling
   • Fix foreach breaking if it iterates over non-existent objects
   • Removed CInterface script hooks because Console Refactor superseded it
   • Console interop improvements
   • Various script stability fixes
   • Various updates and improvements to the TS compiler, parser and lexer
   • Fixed error printing
   • Fix callOnChildren varargs

   All in all the biggest thing is the Console Refactor where the idea was doing a lot of standardization and making it generally easier to interop and maintain. Not really anything that’d impact the end user, but it has some convenient bits for up-keep.

   Assets
   For assets it’s broadly just a bunch of fixes for functionality, so we can just pick out a few of the highlights:

   • SFX Playlist asset working 
   • Fixes saving of asset definitions that have sub-objects properly
   • Adjusts the logic for spawned simObjects from tamil files so array’d fields works properly
   • Updates to asset load workflow
   • generateCachedPreviewImage fixed
   • Ensures that when an asset is edited, it’ll properly refresh
   • imageAssets can be blank
   • Improvements to triggering of shape loading with TSStatics
   • Simplify sound slots 
   • Fix glb asset importer file detection
   • Correct malformed import config passthrough
   • Updates to Asset Importer
   • Fixed utilization of material fields so they can work with NamedTexTargets
   • Added a reloadModuleFiles(%moduleGroup) command to allow forcing of reloads when needed

   Testing/Debugging
   Not much specific here, just a bunch of various fixes to improve the CICD/Testing suite along with a few debug reporting cleanups.

   
   Gamemodes, Subscenes And Spawning
   This is one of the bigger updates to things, so we’ll go more in-depth with it here, as was mentioned in a couple of spots above.
   So! 

   
   Gamemodes
   Gamemodes were always sort of a loose concept as far as T3D was concerned. Obviously there needed to be a grand arbiter of gameplay logic such as rules for ‘if players kill X number of enemies they win’, but beyond the necessary callbacks to have them kick off when a player connects to a server, everything else was pretty loosey-goosey in terms of integration.
   Want to know what gamemodes you have available? Want to be able to filter selectable maps by gamemodes? Want to use a ‘Racing’ game mode, but rather than the default assumption of racing cars, you want it to be a footrace so you spawn players?
   All that sort of thing would require a good bit of extra developer integration and it wasn’t easy for modules to just interop with it.
   This is especially a problem when the goal with modules is being able to drop them in and largely be integrated automatically so you can focus on the glue bits that brings them together into a coherent gameplay design.
   And, above all of that, frankly people weren’t positive how you were supposed to set/associate a Gamemode to a level either. As well as the fact that it was just a text field on the Scene object meant that if you typo’d the gamemode name nothing worked and that could be annoying to chase down.
   So what do you do?
   Well you set some standards!
   

   In specific, Gamemode is now an actual, concrete class rather than just a ScriptObject with a namespace slapped onto it. On it likewise we have utility methods to query what gamemodes exist and some other neat doodads.
   Another important bit is Gamemodes can be marked as being activated or not, as well as if they automatically activate.
   This is prudent because if you have a game with only one gamemode, then it’s silly to need to faff around with toggling it on in the menus or whatnot. 
   So, where that gets you is you can have 1 or many gamemodes, and then the system knows what gamemodes it has, and can run queries on them.
   The old callGamemodeFunction, which originally just iterated on whatever was defined in the Scene object now works against the standardized ‘get a list of our gamemodes’ method, and calls the method if it’s available, and the gamemode is activated.
   This means that any level of mix-and-match for gamemodes Just Works with interoping to the level loading sequence, or if you do call signalling for gameplay glue code logic.

   Want a Racing Capture The Flag Deathmatch game? Just activate Racing, CTF and Deathmatch Gamemodes and spawn in and bask in the glorious chaos you’ve created.

   But you may be wondering ‘Surely maps have to be compatible with certain gamemodes right? How do you set that?’ and that is a fantastic observation.
   The reality is that you can’t assume your insane RCTFD gameplay smorgasbord you just invented above would work on every map. If a map doesn’t support capture the flag in any capacity, you wouldn’t want that map to be chooseable on the level select screen after all!

   The good news is, it’s pretty danged easy to select gamemodes for Scenes now. If you have a Gamemode made and the script executes, then when you edit the Scene object in your mis file, you can look in the inspector and see this nifty shindig:
   

   And selecting what Gamemodes the level is compatible with is as easy as picking them there!
   With updates to the BaseUI menus, we scan the levels’ listed Gamemodes picked via that field, and if you pick a Gamemode in it like so:
   

   Then when you advance to the Levels list it filters down appropriately:
   

   The logic of the menu is fairly smart too, in that if the Scene never defined a gamemode, we figure it’s a sort of ‘assumed default’ state and let you at least *try* to run any gamemode with it. Likewise, if you only have one Gamemode, we assume that’s THE gamemode, and activate it automatically.
   What that means is if you’re making a pretty simple game, like maybe it’s an exploration game with one map and just the one Gamemode, then you don’t have to do any special sauce to set it up, it just figures “Only one of these, and one of these? That’s probably the winning combo there”.
   Keeps things easy to snap in and iterate on.

   Once you have the gamemode picked and running, it largely behaves the same. The client/server and level loading logic has various callGamemodeFunction invokes that, as mentioned above, call the function for any active Gamemodes, and just… does what the gamemode logic defines, largely same as before. 
   Just more standardized and structured.

   Pretty neat huh?
   But what if you want like, one main map, but then do something crazy like having a Nighttime variant, that not only changes a bunch of small bits in the map(Streetlights? On! Sun? Gone!). Or if you wanted to have a single base map, but be able to slap in necessary bits for certain game modes, like changing the ‘bits’ in the map depending on if you’re doing CTF or Racing?
   Or heck, what if you just look at the map and go “Good lord there’s so much junk here, do I really need to load it ALL right off the bat?”
   Well, I have fantastic news because that brings us to…

   SubScenes
   So what’s a Subscene, you may ask?
   Well it’s like a regular Scene we’ve had for levels for a while, but… sub-ier.
   Thank you, thank you, don’t forget to turn out the lights when you leave.

   Alright, jokes aside, it really is a ‘Sub-ier Scene’. Where a Scene is basically the grand arbiter of the content of a level and has some neat utility in tracking/managing the objects under it, being able to pick gamemodes it works for, etc, etc.
   Subscenes are similar, but they are intended to exist WITHIN a scene. So if you have a big ol’ chonker map with roads and trees and terrain and all that jazz as your main scene.
   You could have a SubScene that only has certain objects to load from its own subMis file when you need it. Think of it like how Prefabs are placed in the map, and it loads the contents from a file, and you can move it to where you need the bits to be.
   The main difference is SubScenes are intended to act more as a container of objects, rather than AN object made of bits.

   So how’s that work?
   Well, first thing is we need some junk to make into a SubScene!
   So you have some objects in your map and for whatever your vision you have, you need it to be ripped callously out of existence and shoved into a pocket reality, er, subMis file. Like lets just take these little ConvexShapes minding their own business.

   I’ve decided I need them to be in a SubScene.
   So, per the video below, you can see how I can make a new SubScene, then add the objects to it.

   Once we have it and have a SubScene in the map, we just add objects to it like a SimGroup, and then save the Subscene. This’ll save the child objects out to that subMis file, rather than the main level mis file.

   From there, you’ve got options. You can either programmatically force a subscene to load in script by just invoking the load() method(or unload, for the opposite) or have it load when a client enters into the bounds of the subscene - which allows for a simplified form of level streaming.
   Per the video above, you can even see how when I don’t have it selected, and the camera isn’t within the bounds it’ll unload after a few seconds(a configurable variable), and when the client re-enters the bounds we load again!
   You can even establish conditions on if the SubScene can load, making it so players need to complete an objective before the next part of the map is loaded in or similar.
   You can even set Gamemodes on subscenes like you can for regular Scenes, which lets you build out logic to filter subscenes easily for your game’s logic.

   Ultimately, in its current form it’s a pretty baseline implementation, but with a lot of options for how to utilize it to control stuff being layered on or loaded in.
   As it gets more beatups and used more, we’ll expand and refine the functionality of it to make it even more useable and more powerful.

   Spawning
   The last big chunk of work that was done was for the spawning logic. Originally the gamemode was the ultimate controller of when and what spawned and why.
   It worked, of course, but it was pretty restrictive, and absolutely got in the way of the idea of mix-and-matching gamemodes, or making it easy to drop in modules and just have it work easily.
   If you wanted to do the previously mentioned ‘Racing game but you spawn as a player instead’ idea? You were dropping in the racing kit module and then getting down and dirty in the script to change it yourself to spawn a player.
   That was ‘fine’, but also quite restricting. And beyond that, poor for rapid prototyping and iteration times. So where we ended up shifting things is pulling the invokes for spawning back into the client/server loading stack.
   We know that when a client connects to a server and loads into a map, they need to spawn as *something*. Even if that something is just a camera.
   So? We just do module and gamemode calls to let them have a chance to interject what they think the client should spawn as, where, and with what parameters.
   It works via an override system, so last thing to override has final say.
   In the end there’s 3 main new methods that get called:

   • SetSpawnObjectType
     • Sets what the connecting client should spawn as in terms of object type/class. Such as camera, player, vehicle, etc
   • SetSpawnPoint
     • Indicates WHERE they should spawn. 
   • OnPostSpawn
     • Final after-spawn effects. Setting up inventory, attachments, changing the team colors, etc

   These are called as part of the client connect/load stack, as mentioned, with it walking through any modules that have those functions defined, as well as any active gamemodes that also have the functions defined.
   The logic of the calls utilizes a signal and counting system, so it ensures all modules and gamemodes that *can* work with those functions have a chance to do their work before continuing.
   Normally, it’s a simple ‘run script and be done’, but depending on the gameplay in question, you may need to wait for a maze to generate, or other asynchronous logic to execute you can’t assume a certain amount of time for.
   From you, the developer’s perspective, it just slots in and works, but in the back end it gives everything enough time to ‘breath’ to try and keep things running even when stuff may take inconsistent amounts of time to run.
   Why do all of this? It’s simple.
   It allows things to drop in and Just Work.
   If you’re doing a racing game, but want the footrace style, then dropping in a player module instead of a vehicle module, with said player module definition the SetSpawnObjectType to be a player means that the incoming client will ultimately spawn as a player, not a vehicle.
   It lets the logic and rules break out much more piecemeal to let stuff interop more cleanly.
   To further facilitate this, we added a Priority field to Modules, that allow you to nudge them around for these callbacks’ order without messing with the ACTUAL load order and dependencies structure.
   Ultimately, nothing stops you from just defining all the logic and rules in your gamemode and have it be super strict and rigid, but the main point is you no longer *have* to, and we can set up modules to behave in a much, much more ‘Drop In and Go’ manner.
   Better flexibility, better prototyping speed.

   
   So, What’s Left?
   Good news is, honestly not much.
   4.1 certainly has taken longer than desired, but that’s what happens when you’re doing practical beatups and realizing there’s a lot of spots that have rust or dust all over them and need a good pass with a pressure washer and an aggressive polishing pass after.
   But even with the unexpected drag-out time, the majority of the desired work for this pass in helping lay foundational stuff and make moving forward easier is locked in, meaning that our remainders would be:

   
   BaseUI fixes
   While a lot of good work has been done on the BaseUI to make it clean but flexible, there’s still a number of rough spots. Namely? Bugs.
   The options menu is a particular culprit in this because options menus are bloody complex things to work seamlessly.
   Volume levels not respecting the settings, keybind mapping and display being flakey with multiple action maps, changing between borderless and windowed mode not automatically shifting to display resolution options and more.
   All relatively minor things, but definitely gets in the way of the user experience being seamless. And some of those get in the way of developer time too. If you don’t want your game’s music or sound effects blasting while on a discord call, sure would be useful if the volume sliders worked, right?
   Additionally, there’s little oddities of behavior like highlighting and selecting being muddied logic-wise when using mouse and keyboard, some UI elements not updating/refreshing like one would expect, or some scaling/formatting oddness.
   Again, relatively minor, but it builds up to be a rough experience, and the Baseline UI needs to be good enough to hit the ground running with, not making you have to stop and slap it around to play nice.

   
   Editor improvements
   A lot of the desired work for this has been knocked out, but some stuff remains.
   Some things, like customizable layouts were put on hold while more design-time consideration is put into it. I did a fair bit of R&D work into getting it to play nice, as you can see from this video here, and it *almost* works. But in looking at current UX conventions, both Torque’s and other engines’, as well as talking to you guys, “Just Doing What The Other Guys Are Doing” isn’t a good approach here, I don’t think.
   Certainly, making sure the editor suite UI works WITH or FOR you while you’re making your game is paramount, but that doesn’t innately translate into being able to dock 11 billion sub-windows either.
   I’ve got a few ideas on how to *really* maximize workflow speed with the editors I’ll keep cranking at on the R&D side and come back to how we’ll do customizable layouts and stuff in the next version or two, but for today the editor suite will largely stay ‘Classic Torque’.
   That said, it doesn’t mean NO changes are incoming before 4.1 closes out.
   The big one is complying most all of the editors’ interfaces to utilizing GuiInspectors where possible. I’m sure you all have seen the Material Editor a lot:

   

   Or the Particle Editor:

   

   And while they work, if you never looked at their guts in the script you may not realize that they’re completely specialty-case GUI controls that do a lot of custom script voodoo to function.
   That works fine enough, obviously, but it also means it’s a paaaaaaaaaain to expand, tweak, or update stuff.
   And also doesn’t follow the standard conventions of display in other parts of the editor.
   So we’re moving them to utilize the normal GuiInspectorCtrls like we use in the vast majority of places. Same functionality, just a more standardized way of displaying, and it’s more automatic(being driven by the class’ fields) rather than a bunch of specialty adhoc stuff.
   Easier to maintain, easier to expand, follows the conventions of every other spot in the editor, but it still does the exact same job in the end from a ‘working on my game’ perspective.
   Win-win all around.
   The work on this is mostly done, with the ParticleEditor conversion needing most of the work yet. MatEd is mostly done but has some residual fixes and tweaks to finish it out, and I’d like to get the Terrain MaterialEd to behave similarly before we lock 4.1 in.
   Not too much work, thankfully, but it should help a good bit going forward once it’s in place.

   
   Asset Management Improvements
   The work for this is actually mostly done, just been sidetracked on helping polish out other WIPwork to get it locked in.
   Pragmatically you shouldn’t *notice* a difference in general behavior when this all goes in, but under the hood it’s a big step up.
   Functions are more standardized across asset types, use clearer, less confusing names. Asset Browser has a lot of special-casing trimmed out so things are easier to understand when reading through the code, etc, etc.
   Main idea is it moves Asset Editing/Management logic out of the Asset Browser scripts, and into the Asset Type’s scripts, running through the assetType’s namespace, like so:

   

   Each asset type of interest works like that and behaves consistently across the board now with basically no special-casing in the AB itself.
   It also has some utility methods for registering asset types, so you can create ‘Asset Types’ that exist entirely in script and have the AB work with them as normal.
   Meaning you could create a special type of Asset just for, say, NPCs, and integrate that into the Asset Browser seamlessly for creating new NPC assets, have it display them in the browser, be editable, and all that, but all the logic for it exists in your NPC module, without having to edit the editor/Asset Browser scripts to get it to show up.
   Following the theme, this’ll make it easier to maintain the whole asset pipeline, as well as make it easier for modules to Drop In and Go with custom logic and content without you needing to do a lot of screwing around to make it hook in.
   Better flexibility, better prototyping speed.

   
   Project Manager
   The last thing for this is the Project Manager. Going off feedback people’ve given when using it, it’s in a pretty decent spot as far as usability/clarity goes for being able to easily make and manage projects and modules.
   The biggest thing being a problem right now is the reliance on using commandLine calls to git in order to pull stuff from the internet.
   Good news is, we think we’ve cracked the big hurdles on libGit integration - which if you don’t know, is what all the visual git clients use - which would mean we can just interface with git directly rather than routing via commandLine to call git commands and hope it executes well.
   That lets us report back REAL errors and not telephone game’d commandline error codes, progress bars, checking if there are pending changes to pull down, and more.
   With that stuff in place, the overall experience of using the Project Manager should become quite smooth, though naturally we’ll continue to taken and listen to feedback to make it a fantastic one-stop-shop for kicking off or wrangling your Torque game project needs.

   Beyond that, there’s only really just hanging small fixes and bugs as far as priority issues go, which we’ll continue to patch as we move.
   Once these things here are locked in we’ll do some final test passes to make sure no hideous new bugs slipped the radar, but once they go in there’s no other new features/functionality going in for 4.1.
   It’ll just be polishing up, working on documentation and example modules.

   Whew
   Quite the doozy, huh?
   Again, an apology is in order. It’s too easy to slip into keeping your head down and just getting work done(which yields solid dividends, when you look at the above!) and just talking to people in the discord, but the reality is that you sometimes need to write down an obscene number of words and pin it to the bulletin board for everyone else, too.
   So I’ll try and get back on top of doing monthly workblergs to facilitate that.
   We’re also mulling on the idea of potentially doing a monthly-or-so community voice chat in the discord for some more direct live-fire Q&A stuff that’s a little more consolidated/pointed on the topic than random conversations spread across a dozen channels, but a bit easier to just ‘do’ than a full-bore workblerg like this, too.
   If that sounds appealing, be sure to let us know!

   And if you wanna help facilitate the ongoing Coolification(no trademark, unfortunately) of things, feel free to hop over to the Patreon and toss some money our way. It goes to paying for hosting costs and other such operational things of the sort.

   

   
   But, for now, I’m going to let my hands fall off for a little while before I staple ‘em back on and get cracking back on those last TODOs so we can get 4.1 out the door.
   And when it is?
   4.2 and Components be on ye horizon.
   *Dramatic Music Sting*

   Later everyone!
   -JeffR

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2. 

   Torque 2D

   A group blog by DEVGRU in Work Blogs

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   • Torque2D: Rocket Edition Road Map

   

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   Torque2D: Rocket Edition Road Map

   By greenfire27, August 10, 2021

   Early Access 1

   Today I've released what was held in the Development Branch into the Master as Torque2D 4.0, the Rocket Edition, Early Access 1. That long rambling name deserves some explanation. First, the we needed to get this code out. The big change is the Gui System update which I actually started in 2018. Most of the Gui System has been updated by now and it's been battle tested by the construction of the Asset Manager.

   Which brings me to the second reason for the release, namely, the Asset Manager. This newly minted manager is immensely useful for seeing all the assets and building particle effects. Unfortunately, the Asset Manager is still rough around the edges so that's why we're doing an Early Access version.

   If you're starting a game, or just want to play around in 2D, you should really be using 4.0 since it has breaking changes from 3.5. Plus, I would greatly appreciate feedback on the Asset Manager. The "Rocket Edition" is just a nice text name for 4.x which I'll run with until we reach 5.x. Mostly it's a marketing theme.

   So what's next for the engine? Let's review the plan.

   Rocket Edition Road Map

   Disclaimer: This is a map, not the Bible. I will likely make changes as we go. Also there are no dates by design. These things happen as we have time.

   • Early Access 2 - Remaining Gui System changes and Improvements to the Asset Manger such as a visual animation editor and support for named image frames.
   • Early Access 3 - Project Manager to allow the copying of modules from the Module Library and a couple of modules for said library.
   • Early Access 4 - New game demo based on the Rocket Edition, Perlin Noise Function, and Complex Colors on Tile Maps.
   • Version 4.0 - Update to the Toybox to better match the Rocket Edition.
   • Version 4.1 - The Gui Editor! (We have started this as a toy. Go thank Marauder2k9!)
   • Version 4.2 - The Scene Editor! (This has also been started as a toy, again by Marauder.)
   • Version 4.3 - Empty for now...

   That's the currently plan. I for one, am excited to see these things completed, but there's a lot of work to be done. If you're interested in helping, please reach out to me through Discord.

   Carry on, citizens! 

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