JeffR Posted August 13, 2022 Share Posted August 13, 2022 Great news! Against... well maybe not ALL odds, but a pretty significant number of odds, version 4.0 of Torque3D is finally out! This release is a doozy, not only because of how much it ended up touching, but because of how long it took! ...because of how much it ended up touching. Some of the big highlights in what was done: Switched engine over to utilize Assets and Modules Switched lighting and materials to utilize PBR rendering Made BaseGame template the main/only template Added Assimp shape importer library Added Legacy Project Importer Updated to D3D11 from D3D9 Updated GL to be 4.0 Updated TorqueScript compiler for better performance The changelog is honestly kind of completely preposterous this time(over 600 Pull Requests!!!!) so instead of the usual dump, I'll just link to it: Beyond that, we had well over 2000(!!!) commits contributed by these lovely people: Azaezel Ragora JeffH OTHGMars Lukaspj Marauder Bloodknight Timmy Tony chaigler Jozor Glenn Pecon TRON suncaller calvinbalke13 GoldenThumbs NoboKani bank troido wcbx stsrc jmdejong pacomont You can grab the release, both source and binaries, as always, from the github page: So what's next? Next, we keep working, naturally. Well, sorta. With any release this big over such a span of time, some issues are going to be particularly slippery, so honestly I fully expect we'll be needing a 4.0.1 hotfix release in a few weeks' time. So while we're accruing feedback and bug reports for that, I plan to spend a few weeks wrangling all our spread out documentation to it's new home, which can be conveniently linked from the Docs button underneath the Torque3D header navigation button on this website. The plan is to collapse all the delicious knowledge of the ages for Torque into a singular, easy to search and use home, so it'll be much easier than ever to figure out what info you need. So that'll preoccupy me for a few weeks as well, no doubt. Also, there were a few hiccups with multiplatform behavior to iron out for the new Project Manager, but you can expect that in a few weeks as well. That'll get its own announcement and introduction then. Right, but what's NEXT next? Future development, right. Well, for starters, (and this can also be accessed via the aforementioned Docs button on the site, FYI) I've set up a document to act as the sort of 'high level roadmap' going forward: While 4.0 was expected to take a while because it was always intended to be a big shakup release that let us update some of the deeper foundational stuff, which makes further improvements and modernization efforts in the future easier. Fact is 4.0 took too bloody long. So Release schedules going forward will see a paradigm shift. Debuting with 4.1, onward, the Releases system will be based around a single major feature/system update. Anything that can be done alongside that and wedged in during that process is also obviously free game, but you can expect a release to happen once the main target feature is done. So for 4.1, the engine will be shifted over to utilize components. That was originally a target for 4.0, but obviously with all the other big shakeup work, it became untenable to do EVERYTHING in 4.0. So it's been shuffled. You can see what's on the scope for each planned feature release on the roadmap document, but the MAIN takeaway is that each new release of the engine'll be done way, way faster. The plan is 2 a year. But it may go faster or slower. But ultimately the target is "not 3-4 years" I'll have a workblog incoming this next week to provide more deets on happenings, but that largely covers it for the Release Announcement! Have a good one, and happy game developing! -JeffR Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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