Torque3D 4.0.1 Released!

[JeffR]

Technically it was released like, a week-ish ago, but shush.

The plan was to release the new Project Manager alongside it, but testing found some wonkiness in the last minute, so it's been delayed a little bit and will get it's own announcement when it's out.

Anyways, the topic at ha-

TORQUE3D 4.0.1 IS RELEASED!

While this was primarily a bugfixing release, some fantastic people jumped in and contributed some general improvements to a few spots, such as tweaks to the editor theming, as well as some pretty big improvements to the HDR, bloom and color correction stuff to generally improve the aesthetics and correctness of the rendering.

Outpost Test map, Torque3D 4.0:

And 4.0.1:

 

Now, obviously there's some big differences, but it's pretty easy to see that the 4.0.1 version has a significantly "fuller" color palette. And with more options for the tonemapping algo and improved color correct/LUT handling, you can control the image quality and color balancing far more than you could in 4.0.

So, for the bulletpoints of highlights:

• Major improvements to HDR, Bloom, Tonemapping and Color correction postFX's
• SMAA Anti-aliasing mode added in addition to existing FXAA
• Tweaks to the editor theme to make it a bit more consistent across the board
• Fixed some asset import issues, most notably targeting issues with the mapTo field
• Several issues with environment probes
• Updated the T3D launch splash screen to look nicer
• Resolved some audio/SFX bugs, including fixing up bad behavior on the Mac
• Initial libCurl integration for httpObject, enabling access to secured web content

The full changelog can be found in the docs, here:

 

In the end, 4.0.1 was made up of 46 Pull Requests, contributed by these fantastic individuals:

• Azaezel
• vvv-yeaf
• OTHGMars
• lukaspj
• JeffProgrammer
• CouleeApps
• GoldenThumbs 
• Jozor
• marauder2k7

You can grab the source and binaries from the github release, here:

 

From here, we'll keep trucking to the 4.1 target. I've been hard at work on an initial concept pass for the entity/components implementation which should prove to be very flexible and very powerful. Once the concept is done, we'll spend a bit of time doing beat-ups on it to ensure it's conceptually sound, then full speed ahead on converting up all game classes over to that system.

The end result will be MASSIVE improvements to flexibility of the engine, and almost certainly improvements to performance, while not losing out any of the functionality we've come to know and love because all the existing behavior of Shapebase and it's derivative classes will be recreated via components.

So all the same broad features of the current game class set, but in lego pieces you can easily mix, match and slap together to facilitate whatever kind of game you're making.

All it all, pretty dope stuff!

I said I'd do a workblog last time, but we kinda rolled hard on getting 4.0.1 done, along with work on the PM, so I'll definitely be getting a work blog out in the next weeks this time(this time, for sure!)

Have a good one, and happy game developing!

-JeffR