Thinking of a Torsion revival project.

[Kent Butler]

Hi All, been away from Torque for several years and trying to get a feel for where things sit.

One thing that seems to be seriously lacking is a working Torquescript editor. None of the projects that used to be go-tos (Torsion, Codeweaver) appear to have functional installs available anymore. Is there a new torquescript IDE people are using, or are folks just making do with c# syntax highlighting like I've been trying to do for the last week or so?

I see that Sickhead released the code for Torsion with an MIT license about 7 years ago (https://github.com/SickheadGames/Torsion). Repo notes indicate a proprietary XML library was removed preventing the released code from compiling. Poking around, I found a repo where another user did most of the heavy lifting to integrate TinyXML in place of the missing library, but they were still having trouble getting the project to link properly due to issues with a deeply-integrated third-party WXWidgets library (https://github.com/velteyn/Torsion/tree/wxWidget_new_version303).

I played with it for a couple days, ditched the .dlls completely and got new WXWidgets libraries (well, NOS anyway) playing nicely with the rest of the project. Now the program compiles, runs, and the UI largely functions, but there are still issues with the code editor/auto-complete/project manager functionality that need to be figured out before it actually works. I've poked around a little, but don't know much about how the actual codebase works so it's hard to guess how far/close it is from being fully functional (it feels pretty close ... but who knows).

So, before sinking too much time into this, is there community interest/need in this kind of project? Any thoughts?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update: A working version of Torsion is now available here.

Edited October 10, 2023 by Kent Butler
(Remove big image, add link to repo)

[JeffR]

There's a few alternate projects in play, @LukasPJ has work done with plugins for other IDEs which has been going well.

But I still use the old version for version of Torsion I manged to build years back before it got too gnarled. So getting a workable, updated version of it back up and running would be absolutely lovely!

I'll have to grab your branch and take a swing. There'd been some changes to the internal compiler and parser and stuff that's caused the debugging to be a little skiddish, but the vast majority of the behavior works in my old build version, so I can at least take some time and do a side-by-side and see if I not anything obvious.

This is definitely a good forward step in keeping Torsion running for people that like it, so already fantastic work there

[Kent Butler]

Thanks for the reply. Did you build your version from code ... or, more to the point, do you have access to a project that compiles, runs and has full functionality?

I've only gotten a chance to play with it a little since working out the linker issues, but my build is definitely not happy about something. I've verified that it's loading up script files, but it renders in (almost) all black-on-black. Grabbing a chunk with the mouse and copy/pasting into a notepad works, so it's clear the data is there, the colors are just borked. Attempting to add text - either in an existing document or a newly created one - currently breaks in the auto-complete handlers.

One thing that might be an issue is the program appears to rely on resource files (preferences, lexicon, etc) - and the Sickhead project doesn't include any of that. In your build, are these resources kept in local files?

I'll fiddle with github this evening and try to do a proper fork and get my branch posted.

[greenfire27]

I use VSCode and before that I was using Atom. If Torsion was working I might start using it again. I think a more important note is that Torsion is part of the Torque Myth and needs to be returned to working order as a matter of honor.

[JeffR]

On 10/1/2023 at 11:00 AM, Kent Butler said:

Thanks for the reply. Did you build your version from code ... or, more to the point, do you have access to a project that compiles, runs and has full functionality?

I've only gotten a chance to play with it a little since working out the linker issues, but my build is definitely not happy about something. I've verified that it's loading up script files, but it renders in (almost) all black-on-black. Grabbing a chunk with the mouse and copy/pasting into a notepad works, so it's clear the data is there, the colors are just borked. Attempting to add text - either in an existing document or a newly created one - currently breaks in the auto-complete handlers.

One thing that might be an issue is the program appears to rely on resource files (preferences, lexicon, etc) - and the Sickhead project doesn't include any of that. In your build, are these resources kept in local files?

I'll fiddle with github this evening and try to do a proper fork and get my branch posted.

I had done up a build of it myself a little while after the original guys had tossed it up onto github. At the time it compiled OK because the delta between the library versions and windows and all that weren't that bad yet, so I managed to make it work, but as of the last attempt a few years back that grew too much to just slap compile and call it a day, meaning you'd need to do what you're doing, with actually updating stuff to more recent versions.

If you wanted to compare, though, this is the version I'd done that i'd been using ever since:

http://ghc-games.com/SC/Torsion.zip

[Kent Butler]

Had a hectic week and haven't had much time to play around. I put my build on github.

https://github.com/kb-games/Torsion/tree/rebuild2023

 

@JeffR Thanks! I'll take a look over the weekend.

[Kent Butler]

On the immediate access to Torsion front, there is good news!

I was poking around on other forks and found a repo from someone called HumanGamer that has a functional install. So anyone who needs/wants a copy should be able to download it here: https://github.com/HumanGamer/Torsion/releases

Unfortunately, the code/VS Solution there doesn't just compile and run out of the box either.

[Kent Butler]

OK. Finally some build success.

Started with the HumanGamer repo because I figured that was the most recent working build. Fixed their scrambled VS linker/libraries set-up (mostly related to TinyXML) and got all the projects happily retargeted to VS2022.

Haven't played with it extensively, but everything seems to build and run.

The source project can be found at: https://github.com/kb-games/Torsion

[Kent Butler]

On 10/6/2023 at 3:38 PM, JeffR said:

I had done up a build of it myself a little while after the original guys had tossed it up onto github. At the time it compiled OK because the delta between the library versions and windows and all that weren't that bad yet, so I managed to make it work, but as of the last attempt a few years back that grew too much to just slap compile and call it a day, meaning you'd need to do what you're doing, with actually updating stuff to more recent versions.

If you wanted to compare, though, this is the version I'd done that i'd been using ever since:

http://ghc-games.com/SC/Torsion.zip

Do you know what the source files in the "TelnetDebugger2" folder do?

[LukasPJ]

I don’t know what it is in Torsion, but it sounds like it’s the client version of the telnet debugging server in Torque3D which lets you debug TorqueScript

[Kent Butler]

1 hour ago, LukasPJ said:

I don’t know what it is in Torsion, but it sounds like it’s the client version of the telnet debugging server in Torque3D which lets you debug TorqueScript

I figured something like that.

The files are uncompiled source sitting in the application install directory. I don't understand exactly how they're used ... or by what.

[LukasPJ]

Ah wait, then it might be something that you can throw into the engine if it doesn’t have the debugger.

 If that’s the case you can probably ignore it, got a link to the file in question? (Not familiar with the code base at all)

[Kent Butler]

On 10/12/2023 at 9:38 AM, LukasPJ said:

Ah wait, then it might be something that you can throw into the engine if it doesn’t have the debugger.

 If that’s the case you can probably ignore it, got a link to the file in question? (Not familiar with the code base at all)

The files are in the .zip JeffR posted up-thread. They also build into the Torsion install package.

I think you are totally right. The files seem like drop-ins to get script debugger functionality into early versions of TGE/TGA/T2D. Now that I'm looking at it correctly, by TGE 1.5 all that stuff is in the engine. It makes sense they'd ship that with Torsion.

[globojim]

I'm curious how to build this project and have read somewhere this needs a very old version of visual studio?