buckmaster

The advice I've heard about Kickstarter, especially for games, is that it's not a tool to market to a new audience, but to make use of the audience you currently have. I think what we've discovered over the last several failed GG funding campaigns is that we don't have that audience already. As for the idea itself. First I want to note that what you're describing basically exists. TOL is fairly Tribesy, completely open-source, and has a dedicated team behind it who I'm sure would welcome contributions ( @fr1tz ?). I realise it's not exactly what you had in mind, like one of Blender's open movie projects, but it's already made significant accomplishments, and looks like a pretty awesome game to boot. The idea of an open game project is floated around once a month in this community, but never goes anywhere. I posit that this is because most of the community is already working on the game they want to make and are passionate about. I know that I wouldn't necessarily throw my hat into the ring to work on a community-designed game, because it wouldn't be the game I wanted to make and spend all my time on. That said, I generally agree with your approach. We need to snuggle up as close as we can to Blender, both in terms of community and providing support for Blender art in the engine. Honestly I think it's our best shot. Also, this community tends to be more full of programmers than artists, so pairing with a community where the balance is flipped would be a great idea.

Oh cool, so it looks like the turret class descends from Item? Aha, yes it does. So the list of all members should show inherited ones from item as well - which don't include a sticky member or a stickToGround method. What's wrong with just making the item sticky all the time? Does it need to bounce sometimes?

What object class are you working with? I've never seen a sticky field on anything but Item. Also, I suspect that altering the datablock is not what you should be doing.

How are static builds on various platforms? I confess it may be just me, but the process of trying to link anything in statically seems arcane. I haven't even begun to consider the licensing questions that arise between different forms of linking. But I do dislike having to plonk six different DLLs next to an executable, which is the current state of the Project Manager.

This might help?

Definitely, that seems very reasonable. In that light, how does Qt differ from something like Boost? I'm not extremely familiar with the C++ ecosystem at this level :/. Something I didn't like about Qt was how it's not a library, but brings along a whole baggage of additional compile steps and so on - though to be fair CMake isn't exactly a walk in the park either.

Oh wow. Ambition! I have to say my brief experience with Qt wasn't thrilling, but I'm interested to see where this goes!

Relevant discussion on Reddit.

Qt5, though I may not have updated the instructions in the readme.

Yes: they don't work. :P

@GraphicSynthesizer I'll write something up on the way T3D works at the moment, though it will have to go through GG to make sure I'm not saying nonsense, so it may take a while. Basically, GG still runs the github repo, so if we want access to GarageGames/Torque3D (the official repo) then we're bound to them. Obviously we have write access, but not admin access. We don't need to go through them for much - the main things are getting contributors to sign some sort of legal waiver for GG. @DragonDelays it's not like $20 was a significant barrier to people who wanted to use Unreal before, and Unity has been free in some form for a long time. I honestly don't see that our niche has grown any smaller. Unreal were already open-source for all intents and purposes (except sharing their source, but again, $20 isn't much of a barrier), and I sense that it doesn't really matter to low-level Unity users. We've already had people leaving for those engines, and I'm sure we will have more, though I'm also sure we'll gain members who are looking for an engine they can hack on with a community where they can be known.

I refuse to believe in weekends. And hangovers.

For the record, the Project Manager is written in Qt, so it *should* work in Linux in theory, but it doesn't seem to compile. If you feel like cloning the repo and trying it out, that'd be great, but I think this release will probably just rely on Linux users creating projects manually.

I'm surprised there's not more response in here. Really? A new person comes along with an awesome proposal for a new logo that looks great? Silence? :? I've always tried to make the distinction between 2D/3D clear when writing, for example, wiki materials, because I don't want to step on 2D's toes and act like Torque 3D is the only Torque. However it becomes more and more natural just to refer to it as Torque :P.

I quite like 5 and 12, and the guy on the roof is pretty excellent, though not necessarily something you'd use to show off. Except to me. Any chance the SC could get some of these without the watermark to add as banners on the landing page? If you want to do that I'll contact you with the images I'd like to use :).

Whoah! Hi there! Welcome to the community, and thanks for being so enthusiastic and making a contribution! I really, really like this logo. It's a lot more fun and welcoming than the 'trying to be cool' futuristic font, and the new angle on the 'three Ts' icon almost looks like a gear, which is appropriate! The issue is that GarageGames owns the logo and brand of Torque, so it's not really something we can just go changing without consulting them. Let's see if @GameDevMich checks his notifications, and has any comment about how GG might want to handle it if we collectively decided we wanted to rebrand! What do you plan on making with Torque?

I think we need something built-in. For example, the way GUIs can use text_id instead of text, which allows you to actually select language on-the-fly and edit your GUI sensibly. It looks like the fix in the thread above should work, but as they note, strings are limited to something like 2048 bytes (which is 2048 ascii characters, less for non-ascii encoding, AFAIK). So if you need really long strings, you might have to break them down, store them in some other fashion (like in their own files, and select the file based on the language), or find a way to increase that limit. I think we should try to get the fix in the thread linked ported and included in the engine sometime soon.

Actually, this is simpler than my suggestion above; ignore the first half. Just define a new console function that returns a string formatted hw you like. Here's an example of returning a string. As for formatting, I'd recommend getting the integer part, and the fractional part (to 2 DP) separately and concatenating them using dSprintf.

How about we always render numbers as decimals, and add a number formatting function? That way people can actually choose how to display values?

:D Does the light propagation itself not handle AO?

I think we need a little test house like this one ;) But seriously, that's looking fabulous. I had wanted to ask whether this would accommodate non-point lighting - I guess the answer is yes! Though is it possible to adapt the power of emissive materials to make them brighter?

I don't have a lot of time right now, but I'll address this: You can just create a new git repository in a project's directory. Here's an example. I can clone that repository right into My Projects/ and it has the correct structure for a project. If you want to tie your project's version to the version of the engine repository, you can use git submodules to do that. Here's an example in T2D - in the modules/ directory you can see a bunch of submodules that are used by the main game repo.

Ooh. main.cs.in shouldn't end up in the finished project. It's just a copy of main.cs, but with some special sigils so that the Project Manager can replace parts of it with the project name once you've created the project. runTests.cs is a minimal main.cs file which runs the engine's unit tests. If you launch the engine from the command-line, you can tell it to use runTests.cs instead of main.cs. You can ignore both of these files entirely, unless you want to run unit tests :).

Oh sorry, I wasn't responding directly to you. Yeah, that's basically how I see it at this point, though it still begs the question of why we'd want to use TAML at all if all it does is exactly the same as TS serialisation. Actually, a good example of why TAML might be a good idea is the way we handle mis files currently. We have to do manual text parsing of the TS syntax to extract the mission info for the main level, which is kind of disgusting. If we could load up a TAML file as an abstract entity (an XML document tree or whatever), without creating a bunch of SceneObjects like you do when you exec a mis file, then we could traverse down into the mission info object and get the information in a nicer manner. As for replacing what a mis or gui file means fundamentally, I'm not sure I follow you. What do they mean fundamentally? Nothing, really. They're just script files that create objects.

No. No script in TAML files. That seems like an awful idea that we will regret later. I can't see any valid use case for it unless a script is actually part of your data - for example, the way that spawn spheres store a little script fragment to be executed when they spawn an object.