Duion

For example I have a backgroundGui that I replace with random background images through script every time you enter the main menu: https://github.com/Duion/Uebergame/blob/master/scripts/client/init.cs#L216

Don't reply he is a spammer.

You can't find them, because they don't exist. But I think I know how it works, even though I did not do first person hands and chose to use the third person model instead, because I was lazy. So what you need to do is ignore the first person hands and gun for a while and finish your third person or regular player character, animate him and implement him. What I did was put a gun into his hand and so I could give him animations for the gun, like reloading it. So I was left with a third person model and a gun, so I removed the gun and exported him. In-game I then would mount the gun onto the hand and everything lined up nicely. If you finished those steps of implementing the player, then you can consider using first person hands, since they give you more control, look nicer and prevent clipping. I'm not a fan of those, since they mean extra work, which I will explain now. To now make first person hands, you take your player character, you already have, that has it's origin meaning the position below the feet at coordinates 0 0 0 aka the objects origin and move the eye point of the player character to coordinates 0 0 0. The reason for that is, that the gun gets mounted on the camera, aka you, aka coordinates 0 0 0. Now you should have a full model of the player character with its head at the origin point. That's your first person hands now, of course you can delete the other parts of the model now except the hands and animate them more detailed or add more model details, though you should derive those extra detail from the first model you made, since the arms have to match up the player model, so you need new arms for every model. Now you may wonder how you do different weapons, well I think that is done by adding the hands into the first person view of the weapon, so the weapon and hands are glued together, this has the benefit of the animations matching up perfectly. If you have similar guns, you can re-use the hands models and just switch the weapon. Well those are the steps I think. It is a bit complex, that is why I dislike that system, so if you can get away without first person arms I would go that route, if you want high quality, make them. Later you also get more work, since the third person player model needs to roughly match the animations of the first person, so when you open the default Torque3D soldier you can see new sets of animations for each weapon, since the player walks, shoots etc differently holding each weapon. This may sound complicated, but if you go through it step by step, you should get it done, if you have more questions just ask me.

It is relatively simple, you put it on the webspace, run it, follow the instructions and the website needs to get a javascript snippet somewhere so the analytics can count if someone visits it.

Yes he is a nonexistent member of the nonexistent steering committee, that's why I'm preaching for years to get an existing steering committee, since having an existing steering committee, would solve a lot of issues by itself. Regarding analytics, yes I would not install google analytics, I for example use: https://matomo.org/ it is pretty easy to use, you just install it and can operate it through web interface. It is self hosted and open source, so there are no costs. Maybe we really do not need it, but I think the only thing that is visited regularly is the forum, the other pages are kind of unknown for the most part, so it would be nice to activate those as well.

I'm not an expert programmer, but from what I have learned over the years is that the scripting language does not matter that much, since it is usually not performance relevant stuff and that the performance relevant stuff should be in C++ anyway, which beats any scripting language in performance. Others even use things like blueprints aka visual scripting and they are the worst regarding performance, but it does not matter since it is not that performance relevant and modern computers are fast enough. It is mostly just a belief war and most people fighting it have no clue about anything, if you want to make a point, make a demo and measure the results, so you can present a definitive proof, everything else is probably not constructive. I saw implementations of Lua in Torque and then you had a scripting folder with Torquescript and one with Lua, making everything even worse. I also saw games written totally in Lua and they had horrible performance because of that. To make it short, I have not seen any evidence yet that would convince me that another scripting language would make sense to use. Sure the engine is open source, so you can do what you want, but please do not break the old stuff, there are people using it, that's my biggest concern.

You could also go crazy and do metatags for every page. The topic is a bit complicated since there are many kind of metatags and standards, but you should at least define content type, description and tags, so search engines know what content there is. The forum probably uses some forum software and has bots from search engines, so that should be fine, but the front page, wiki pages etc could be defined with metatags.

Basic SEO is not that hard, having some SEO is better than having none at all. For example you should have meta tags, torque3d.org has none. Here is an example on what garagegames.com has as metatags: So you could add something like this at least.

@JeffR It is not about posting updates, it is about updating the site, like first you update the description, since there is still the description from the commercial days that says like "Torque 3D is the best full source, low cost solution out there. " then maybe update the screenshots with some up to date stuff, ah I forgot that's not possible, since we have not changed the visuals or produced any new demo material in all of our history, but that's another issue. With visitor counter I don't mean the thing from the 90s but something that counts visitors, so you get a rough idea how many visitors you get and from where maybe as well. @LukasPJ is the admin so he must know of those things. First you need to have some analytics and then you do some SEO and see what happens.

It does not matter if I hate on the SC or not, since it does not exist anyway, I more hate its nonexistentness than its supposed existentness. And no it is not the fault of Garagegames, they even spend resources on maintaining and releasing the engine to open source for a while, so they did more than they needed to. If they had not "fucked up" we would not have the engine open source, so it is a good thing within the bad.

To make the decision to have it deleted would require an existent committee to make that decision, which we do not have. My point is, if we have it, either update it, or don't, but don't leave it half updated and in a half derelict state, it does not look good. But we kind of need it, since most people using the engine have their game on there as well and then they would be left without an engine, which looks even worse. If we delete it, it would require the community to go with it, otherwise we would just be harming ourselves. So deleting it is not an option currently and by the way it was just an example of our nonexistent leadership.

@suncaller Do you think you can convince our nonexistent steering committee to update pages like: https://www.moddb.com/engines/torque-3d that have not been updated for 8 years now. I mean it is probably too late now for that, since moddb is pretty dead, but it shows the ignorance and nonexistentness of our leadership, that cannot manage to update the description and screenshots of the engine on that website in like 6 years of time. Some things are changed now, but only because I took charge of the account, handed it over to JeffR and told him what to do. There are maybe 100 websites like that were you could mention the engine or update the entry in some wiki, or write forum posts. Yes there is not much marketing we can do, but the little we could do is not done for the most part. I tried to do it myself a few times, but I was insulted as a shill or by our own community that I should not be in charge of that task or whatever so I stopped doing promotion. I'm also tired of begging others to do things, just because people somehow do not trust me.

I've been watching the growth of the Godot engine, and I'm not sure that's a fair assessment. Instead, I think it's because Godot has certain strengths that it leverages correctly Yes and those strenghts I already named like subzidization, mobile support, cryptocurrency support and microtransactions and pay2win support. What is so hard on watching statistics? The PC marked is flooded, saturated and shrinking, the mobile sector is new and growing. There were multiple new engine projects I watched that were not mobile game engines and they ALL failed. Almost all of the indie dev scene and the open source game dev scene only do mobile and/or retro style games, there are hardly any serious indie game projects, the risk of failure is too high, the competition too strong, the engines too weak, the costs too high etc etc mobile and retro games on the other hand can be developed cheaply and still generate a lot of money.

There are tools and way to estimate traffic even when there is no metric on it and I would assume visitors of this website are around 100 daily, which is not much. Most people are probably from the old community and new visitors are mostly nonexistent. But of course having a real visitor counter would help more than deducing the visitor count from other factors that are less accurate. Marketing would mostly consist of placing backlinks to this website on genuine other websites, that is what the spammers are trying with our forum, they place links to have their scam websites rank higher and gain more visitors.

Is the wiki the official supposed place for documentation now? ( http://wiki.torque3d.org/ ) I would assume it is, but most people do not realize it. We should encourage more people to write things into there on their own, because our nonexistent steering committee obviously will not take care of that.

Can we have a visitor counter? I mean having a visitor counter is essential to having a website, since otherwise you don't know, if anyone actually visits it. That is like the most basic common sense, but it seems like we do not have it. Later if you have a visitor counter, you should do marketing to increase visitors, so people interested in the content can find it more easily also the most basic common sense, So has anyone of the nonexistent admins or steering committee members ever thought about that? If not you should consider doing so. First I wanted to post this as an answer into the thread "Curious fantasy and hypothesis", but I think this is an issue of itself and the bigger issue. I mean debating about details is meaningless, if we do not even have metrics to see, if what we do has any effect. When we have metrics, I think doing marketing or SEO would help the engine more than anything else, since more users contribute more.

Do we even have a traffic counter? I don't think anyone from the nonexistent admins/committee is monitoring anything regarding visitors. If you don't have any metrics, then all other discussion in that regard is mostly meaningless, since there is no way to prove anything.

Let me tell you how I chose this engine, I wanted an open source engine and I wanted the best open source engine that offers modern technology and is not a dead end like Quake engine. I saw Torque3D being open sourced and there my decision was already made and I never looked into the details like scripting language etc, I did not even know what a scripting language is at that time. My only question was, "Can the engine do what I need?" and after those questions were answered technical details became mostly irrelevant. To make it short I'm pretty certain changing technical details on the engine will do nothing or almost nothing in regards to people using it, that is not what people look for, they are looking if the tool can do what they need and everything else is secondary. Choosing an engine because it uses a scripting language you like or because of other design choices is pretty insane and those people are not serious in their undertaking anyway. There are cases however where secondary criteria are important and that is if they are breaking primary criteria, for example my main criteria was to have an open source engine, but if that open source engine switches to a non open source friendly scripting language (like C#) it becomes a serious problem, since it will put the main advantage at risk and with that put everything at risk just for a bit convenience.

Who cares about the details I need a solution that works. I think I need some kind of function that checks if the connection is valid, on the server and on the client and in case the connection process gets interrupted, bugged, timed out or whatever the connection is reset and the slot is cleared on the server. I know it is not just the master server since you can join servers directly through IP and this also fails. The join and exit processes are pretty bulletproof, if you test them short term, but if you let the server run for a day and then come back after a few people played on it a few times the server somehow gets broken. I already reset the servers after the last human left, but something does not seem to get cleared in that process sometimes.

Yes, I discussed that player count issue before, but that "only" caused servers to disappear from the server list that the master server generated, now there also exist servers that are still listed by the master servers, but are not joinable and that break the game once you tried to join them, since the serverConnection object is not deleted and the game still thinks a game is running and does not let you join another, forcing you to exit the game to reset it. Regarding that message, yes that looks weird, but I don't really understand what is going on there, only that it is a message function with lots of arguments and one of them is a weird number that looks like a floating point imprecision. The numbers are IDs that are assigned to certain things, network optimizatoin or so, one number is the client ID, in this case "70". Behind that are a lot of arguments that are mostly empty and some have 0 assigned to them. I don't really know where to look to debug that or to find out what is being send there. The bug is also hard to replicate since it needs a server that runs for a long time and needs real human players from time to time, bots seem to speed up the time the bug happens, the more bots the faster, but ultimatively real human players are needed to cause it. If someone wants to test the bug for himself, I could offer to host a server and let it go bad, meaning not restart it for a long time until it breaks, but the problem there is, at some point it also may disappear from the list. At first I could prevent the bug from happening by restarting the servers every day or twice a day, later I went down to 8 hours and now I had to go down to even 4 hours to prevent the bug from happening in most cases, but there is still a slight chance it will happen.

I have a bug where sometimes there are unjoinable servers and after you tried to join such a server you cannot join any server anymore, so basically the game is frozen after that and you can only press menu buttons and only restarting the game changes that. The unjoinable server however stays that way and if you try to join it the problem occurs again. What I think is happening is, that sometimes after someone or you joined a server, the slot is not properly cleared, so the server thinks you are still on it and of course does not let you join again, but the game itself also thinks a serverconnection is running and does not let you join another game. The server in the list then is listed with +1 human player, that does not get cleared and stays broken and when someone tries to join it it adds +1 more human player, but for the person joining the game breaks, so he has to quit the game and try again, which may repeat the cycle. What makes it so hard to test is, that you need a server on the internet and a client to join the server and a lot of patience to wait till something breaks and the bug occurs. I cannot open multiple instances of the game myself to test it, because it seems to be locked by the IP, meaning you need real different people to test it with real different IPs. My current solution is to just restart the servers every X hours, so the bug never occurs, since the longer a server runs and the more players are on it the sooner it occurs. Bots work as well to cause the bug, which I now realized, since I have more bots on the servers by default and the bug happens much sooner. The bots simulate a real player connection, so they appear on the server list as players etc. So what I think is happening is that at some point server connections are not getting cleared on the dedicated servers and either the server becomes unjoinable after you tried to join it, or it completely gets removed from the list by the master server since it reports some unlegit number of players and also becomes unjoinable. Well this all sounds very complicated, but this is a potential game breaking bug and I don't really know where to start, so maybe someone here has an idea, I also provide a short console.log of what happens when I try to join such a bugged server and join it again:

Nobody cares about the technical details, you don't become popular through offering a good product, popularity is bought primarily through money. Godot is "popular" because it gets subsidized, because it offers mobile support, cryptocurrency support which then offers great protential to rip people off through microtransactions, that is what matters.

With OpenGL rendering there is a flicker bug, that sometimes appears, I don't know exactly when, but it happens when displaying the NavMesh and in some scenes with heavy load I think. Here is the NavMesh flicker example video, first normal scene, then switching on NavMesh render, flicker appears, then disabled NavMesh view and everything is normal: https://duion.com/files/temp/bugs/openGL-flickerbug-navmesh.mp4 And here a flicker happening in a normal ingame scene, it happens on very few levels, this is a very big scene with lots of forest and groundCover elements, the flicker only happens sometimes, so sometimes you can launch the game and play the level fine, another time it has heavy flickering. When I decreased mesh render quality in graphic settings I could make it stop through that, my mesh render quality settings reduce the number of groundcover objects, maybe that is a hint, that it happens when there are too many objects or polygons to render, like the NavMesh that adds a lot of overhead: https://duion.com/files/temp/bugs/openGL-flickerbug.mp4 Also you may notice the recordings in OpenGL are somehow upside down and mirrored in some way and I have no idea why, they were recorded with OBS and it normally works fine, but this only happens in OpenGL as well, maybe another bug. I would suggest to replicate it with the NavMesh method, which is pretty reliable, the other thing happens very rarely. The issue exists for quite a while now and with multiple versions, but I ignored it so far, since I thought it was just something with the NavMesh display and maybe it is, but maybe those issues are related.

Thanks, yes that solved it.

I found a bug that renders the vertex color painting of models wrong in OpenGL: Here is an example of the lighthouse model I made, I use vertex color to add color variation to my models, so I don't have to use different textures, this is what it looks in OpenGL: And this is how it looks with DirectX and how it is supposed to look: Anyone an idea what is happening here and why the color scale is shifted towards something else?