Duion

@NeonTiger

This is something I was looking for as well, I would suggest you to make a pull request into the main repo with this, so it gets added into the engine as a new feature, so not everyone has to maintain their own fork.

It is not a visibility problem, but a statement of fact and fact is no releases in over 2 years, even though it was planned to have like 4 major releases every year and the steering committee concept worked fine before as it was proven by the fact that we had releases and visible progress.

Sure I know there is development going on, here and there, but it is not visible and if it is not visible it did not happen.

By the way there is almost no visible change to the engines appearance since forever, sure there are updates and bugfixes under the hood, but everyone opening up the engine will see something that looks outdated by 10 years or so.

Other engines have like new updates with fancy new visuals, demos and marketing campaigns etc every few months and we have nothing in that regard, not only do we have nothing, we do not even have people admitting that we should do something in that regard.

levelName + _preview

For example:

Mission file name:

TestMission.mis

Preview image

TestMission_preview.jpg

@Duion Be the change that you want to see! That's the beauty of an open source project. There is nothing stopping anyone from forking the engine, renaming it (optional step here), forming their own steering committee and taking the development in whatever direction and at whatever pace they so choose. You could even define the methods of communication for your steering committee so an aversion to Discord would not make you feel isolated and out-of-the-loop. Who knows, a little competition might spur development...or it could kill both engines...but you won't know unless you try. It is bound to be more productive than trying to tell others how to behave through messages in this forum though.

Yes, that is probably the single most contraproductive thing you can do in an open source project and it is done so many times and often it kills the projects. I mean first you split up work forces, then you split up community and users, then you increase workload for the already reduced work forces, because each group or at least one group has to merge back and forth changes from one repo to the next etc. Yes total insanity.

By the way a similar effect is achieved, if people who have permissions on the repo, forums whatever, just do what they want ignoring anyone else and not letting anyone do anything. That way the few people in power just overload themselves with so much work, that they get nothing done either.

It is not rocket science to get anything done, pick a goal, work towards it, reach it, done, that is the ONLY way you can be successful.

We had a Trello board before to manage the issues/tasks/feature requests and anyone could pick a task which would then be assigned to him, for example one tast was to make a new default example player model and someone who is qualified enough to do it could pick that task and later it would have been added to the engine in some way.

Basically that is what I want.

I don't really know what forum is supposed to be for discussing the general engines development. There is just steering committee, that nobody can post it, roadmap, where which already seems predetermined and a forum to talk about issues and pull requests, but there is no actual place where we can discuss how we develop the engine further.

For example what the GUI design should look like, what the default assets should be, or how we want the new template system, what we should do for marketing etc.

At the moment it just seems like someone (probably @JeffR in most cases) just decides what to do and then does it, complete ignoring other peoples plans or opinions and I feel like I have no say in anything.

So I would like a forum for that, or would like to know where to discuss that, the current setup is a bit confusing as those things hardly ever get addressed.

@Happenstance

As I suggested before with the steering committee, we should enable it back again, since Jeff seems to be the only active member left more or less.

So put some more people into positions where they can change things, like put skilled people into the steering committee, people with time into moderator positions, give them a vote, whatever.

The problem is nobody can do anything, because they are not allowed to or there is no communication on what can be done or who can do things.

For example I would vote for making the release, throw all the planned features out, only release bugfixes and PBR system, put everything else on halt or let the people develop it on their own and have them put it in when they are ready. The materials system was already partly changed to be compatible with the new PBR workflow, I know it since it broke the rendering in my game and some material setups, so we are stuck with a halfway finished system for 2 years now, but instead of finishing that, there are plans for creating whole new features that throw everything over board in other areas. I'm not an expert in rendering programming, but I have seen it working for other people already 2-3 years ago, so it cannot be that hard to just put it in and let the people fix eventual issues.

Also I would vote against changing the templates, for example the empty template was already removed. I mean people with real projects have everything based on the template, you cannot just remove them, this screws over all people that use them currently. You need to communicate first what is being done and why and then leave a transition period etc and not just answer to questions like "where is the empty template" - ah I just deleted it, because I was in the mood to do so, because I thought it is useless anyway.

I mean I wanted to do steering committee, I was even in it as an artist and even worked on new templates like levels, materials etc, but everything got totally ignored, so I really lost the motivation for that, but I was pretty much the only one actually doing anything that was planned. Thats not how you motivate people. Just mentioning that the example art assets NEVER got changed, so the default template looks as bad as like 10 years ago, since nobody every in the liftime of the engine wanted to update the visuals, which leaves a very bad impression for the engine visually and will turn many people off instantly.

I could go on for longer, but those are just some examples.

The development seems to be stagnating heavily, I addressed this before that nothing gets done, but nobody seems to care, but I care.

What I do on my projects is I write down a realistic goal I can achieve in a certain time, like 3 months, then work towards that goal, finish it and release and it works most of the time. I write everything down on a list and never do anything else that would delay that schedule, except when there is time left to add extras or something else more important shows up.

That is also what I remember was planned for Torque3D, to have 4 major releases per year, meaning one every 3 months and the goal of the steering committee was just to guide that process, not to develop everything and add more and more features. If you just continue to promise new features, we end up like Star Citizen where everything is promised and nothing really ever gets done and it delays forever and everyhting is kind of half there, but not really there and not really working.

What is so hard on sticking with the plan? We are not even behind a little bit, since the last major release was over two years ago in 2016. That means we are 7 releases behind, seven !!!!.

I suggested to get a new steering committee, but seems like nobody is interested, whatever, why don't you just throw all the features that are in development out and just finish one thing, like PBR and release it, then work on another part and release that 3 months later. I mean PBR for example should have been there 2 years ago and we still do not have it.

Even if nobody works on it, you could still just release it untested and have the users be the beta testers and fix the issues, so at least people will be forced to work on it and fix it.

When I upgraded my game to a what I thought major version I had to notice that it was more like an untested beta anyway and had to test and fix it before I could use it, so releasing untested broken stuff, would not even make things worse than they were before, but better, since we would at least have some release and some progress, but this way, we hardly have anything.

I mean you could just put me in charge and I would guarentee you that things will get done. Sure I'm not a good programmer, "only" a good artist, but it is not hard to write down a schedule and stick with it, almost anyone should be able to do that, does not matter how small the steps are, progress is progress and it will add up over time. Small changes to the engine would be even better, because if something goes wrong it at least does not break everything in my game every time, that would be a huge help also. If only one major features was added I know where to look in case of problems, but if 10 major features get added it feels like everything breaks down and I have to analyse and debug like almost anything.

First I wanted to write this to @JeffR since he seems to be in charge now and refuses to let others do anything, but this is more of a general issue and I'm a bit tired of begging everyone to do something, because nobody lets me, because some people hate me and try to sabotage me or whatever, I don't care, what I care is that I use this software and depend on it, that is why I want it to develop further.

So can we please do anything?

I use VS 2015 and Cmake 3.7.1 and it works.

Consider trying an older version, if you want to have a lazy solution, I had problems using too new software before.

Otherwise we may need more information on what you have fabricated.

In case your game is multiplayer, the .mis files cannot be edited by clients.

In case your game is singleplayer, you need to remove the tools, before you release, obviously, this will make it a little harder, but those who want can still do it.

What exactly are you trying to do here? Did you make a release build with compiled scripts already? If so, what is still left that you want do prevent from being edited?

The last time I checked we live in the year 2019 and not 2010, maybe update your Visual Studio to something newer, I use 2015 version.

And you need to generate the build files yourself with Cmake, those premade versions are way outdated. Read the wiki here for that: http://wiki.torque3d.org/coder:compiling-in-windows

Why detail 16? I never understood that part. Some default models have lowest LOD at detail 2, but you can use anything. I use 1 I think.

Also I do not understand what bounds are for and why you have a shape file outside of the hierarchy.

It should run smooth, you do not need a debug build for debugging with Torsion, Torsion just goes through the scripts.

Try setting a break point at the beginning, then you can see what gets executed in what order, may take a while, but you will be sure later, you should try that at least once anyway, to see how the engine loads stuff.

Well it is hard to guess what is wrong from that description, you should try to debug yourself first.

First you should install something like Torsion, a Torquescript debugger and see if you can identify the error in the scripts, if that does not help, use a code debugger like Visualstudio for example and see if you can find the error there.

At least that is how I do that.

It seems like you want to remove the tools from the game, I think you can just delete the tools folder and remove it from being executed, but I think it loads automatically from the main.cs in the tools folder or so.

You can also add the logo as a model onto the other model, that way it is even physically separated. Multiple UV maps work as well of course, there are 4 slots in Torque by default.

I don't know about 3.9, but I had the footstep sounds working all the time, meaning in all possible versions since 3+ years. Maybe I fixed something to make it work again, but I have no idea anymore, you can look my commit history if you really want, but I would not bother and just update the engine, I mean, why you want to downgrade?

I have them working, obviously, using latest stable release, I showed the code I used to make it work.

The sound could not be setup correctly, so it does not load, try using a default sound with footSteapSoundID 0 or 1.

If you are using my asset packs, read the readme, it tells you how to install it, I think you have to install the Uberpack1 over the Konserian pack, since the Uberpack contains all the forest items and of course do not change the file paths or you have to upgade them in the managedItemData.mis.

But I would not suggest you to use my old asset packs, since they are bad, I upgraded the quality and functionality of some assets and use them in Uebergame now and threw away some bad ones. You can just use Uebergame as a base, since I regularly update and fix it, at least the assets, the scripts may be too complicated.

You can try merging all the managedItemData files, that should work, the brushes file is not relevant I think. You need all names found in the forest file in your managedItemData.cs file, ideally they attach to the correct models as well.

Well this is complicated in Torque, you need to create a dummy Terrain FX material and link it to the terrain material for the FX to apply, just watch my code and you may understand, for example this:

https://github.com/Duion/Uebergame/blob/master/art/terrains/sand/materials.cs#L1-L28

Define "do not work". You likely have overwritten something or some file reference path is missing or wrong.

For example there are files in art/forest/* called brushes.cs and managedItemData.cs which are required for the forest to work and each forest only works with the managedItemData.cs file it was created, if that is changed, it will break.

I addressed this issue before, since a forest file is binary data and will become useless if managedItemData is changed, which may happen in your case, when you want to merge different projects and/or change/extend things.

My suggestion was to have a different managedItemData.cs and brushes.cs for each level to avoid that issue.

You can also edit the compiled binary files to make it work, but this is ugly and kind of a hack, it may work, but I cannot recommend it.

If you just want to add something to the texture, just paint it on the texture, it does not have to be a dynamic decal then.

Folder structure depends on taste, do whatever you like, the materials.cs files get all executed anyway. Torque scans all folders for those files and executes them. Having one big file may have a very small performance advantage, but I think it is not relevant.

So do whatever you like. Consider that in the future it is planned to have terrain materials and regular textures behave the same way, but I have no idea when that is going to come.

Any halfway skilled artist should be able to do that, all you need to do is have a character with animations, which then can be imported into Torque, the only conversions needed is the Torque specific node setup, so the engine knows how to handle, LOD levels and such, the animations will then be assigned in the engine through Torquescript. Once you have the character ready, you can even do the conversion yourself, it is not that hard.

Mixamo is a subscription model software, see their plans: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

It is quite expensive and I have no idea how it works, since I prefer open source software, but I know this is something professionals use. You can also search the market for cheaper less complicated software, there may be a bunch of them out there.