Duion

Someone was reporting on my game forum that there are performance issues with OpenAL sound on Linux. http://steamcommunity.com/app/391780/discussions/2/350544272212748764/?tscn=1476010610 I don't have experience with sound drivers and I wonder if OpenAL is the only sound driver for T3D on Linux? On Windows I can chose between DirectSound, OpenAL and XAudio where XAudio gives the best results for me. So does anyone know if other sound drivers are available on Linux? And if OpenAL is the only one, can anyone confirm the performance issues or knows what could be causing it?

I would just go with what is already there and extend it later eventually, if you want to customize everything from the beginning you will just waste time on unimportant visual extra features instead on spending time developing the core game.

I'm currently setting up my AI players with navigation meshes, it works fine so far, but I have problems making them use doorways. The navMesh adds a distance of roughly 0.5 meters to walls, so the AI does not run into walls or gets stuck, the problem is, my doorways are 1 meter wide so the navMesh does not get generated through them. Only way to make the navMesh go through the doorways is reducing the size to about 0.2 meters, but this makes the navMesh go really close to walls so AI players run into walls constantly and get stuck. So I found there is a link feature which lets you add custom links in the navMesh by hand, like where the AI has to jump etc to get through, it works fine for small barriers with jumping, but it does not work with walking through doors. I think this is because the link feaure also takes into account space to the sides and to the top and decides that the doorways is too small for the player to go through. So any ideas how to solve this?

That is what shapenames are for, they are enabled by default for player objects, but they just have regular text, not 3D text.

Torsion is free and open source now in case anyone still does not know it.

If you want an open source game engine, there is no real alternative to Torque3D, for small games like 2D games or mobile style games there is a bunch of alternatives now, but for large scale 3D projects they cannot compete yet. So it depends on your project, if it is a small game Godot or Urho3D may work better, since you get results faster, but in the long run you will be missing features that Torque3D provides by default.

Sounds interesting, I did not expect that update so soon. The issues slipped past the testing likely because the testlevel did not utilize much advanced features, the test level has almost no normal or specular maps applied and not a reasonable lighting setup. I would also turn off the timeofday by default, since it confuses the lighting setup, you need a constant scene to have something as a benchmark, not something that changes all the time, this can give wrong impressions.

Of course I know where to find the stuff, but I just occasionally backup things I find usefull, I do not make sure to make accurate complete backups. And stuff that was already down when I joined the community I cannot have saved obviously, since I joined relatively late.

I have terrabytes of online storage, the question is more 1. where do I get the stuff to host and 2. is it legal to do so? and 3. does anyone care?

Do you use git? Then you can just merge the branches. For your template directory you will have to merge it by hand. And I would advise you not to upgrade to 3.9, since it is not useable at this point, wait for it to be fixed.

Use dxt1 whenever possible, it has the highest compression. For normal maps you can use dxt1 as well but you will have compression arftifacts, so you have to use dxt5 or dxt5nm. For textures with sharp alpha use dxt3 and for soft gradient alpha use dxt5. So cutout plants can use dxt3 and semi transparent clouds can use dxt5. When in doubt just use dxt5. I use dxt1 for diffuse and specular and dxt5nm for normal maps. If you want to use parallax textures you need to put the heightmap into the normal maps alpha channel and save it as png, since dds are broken with that feature.

Probably dxt5nm format also called swizzling. It shifts around the colors to avoid dds compression artifacts. I use that for most of my normal maps, but when I open them in Gimp they look normal again, it is just in WTV that they look weird. Another cause or weird looking normal maps is if there is an alpha channel with low intensity so that the texture is transparent which changes the appearance of the colors as well, you can see this on the normal map for the default soldier, it is almost transparent.

Datablocks just contain values for an object type. You can only use data values that have previously defined in tihe engines source code like this for example: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D/blob/development/Engine/source/T3D/item.cpp#L68-L109 You can build your swords upon the weapon datablocks and other items upon the item datablock. The sourcecode example has default values, so you only need to enter the values in the datablock you want to change, this can help reduce filesize. You can also use namespace method to derive a datablock from another. Like "bigJar : jar" where the bigJar will be derived from jar, so you can make a default datablock for all jars and use namespace if you need to just change certain values for the jar type etc.

Your greed has been solved ;)

I forgot the most important thing, find people to playtest with, testing the game under realistic conditions is most important, since only then you can see if the gameplay really works, is balanced and is fun. PS: The blogs section is supposed to be for announcements and updates, not so much the general discussion forum. Here: http://forums.torque3d.org/viewforum.php?f=8

There seem to be some provider with special offers regarding some domains. For example I just did a quick search on the internet and found a provider offering a .de domain for 5 Euro, but on the other hand their .com domain cost 19 Euro per year. So if you really spend time searching you may find some special offer that will get you a domain a few dollars cheaper, but those providers then have other drawbacks, since they have to make their money somehow as well. I would not spend that much time into a topic that could me potentiall save a few dollars per year, I spend significantly more on other things. Here I found a comparison chart of the cheapest: https://www.domcomp.com/ GoDaddy gives you .com for 0,99 cents, but if you read a bit it is limited for one domain per customer, and 1&1 also gives you a .com for 0,99 cents, but it seems just to be a welcome offer for new customers etc. So there is always a drawback somewhere, better not be to greedy and eventually get some contract with extra costs you do not get rid of again, I prefer just to pay the regular prices and not get any bullshit with it.

Good luck with your Greenlight. But I want to give you some tips: You may get lots of negative comments, better ignore them, only respond to those who sound like they could be reasoned with, otherwise you just make it worse. If you get greenlit, the release of the game is the point you will get the most attention so you should spend most time preparing for that moment and get everything right then. You could improve the visuals by just playing with the settings a bit, try changing ambient light, fog, postFX etc can visually give quite an improvement, at the moment it is all very lit with high contast and very strong colors, I would try to tone it down overall a bit. You seem to have a low FOV, this makes the player feel a bit cramped, I found to be a FOV of 90 ideal for FPS games, this is also what most games use.

I pay 11,90 Euro but it is not really much of a difference, you seem to be really greedy or you have a ton of domains.

Why you censored the rabbits balls? They were the best part. Sadly I'm an Indie and cannot afford AAA rabbit balls. :(

My levels are all made with the T3D terrain editor all made by hand, it was not that hard, I only improved the basetexture in a third party tool. The only problem you occasionally get is that you get hard edges from the brush, there maybe could be some more options to randomize or smooth the brush so you do not get such harsh edges where you paint.

The terrain editor may be easy and intuitive in Esenthel engine, but nowadays we have total different standards in terrain editing alone. You have very complex tools that do just generate terrains, like World Machine. I don't think any engine now has such a capeable terrain editor like World Machine and others. If you want good looking realistic terrains you will have to switch to third party tools anyway.

If you have a real serious game and not some obvious ripoff or trash than you should be able to get through greenlight very easily. In the past getting through greenlight was very hard, after some time it became easier, but maybe it has changed again and it has become a little harder again, I don't know.

I don't feel that since I do not know any Torque version before the open source release. You will not have much choice other than to switch to Torque3D, since there is lots of updates and new features coming.

DRM is optional for Steam, if you don't use it for your game, then your game has no DRM. Same with other platforms, the big ones likely have some form of DRM protection as well.

I think you can ignore most of the stores, since steam will give you probably by far the most sales.