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Torque 3D! On a mac, is it worth the time?


SeamusFD

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My question is a simple one, is it worth the time (If even possible) for me to try and get T3D working on a mac or would I be better off looking for a different engine. (Answer honestly please)


I don't have any C experience, however I do have programming experience. I am willing to learn if it is a worthwhile pursuit.


Note: I posted this on the other forum but wasn't sure whether it was active! :lol:

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I think @LuisAntonRebollo knows this the best, but T3D just had OpenGL implemented and I think Linux is the next target for support. Not sure how far the Mac port is, I'd think that it's under development but not finished.


So yes and no, it's not infeasible but not officially supported either currently.


Edit: on the IRC @Azaezel mentioned that @Hutch might be the go-to guy instead :P

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T3D has been ported to OSX (by these guys), and we're aiming for official support soon (not this version, but hopefully the next one, due out in... several months' time). I think if T3D is the engine you want, then it's worth waiting, and possibly even jumping in to help out (we can always use more testers with Macs, which will help us support that platform better).


But, I think if T3D doesn't have some killer feature that'll make your game that much better, or if you don't feel you have to have an open-source engine (or if existing OS engines work fine for you), then there's no real reason to wait. Maybe you should make a game with something else, then come back and visit us in a year's time and see how far we've come ;).


I guess it depends on the work you'd rather be doing. If your passion is making a game, you don't really care about game engine internals, and it's feasible to implement your game in a general-purpose game engine (i.e. you wouldn't need to modify the engine source), then you should probably use some other popular engine. But if you like to get your hands dirty, learn about how game engines work, modify it to suit exactly what you want to do with your game, etc., then welcome aboard!

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[edit] argh, ninja'd by @buckmaster


Hi! :)


Mac support in torque3d is lagging. Currently, the development version will not compile on mac. I have managed to get Torque3D to compile on Mac OSX Yosemite using Xcode 6.1.1 with some effort. Currently, I only have basic lighting working (no deferred prepass rendering yet [advanced lighting]). I am using the OpenGL core profile to render, so it will use either 3.2 or 4.1 depending on your mac. You must have a mac with Lion or higher, because Torque currently uses OpenGL 3. I have been doing research into providing a "legacy" profile that will require Snow Leopard or later using OpenGL 2.1, but no guarentee on that any time soon. Currently, I have tested the code on 2 mac book pros, both running Yosemite, but it should work with 10.7.2+


The macs I have tested are a mac with Intel HD 3000 graphics (HORRIBLE PERFORMANCE) and Intel Iris Pro (Acceptable performance, but needs some improvements).


Please note that there is NO optimizations whatsover in the codebase for OSX as of now, but, given some time and patience, that will change. I am using Torque3D for a project, where I am planning to fully support snow leopard and up.


A lot of the platform specific code needs updated as well, because it uses the old Carbon API, which does not have very good 64bit support.


Currently, everything renders in basic forward renderer fine in DEBUG build, but in a release compiled build, its still glitchy.


THE TL;DR version: I don't know when mac support will officially be in the engine, but it is possible with patience, knowledge, and pulling your hair out of your head :)


[small](okay i was kidding on the last part...)[/small]


Btw, at the OP, what's your specs on your mac?

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Hola Seamus:

 

My question is a simple one, is it worth the time (If even possible) for me to try and get T3D working on a mac or would I be better off looking for a different engine. (Answer honestly please)

 

As a MacHead, I'll give you the honest answer, short and long.


short answer: Yes you can get T3D to work on OSX.


long answer: Yes you can get T3D to work on OSX but it's a lot of work. There's a handful of brilliant minds working on T3D and a smaller handful of us testing/using the result of their labours. I can say that an out-of-the-box, working project for xCode is on the horizon. Having said that, you'll need to be at least an 'advanced beginner' with both xCode and CMake to be able to use it or any other 3D source code. You'll need a version of Windows on one of your Macs or a stand-alone PC as well to get a lot of the workflow going - it's simply unavoidable, no matter what engine you use for game design, whether it's T3D, Unreal, Unity, etc. FWIW I held out for many years using Maya, Blender, etc., but found it's worth having Windows somewhere not only for testing your work but for apps like Ultimate Unwrap, Milkshape, Fragmotion, and the like.


As of this posting, I've had a 10.6+ version of my project running with all but a few shader-related features for about a year now, fully network-compatible with Win7+. In all fairness, while I'm no code guru, I've been tinkering with the engine and xCode for over a decade and know the quirks of running Torque engines on a Mac. FWIW it was TGE that got me started compiling my own apps back in '02 using CodeWarrior, and used it to not only compile for OS9, but Linux and Windows as well. I would reiterate what Buckmaster said - if you want to download an engine, open the level editor on your Mac and get busy, you'd best try Unreal or Unity (I've used both on both platforms, prefer Unreal - just sayin'). If you're down for the DIY and want total ownage of your Intellectual Property, then this is a great place to get dirty...

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Where do I start? Thank you all for the quick and insightful replies! I really appreciate it.

 

I guess it depends on the work you'd rather be doing. If your passion is making a game, you don't really care about game engine internals, and it's feasible to implement your game in a general-purpose game engine (i.e. you wouldn't need to modify the engine source), then you should probably use some other popular engine. But if you like to get your hands dirty, learn about how game engines work, modify it to suit exactly what you want to do with your game, etc., then welcome aboard!

 

^ Thanks, I don't really know about want I want at the moment, but was attracted me to look at Torque was its versatility. Don't get me wrong I love engines like Unreal and Unity3D but I was missing the ability to have ALL of the features and control without licenses or contracts etc.

I can't say I know what I want, but I am willing to experiment and try stuff out.

 

THE TL;DR version: I don't know when mac support will officially be in the engine, but it is possible with patience, knowledge, and pulling your hair out of your head :)


[small](okay i was kidding on the last part...)[/small]


Btw, at the OP, what's your specs on your mac?

 

^ Hutch, I have a brand new Mac Mini with 8Gb of RAM a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and Intel Iris 1536 MB graphics. Those are the basics, and I hope for an officially supported version soon.

 

long answer: Yes you can get T3D to work on OSX but it's a lot of work. There's a handful of brilliant minds working on T3D and a smaller handful of us testing/using the result of their labours. I can say that an out-of-the-box, working project for xCode is on the horizon. Having said that, you'll need to be at least an 'advanced beginner' with both xCode and CMake to be able to use it or any other 3D source code. You'll need a version of Windows on one of your Macs or a stand-alone PC as well to get a lot of the workflow going - it's simply unavoidable, no matter what engine you use for game design, whether it's T3D, Unreal, Unity, etc. FWIW I held out for many years using Maya, Blender, etc., but found it's worth having Windows somewhere not only for testing your work but for apps like Ultimate Unwrap, Milkshape, Fragmotion, and the like.


As of this posting, I've had a 10.6+ version of my project running with all but a few shader-related features for about a year now, fully network-compatible with Win7+. In all fairness, while I'm no code guru, I've been tinkering with the engine and xCode for over a decade and know the quirks of running Torque engines on a Mac. FWIW it was TGE that got me started compiling my own apps back in '02 using CodeWarrior, and used it to not only compile for OS9, but Linux and Windows as well. I would reiterate what Buckmaster said - if you want to download an engine, open the level editor on your Mac and get busy, you'd best try Unreal or Unity (I've used both on both platforms, prefer Unreal - just sayin'). If you're down for the DIY and want total ownage of your Intellectual Property, then this is a great place to get dirty...

 

^ Gibby, I can't say that I am an experienced programmer. However I am willing to learn and the DIY and total ownage of property is what brought me here (just as to any real open source projects).


In short I can't say if I will use Torque engine for games. But I will try it out and see where it takes me.


Thank you all! :D


-SeamusFD

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  • 4 weeks later...

So at what stage is the Mac port currently at? What sort of help is required to get it running?


I've been a Torque user on and off for the last decade or so and would really like to start using it once again, especially on my main computer which is a nice little MBP. I'm willing to put some time into helping, as the other alternative is to write my own engine/editing suite to make my game idea(s). I'm more than capable of that, but I think less time would be spent helping out with T3D in the long run.


I'm not a big fan of Unity and having worked on an Unreal Engine project on console a while back - that was enough to swear me off it for life.


I have a couple of decent windows machines that I can use, but as I said, my MBP is my main machine here at home and would like to stick with working on OS X.


** edit **


I've cloned the latest repository for GitHub and run the generate projects command. However, Xcode refuses to open any of the Full projects.

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I've had T3D+AFX running in OSX for about a year, all the way up to 3.6.3. I had been missing some of the shaders in the past but they're all updated and working well in OpenGL now. I've been trying to get 3.7 to run with the intention of writing a T3D/OSX wiki but I've run into issues with an older version of xCode on my MBP. I have a huge non-game project in the works now and won't upgrade OSX/xCode 'til its delivered in a week or so.


What I can tell you is that the Project Manager is not likely going to work. I have in the past generated projects on the Windoze side [if there's a plist in your templates] and tweaked the projects till it ran. That approach hasn't worked for me as of late, but fortunately these days, you'll simply need to setup and run cMake to generate your xCode projects - pretty painless.

Once you have used cMake to generate the xCode project, you'll have to make sure you're using the Apple LLVM 4.2 compiler (not the GCC we used to use for TGE ) and running 'Latest OS X' in your build SDK. FWIW There's a couple of guys on the IRC channel that are compiling test versions for OSX, if you get stuck they're always really helpful.


Please give it a shot and post your results, working or not. I'd like to get an OSX how-to going and would welcome any help, especially from an experienced Mac-Torque user...

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..Lots of useful stuff..

 

Thanks for the tips, Gibby. Depending on if I have time tonight or not (I have book to finish and my publisher is nipping at my heels) I'll install CMake give it a go. I did download CMake last night, but saw posts about using the generate commands else where - so I figured I'd see if it was the path of least resistance.

Edited by lowlevelsoul
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@Luis: I'd be honored to help in anyway I can - llame me Pues!


@lowlevelsoul: So far there is no well-defined path to get T3D and OSX to work together, we've all been doing our best to get it going independantly which is so often the path of the Mac gamer...

Perhaps Luis has the right idea, let's get a team together and make this happen1

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[mention]Gibby[/mention] - yeah, I found this out last night. I had to pop into the IRC chan to get some help on why I was getting an error with cmake. It looks as if the Mac version needs some significant work to be done to get to being close to usable - stuff doesn't compile and even if I could get the 3.7 rc candidate to build; running might be another issue all together.


I'm sorely tempted to just use TGE 1.4 and write new render pipeline for it - I used it this evening to implement a simple version of the memory manager that I had proposed in the C++ forum and ran some tests. The Stronghold starter.fps demo was interesting to see in action again. I got some really useful metrics and some interesting results.

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Update:


Thanks to Hutch and the crew on IRC, I have been making headway. Seems the cMake approach has some issues with the 3.7rc but I've been able to get project manager to generate xCode projects.


@lowlevelsoul: Hang in there. I got a version of my 7DayFPS project working and performing nicely [50-60ish FPS with forest, precipitation, postFX and dozens of bots] with just a few features missing in late January [version3.6.2], and despite the many updates/enhancements to the OGL side, it's likely we'll have it running in less time than it would take to write a new rendering layer. FWIW you should also look into what's happening with Torque6 as it's basically what you're considering - T3D networking, T2D modularity, new rendering layer...


@lls+all: Even if you only have time to download and check the install process, we have so few mac users that any help is valuable, especially in making sure that it'll be Prêt-à-Porter for as many mac versions as is practicle...

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