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Torque 3D 3.9 Release Candidate


JeffR

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if this comes across as sarcastic then so be it :p


keeping up with other engines... other engines have dozens of full time paid engine developers.


stopping work on advancing the engine just so that... cross platform compatibility work can catch up, is a pretty good way of ruining a product even if you have people available to work on that particular task, its even more ridiculous if you have nobody to work on that task.


macs are a tiny part of the PC market, i'm not even sure gaming on macs is even remotely on par with gaming on linux outside of the USA, i'm not even sure it has parity even in the USA tbh.


So just to re-iterate, there is no point in stopping the few people who are contributing to the engine, this wont get mac compatibility done any quicker, in fact it will destroy whats left of the userbase because the majority of the users who can use the engine are no longer getting updates.

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I'm sorry to hear that.


Could I make a suggestion for the steering committee?


Instead of pushing the engine even further ahead in 4.0 and going for PBR which is ahead of the curve but maybe a little too far ahead of the curve, why not put all our resources into making the engine cross-platform compatible which will do more than anything else to bring it up to date and increase the user base?

It's been tried several times now and failed, how about putting all our resources into it and putting it on an equal footing with the other game engines and making a Mac, Linux and Android version before we go any further ahead?

 

I'd be keen on mac support happening, and lots of stuff has had the tangental benefit of making that easier going forward, stuff like epoxy helps a lot for making sure systems with flakey or out of date drivers work(such as osx or some units distros), and SDL shaves off a lot of the work in dealing with the platform layer work.


The big thing holding back mac being a minor drop-in effort is Apple putting very minimal effort into keeping osx working with modern OGL, which isn't something us full-in'ing on can change. We can work around odd osx behaviors, but we can't really fix them.


That said, the last attempt that was made a few months back showed it's pretty close, I recall some odd graphical behavior and some platform oddities with SDL, but it did compile and run. As we continue to refine the OGL gfx layer, and switch over to SDL for the platform core, it should be much easier to double-back around and have a bit of slap-around on mac ;)


Stuff like PBR - which is almost completed already and the entity/component work don't negatively impact osx other than it potentially coming about a bit slower, and stuff like e/c and PBR help a lot with standardizing art and gameplay paths, which do benefit the mac dudes too when we get that end working.


Another limiter that is slowly being resolved is anyone with the code know-how having access to macs which almost no-one did in prior attempts. I've got access to one from my work, and a few other people are getting them for testing and all that jazz. That means that when we look at it again, there's a much higher number of eyes on it so testing and fixing can occur much faster.


So yeah, I can promise you it'll be looked at and we'll make an effort to get mac support added proper - chances are better now than ever before - but I disagree that we need to stall on other fronts to get there, and quite a bit of work, if indirect, has already been pushed to making it workable going forward. :)

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Thanks.


It's just a suggestion.


Most of our users are not gamers which explains why some of them have Macs.


I don't have a Mac but we can probably draught some of our users into helping with testing a Mac build.


There's always a balance with allocating what limited resources are available we all know that having worked with Torque3d for so many years and most of us having to work with others on our projects are well aware of limitations on budget and manpower.

It's not as fun or dramatic as a new cutting edge render engine I know but I think it's something we have to be serious about or we won't be taken seriously and the user base will shrink.

As you say we are closer now than ever, it's a good opportunity, I think we should keep the ideal of cross compatibility high on the list of priorities.

It's as if we are almost there and maybe with an extra push it will get to a point of stability and stay on the agenda that's what we are hoping for.


By the way the latest developments really are unprecedented and unexpected and all I can say is keep up the awesome good work.

Edited by Skipper
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Let me be perfectly plain on this 'pbr *vs* mac' argument: There isn't one. Deferred was put off till opengl was in because mac support seemed to be following shortly. If folks with Macs wish to spend more time Acting instead of Asking, or I get enough cash to buy one and test it this end, hutchs work'll absolutely be incorporated into that and i'll help as time allows. Actually @hutch, would you want that https://github.com/JeffProgrammer/Torque3D/tree/macosx tossed in at present, or preffer folks held off on that end and contributed to https://github.com/JeffProgrammer/Torque3D/tree/macosx_cocoa seem to recall it was a variant of the former we checked out on one of my crews macs, mostly worked, but kinda slow, which coulda been down to debug ect?

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macosx branch. the cocoa branch should probably not be used as that was when I was being stubborn on SDL as it was still unstable and thinking about just porting everything. I also broke some functionality in the branch as well :l. Probably just use the macosx branch. It needs to be pulled up to date with devhead and tested, so that should probably be the first thing. Then SDL functionality, get it working with 32bit, followed by the transition of deprecating like *all* of platformMac folder as its carbon based, and then transition to cocoa. If you have any questions just ask and I'll try to clarify.

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I can confirm that it compiles and runs with the 10.11 latest SDK using XCode 7.0.1 and MacOS 10.11.5.


You need to do 2 things in CMake:


1. set the CMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET property to 10.9

2. set the CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES property to i368


I will not recommend supporting below 10.9.5


Note that you will get a CPU fatal error. Well...it's not fatal as its just platform detection, and fatal errors on OSX are broken and don't abort the process. Just press OK and it will continue to run :D

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Wow Timmy that looks great.


If you need any help with testing please let us know.


I don't have a Mac but some of our users do and they are pretty eager to help out with some beta testing of our game environment.

They are not all tech savvy though but at least they are willing, if you can give them some clear instructions about what they need to do to build it and get it installed then we may be able to help.

:D

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  • 2 months later...
So I have a Mac and I'm willing to do some work. I checked out the repository from Jeff's repository, but CMake has a bit of a fit when generating a project for me to use. What's the state of the 3.9 development branch? Is it worth checking that out to test?

https://github.com/rextimmy/Torque3D/tree/mac_port

 

Cool - although I can't check it out - I think rextimmy has to allow me to have access. I'l download the zip for now and take a look at what's going on.

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  • 4 weeks later...
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