Is this forum ruled by despotism?

What is stopping me? People because almost every time I say or do something they fight me and if I do it anyway they ignore it away. Like with the new default art assets I made and the Moddb account I recovered to do PR on.

It is easy to see that nothing happens for example out of the steering committee members only 2 were every really active and since 3 years just 1 is active, so for 5 years there is no progress at all, rather there is a regress and there is so little happening that nobody even bothers to spend a minute or two to just delete the inactive nonexistent members out of the steering committee list, that is also an example of intentionally ignoring problems while actually fixing them would require even less energy than ignoring them.

The new default art assets you made, is that a pr? Can't find it with a superficial search.

I'd like to see an example of how you've been wronged, you seem to suggest a maliciousness behind it.

I admit that I have not deleted people from the SC list on the forums, it's a communication problem where I didn't really keep up-to-date on the SC work so I just didn't pick up on it, and it doesn't seem to really matter now.

Assuming that is the list you're referring to, then I can clean up the list tomorrow if that is important to you.

It was decided to not pr new art assets into the repo, because that would blow up the size and it is already very big and since it is version control every binary asset file will blow it up forever. Git is not made for that.

I released the first version on Opengameart, but I'm banned there now, so it is on my website with all my other stuff.

Now I would make new, better ones, but I have nowhere to put them and nobody will use them anyway, so I'm not really motivated to do anything anymore for others.

I'd be interested in seeing the actual discussion where this decision was made, was it a forum post?

Tbh from what you're writing here, it sounds less like you being ignored and more like an active decision not to include it in the main repo.

But, it doesn't have to be in the main repo, you can create cool art and put it in another repo or as you did on your own website. Then, everyone interested can get it freely! That's arguably just as good as having it in the main repo

I'm working with Lukas and other site/online presence maintainers to put together a gameplan on how to clean up and consolidate stuff because as people in here(and elsewhere) have noted, there's the issue of stuff not being kept up to date.

I'll be posting a new workblog and the gameplan for stuff going forward to deal with most all of this this weekend.

In the meantime, pertaining to default assets: if they're not included when someone downloads the engine, it's hard to say they are default.

That said, with the new Torque Manager, the idea is an easier to maintain and expand list of community assets that are readily downloadable on demand. Ergo, your assets could be uploaded and integrated into the list, and so when people use the Manager, it'd appear in the list and they could readily download and utilize it in their projects.

This would keep the main repo size down, while making it front and center for those utilizing the engine via the Manager, which should assuage a lot of that concern.

I can touch on that more as well in my next workblog.

It was from a time where there still was an existing steering committee and I was in it and there the decision was made and then the decision was told to the public, probably in some post on garagegames.com.

Well creating stuff only makes sense if people know about it and use it or at least mention that it exists, which did not happen, instead people ignore that the steering committee existed, ignore all plans and decisions that were made and the things that were done and pretended nothing ever existed.

No it is not just as good as having it in the main repo, because nobody will know about it, when nobody mentions it, because they actively ignore the decisions that were made and keep going like before, like no decisions were ever made.

That is similar to the new repository now, new people will still go to the garagegames official repository and notice it is inactive and conclude no progress is made and if you tell them, well there is progress made, in this secret new repo, that nobody knows about and nobody tells you about, but there is no problem with that, because it exists, somewhere. You have to do actual public relations to tell people that it is different now or at least announce it somewhere on a front page or blog, which currently do not even exist and update all the links and references from the old unused links to the new used links.

So there is a crucial difference and things existing somewhere is certainly nowhere as good as things existing officially and were officially announced as the new standard now.

Have you never watched statistics on websites? Do you know what conversion rate is in business? Do you know what bounce rate is in analytics?

Let me tell you how it works, basically we are a business and when new potential customers come here, they will just look what is obviously there and if they see an inactive website, with no news made for years and nothing done in the official repo, they will conclude it is dead and leave. Most people will and cannot bother to research every small corner of the website, forum, Github to see if someone somewhere mentioned where the actual stuff is happening. People search for an engine and come out to some social media page and see it was not updated since forever, they conclude it is dead and use another engine, customer lost, having activity and updates somewhere else does not matter in the slightest anymore, it is a difference like day and night. In the day things are visible and in the night not, of course maybe 1% of people will also find things in the night, but 99% will not bother.

@JeffR

Well finally, that sounds promising, I would even consider removing the default assets from the repo and replace it with a very basic placeholder, like the blue guy or red guy, similar like other engines do and replace grid textures that are obviously for prototyping and not meant to used for real, cry engine even had a texture that had "replace me" on it, which is like the warning material that we have.

Then you should even link the assets in the main repo or the game engine itself, like an asset store, where you have ready made Torque assets that can be imported with a click, then we finally can play out our main advantage of being open source, a free asset store.

It's been a wile since I checked Torque forums, mostly I come here to see Duion's rants, they are pretty funny, never change buddy.

While reading this tread I was thinking the whole time about the saying "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" That's pretty much Torque3D development in a nutshell.

As an outsider, this is usually the Torque experience when finding this:

• Searchs "open source game engine" on google: If algorithm gods feel generous that day this forum pops up in page 15 more or less or in a "game engines list article", -not a great start-.

• Checks 'Get involved' and goes to the git linked there, -oh, OK last update 8 months ago, last answered Issue on November 2019, not a great sign-.

• Last official release more than 2 years ago, -yeah this is fucking dead-

• Goes to features list and... -Desktop only and not even PBR materials- (If isn't in a official release it doesn't exist, not gonna bother searching JeffR's work, etc)

• Twitter -> Dead

• Facebook -> Dead

• YouTube -> Non-existent

• No updates -> PAGE <- or similar (News forum section is OK but again, too hidden)

• Sees Discord, -Yeah, not even gonna bother-

Conclusion: Downloads Godot.

necro thread: bad

derail this particular thread: acceptable

i'll make this even worse... having accepted all of that criticism a while ago, everything on that list that already exists (do not get me freaking started on joining every fecking social media platform under the sun) is literally now a work in progress trying to improve the situation.

ironic twist

most of its being done in the background and unless you are part of the real time chat (discord) you can be forgiven for not knowing.

begging forgiveness

assumptions were made this would be a semi-speedy happening thing

the reality is this has been accelerated very much but only quite recently, perhaps it's worth the powers than be having a moment to quickly note where we are found and discovered and a brief paragraph explaining which changes and why are happening, because it is seemingly touching every aspect of torque.

please excuse the use of *we* its a terrible habit, I don't actually speak for torque or the community or the powers that be, but I do my best to operate in good faith.

• We have moved to an entirely new github organisation away from garage games
  
• We have some very capable people now working on the new websites
  
• People have been found/volunteered for various specific roles as noted with websites above
   
  

bad faith section

It is a little tiring having to point out constantly that the sheer lack of people the community has does not help, there is an automatic assumption that every game engine has dozens or even more developers, or income streams for developer wages like Godot. given the limitations I still think the guys here do a fantastic job on the engine.

I think its a shame that most people on the internet are little more than shallow PR sponges who do nothing but judge books by their covers.

@Outsider

So you come here for my rants, is this meant positively or negatively? I mean almost all your complaints are identical to my complaints, does this mean you are ranting funnily too?

I can make my point even shorter, so everything else is dead, no update page, no social media, the only active thing visible to the outside world is the forum and now the community is trying to kill that as well.

When Torque3D was released as MIT it was definitively the best open source game engine ever and probably even still is, but people are so full of self hatred that they try to sabotage it in every way, by making it look as bad as possible, so nobody will look at it and when I tell those obvious facts people try to get me banned.

most of its being done in the background

And that's exactly the problem :roll:

Duion I complain whatever way you want me to complain baby <3

Well most is not even done at all, which is an even bigger problem.

Posting your work to the outside world is usually much less of an effort as doing the work itself, so if someone supposedly does a lot of work, but never shows any of it, it becomes very suspicious if work is done at all and even if the work that is not visible is done for real, the person should really consider doing less work and doing more work on publicizing the work.

Marketing is always more important than working on the actual product, because if nobody knows your product exists you cannot sell anything, no matter how good the product is. So marketing should always be number one priority, so whenever marketing is not your number one priority you are doing it wrong.

There are game engines that are more popular than Torque, even though you cannot even develop games with them for real. This is all because they spend more work in marketing. A big portion of social media giants have no or almost no actual content, but they are popular as hell, because they spend all their effort on promoting themselves.

It's been a wile since I checked Torque forums, mostly I come here to see Duion's rants, they are pretty funny, never change buddy.

While reading this tread I was thinking the whole time about the saying "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" That's pretty much Torque3D development in a nutshell.

As an outsider, this is usually the Torque experience when finding this:

 

• Searchs "open source game engine" on google: If algorithm gods feel generous that day this forum pops up in page 15 more or less or in a "game engines list article", -not a great start-.

• Checks 'Get involved' and goes to the git linked there, -oh, OK last update 8 months ago, last answered Issue on November 2019, not a great sign-.

• Last official release more than 2 years ago, -yeah this is fucking dead-

• Goes to features list and... -Desktop only and not even PBR materials- (If isn't in a official release it doesn't exist, not gonna bother searching JeffR's work, etc)

• Twitter -> Dead

• Facebook -> Dead

• YouTube -> Non-existent

• No updates -> PAGE <- or similar (News forum section is OK but again, too hidden)

• Sees Discord, -Yeah, not even gonna bother-

 

Conclusion: Downloads Godot.

https://github.com/TorqueGameEngines/Torque3D was a relatively recent swap over, so can see why that wouldn't turn on up.

twitter torque3d in google brings up

'Get involved' - left a love note to get that link fixed

'Goes to features list and' - it's a fair critique. We do tend to err on the side of 'ok, have we *really* run out of ways to beat this up for general use' before we consider stickin it on a feature list since making the promise something will be in if it aint already is a good recipe for worse will than just not listing it.

'No updates -> PAGE' - what kind of thing would *you* be eyeballing?