[greenfire27]

Hi Guys!

Let's be honest, T2D is dying. I'm the only real contributor and I can't find the time to work on it much myself. Or at all really. We're being honest. So I decided to take a page from the GoDot playbook. In case you don't know, GoDot is a flourishing and completely free 3D and 2D game engine with editors. They've managed to see this success by running a successful Patreon page so that their community has a way to fund changes. So I've set up a similar page for T2D which you can find here: https://www.patreon.com/Torque2D

Hopefully this will breath some life back into T2D. I encourage you to give a little or at least pass this on to those in your circles who would be interested.

[Duion]

I'm not a Torque2D user, but it is a good idea to try to keep it alive.

But don't expect magical things to happen just because you create a patreon or whatever, Godot engine did not become successfull organically, it is mostly because of the mobile hype plus some cryptocurrency hype and they have bigger sponsors that donate bigger amounts.

So if you want to make Torque2D survive, you need to support some kind of mobile platform or at least browsers, since that is the growing market right now, nobody really cares about desktop PCs anymore, at least in the 2D game sector.

[greenfire27]

That's good to know about GoDot. Don't get me wrong. I don't expect Patreon page to explode with donations. However, I do know that some users would be willing to pay to get certain features and that would finally push things forward.

Torque2D supports six platforms including iOS, Android, and Web.

[Duion]

Getting the first donations is usually the hardest, it is some kind of psychological thing, people will not donate if nobody else does and you have the chicken and egg problem.

Once you have some activity going, you can try advertising with mobile and web support and maybe a short trailer.

[greenfire27]

Thanks for the advice and for volunteering to give the first donation!

I'm just kidding! But seriously, thanks! Always glad to hear ideas.

[Happenstance]

Good on you Peter for sticking with it all these years. Your avatar's appropriate; you're definitely the captain of the (admittedly lonely) ship. I wish I could've done more to push the editors forward and stuck around longer as an active member of the steering committee but real life got in the way. Hopefully the stuff I dumped on https://github.com/chaigler/t2d_editors helped somebody.

As for the engine, it's been an uphill battle for a long time now. GarageGames failing so soon after the engine was released, Melv departing for Unity, and then Michael Perry abandoning ship shortly after were big blows to the community. The lack of editors, outdated fixed function renderer, etc. didn't help either. It would've been nice if some of the work they did on 3 Step Studio could've been rolled back to T2D, just having some of those editors would've went a long way toward attracting more people to the engine.

I do think there's still a niche T2D can fill, though. I'm not particularly happy with the direction Godot took with 3.0 (the push to GLES3 and the latest-and-greatest rendering came at the cost of performance and compatibility and the engine is worse off in some ways than it was in 2.x). I have to believe there's a place in the world for an opensource, lean-and-clean 2D engine but the amount of competition out there is absurd and attracting users that will actively support the project is insanely difficult.

I would say it might be worth your time discussing things with Jeff and co. There was some talk a while back about leveraging T2D's clean codebase for T3D. Maybe there's an opportunity to leverage something from T3D in return? I've always thought the ideal situation would be a hybrid, Franken-engine pairing T2D's 2D abilities with T3D's more modern renderer but that's an improbable dream at this point.

[greenfire27]

T2D does fill a niche: rapid development. But it hasn't been fully realized. The mod system, scripting language, and future editors will all come together to make an engine that can take in idea to a game at the speed of lightning - and on six platforms to boot! I still plan to keep advancing the engine, so don't get depressed or anything. I just hope that the Patreon page gives users an avenue to support the effort, which in turn will provide us with motivation and encouragement.

I've been in contact with Jeff. We want to make sure the sister engines don't diverge too sharply. But there isn't a silver bullet that will solve all problems. There's a lot of competition out there from engines with solid revenue streams. For Torque to compete, we need a way for our users to vote with their wallets. Otherwise, we'll lose to engines with payed developers every time. The Patreon page will hopefully give our community a fighting change to level the playing field a little.

[Duion]

Well without marketing hardly anything is going to happen.
I have not figured this out fully either, but I know that you need some kind of press kit, where you show your company and what you do, so you can answer questions to journalists quickly and effectively.
Then you need to figure where you are going to market your product to, like search for websites, magazines, streamers, social media that could be interested in writing for you, which is where your press kit may come in handy.
Sure you cannot force people to promote you, but you can make it easier for them.

[marauder2k9]

In all honesty i think the only thing torque2d needs is activity in the forums. I asked questions back in october that have never been addressed, whether the answer is "i dont know" or "thats a stupid questione" it would still be good to get any kind of a response. I had apps that i have made for iphone that are coming up to release that if i had of seen any response at all it would of made me more open to ask further questions and i would of worked on them with torque instead. And probably would of got them done quicker and better. I would love to help out with torque2d but i dont know much about what is happening or what is being worked on or what is going to happen because as i said any time a question is asked it takes forever to get a response. There was a post up about emscripten on this forum that never got an answer apart from the creator of the post months later. Dreadedclowns post Newbie Questions still has no response from anyone apart from lukas telling him that his post was formatted properly with the code highlighting. Is there a steering committee for torque 2d? If so who is on it ? is it just yourself? How do i join the steering committee and put forward ideas? Is anyone going to listen and respond to posts being made so that those ideas don't fall on deaf ears?

[greenfire27]

There is a Steering Committee and it's mostly just me. I typically have about one person a year offer to join and help. Then we spend time going over the daunting list of things that need to be done. Then I never hear from them again.

As far as community, there's a lot of people with warm feelings toward T2D but I don't think they roam the forums on this site. Currently there isn't really a great place for beginners to go to get help and that's a problem. But there's also a lot that needs to be updated with demos and would help beginners get through the learning curve easier. That's all part of the daunting list of things to do.

Because I've had a lot of non-starters, I would prefer that you didn't join the committee until you've submitted a few valuable pull requests. If you just want to put some ideas out, then private message me through these forums. You've got my ear.