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Pre-Release Candidate 4.0 build


JeffR

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Should note the OpenAL end of things on mac was a bit of a hack that cost us the new reverb stuff on that platform. At some point we'll need to revisit that to sort out how to properly use the git-included library instead of the os framework to leverage the AL_ALEXT_PROTOTYPES extended functionality.

 

Fix is here , this also enables using the t3d supplied openal-soft version for linux as well, so all 3 platforms will now use the same openal-soft build. Should give @practicing01 credit for the EFX fix, his original can be found here

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Hey, I've been attempting to compile the Pre-Release in Linux and so far have some case-sensitive problems. In customShaderFeature.cpp - line 23, it was CustomShaderFeature.h but was supposed to be customShaderFeature.h.


Damn case-sensitivity.


In meshREnderSystem.h, I changed, #include "core/util/SystemInterfaceList.h" to #include "core/util/systemInterfaceList.h"


There were some others too.



In renderProbeMgr.h, I had to change

 

inline bool ProbeRenderInst::operator ==(const ProbeRenderInst& b) const


to

 inline bool operator ==(const ProbeRenderInst& b) const

 



I got it to compile without errors and the executable would only run from command line.


I used

 

CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS                           -no-pie

 

CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS_RELEASE          -no-pie

 

re-compiled and the executable would run with a double click. I don't really know what -nopie means but I read it isn't the best practice.


When I enter a level, there are a ton of errors that I believe may stem from case-sensitivity in Linux.


I will check more into it.


Thanks

 

Good spots on all this, I'll make sure to get this rolled in.

On the no-pie thing, I did some reading and it seems like it's more just a "it's less secure this way because it doesn't get punted into random memory", but since it actually lets the thing run without any hoop-jumping, then unless something else crops up for why it's bad to use, I'm sorta inclined to have it be the default.


We could probably have that be an option in cmake so if someone wants that added security and is willing to juggle the extra headache of the security measures messing with stuff, they can.

 

Thanks Jeff, I admit that I haven't had to much time to look into the actual script errors but I uploaded the "working" Linux friendly source if anyone wants to compile it.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KuEQKOyX-a6ZCApzuHMvSbGbgxqYmoad

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Good spots on all this, I'll make sure to get this rolled in.

On the no-pie thing, I did some reading and it seems like it's more just a "it's less secure this way because it doesn't get punted into random memory", but since it actually lets the thing run without any hoop-jumping, then unless something else crops up for why it's bad to use, I'm sorta inclined to have it be the default.


We could probably have that be an option in cmake so if someone wants that added security and is willing to juggle the extra headache of the security measures messing with stuff, they can.

 

Thanks Jeff, I admit that I haven't had to much time to look into the actual script errors but I uploaded the "working" Linux friendly source if anyone wants to compile it.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KuEQKOyX-a6ZCApzuHMvSbGbgxqYmoad


reminder: you need to add these flags for executable in cmake


CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS -no-pie

CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS_RELEASE -no-pie

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  • 1 month later...

Been about a month, just wondering about any possible progress...


Also a question- Can you point me to any discussion and/or possible docs on the new "modules" and how they fit in and work? Also any docs on how or discussions on the actual editors and how they are implemented in the Torque IDE? I know I can go find it and figure it out if I have to, just curious if there are any written or discussed docs anywhere before I go do that.

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Been about a month, just wondering about any possible progress...


Also a question- Can you point me to any discussion and/or possible docs on the new "modules" and how they fit in and work? Also any docs on how or discussions on the actual editors and how they are implemented in the Torque IDE? I know I can go find it and figure it out if I have to, just curious if there are any written or discussed docs anywhere before I go do that.

 

Sorry, yeah, July was a weird month. But progress has been happening, will have a full update in the next day or two here.


For the documentation stuff, I finally puzzled out how RtD requires it's stuff to be formatted, so I can finally start updating the documentation there, and the first page I've started working on is the overview of the modules/assets stuff.


For the IDE integration, Torsion, for example utilizes the telnet hook-in for doing live debugging. But I don't believe there's much in the way of documentation for it. Definitely wouldn't be a bad thing to have at least an overview page on though.

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Awesome Jeff, I was just curious. Looking forward to the next update when your able to do so. I completely understand about weird times lol.


That's great I will wait for you to finish the documentation on that. I am curious about the module implementation, you have glossed over it in various updates but a nice actual write up would be fantastic.


OK, I will look into Torsion. I did not think there would be too much documentation on it I was just hoping. I will start with going over the source (both engine and Torsion) and reading the code comments and just hope people have been commenting on their code well enough to follow what is going on.


Thanks a bunch Jeff!

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  • 1 month later...

Jeff , can we have some news about the 4.0 release ?

It was almost here but not usable at least for me, i would expect some new releases with bug fixes.


About Torque 4, perhaps the goal is not the good one.

Why a very small team should try to compete with triple A engines delivering big each semester ? It is not crazy ?

What about focusing on the indie market and indie graphics ?

Most indie games uses simple or alternative graphic styles, not very realistic, they don't use terrain or ocean systems.

Instead they need to be able ot customize graphics and ligthing with shaders and they create their own graphic styles.

This could result in making a small new version of Torque 3D without the water and system terrain, that could be fully based on entity system, fully shader customizable and supporting a very popular language like C# and make it grow adding new things step by step ?


Perhaps Torque 4 need to shift goals from trying to grow as big realistic 3D engine, to small but very usable and customizable engine.

Torque never really took off, because the direction and goals was not the good ones perhaps or the task was (or is) too big.

Perhaps it's time to change goals and vision for Torque 3D (outside of the engine technical changes).


I hope all is well for you Jeff, don't give up on Torque 4, it is almost here :)

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Why a very small team should try to compete with triple A engines delivering big each semester ? It is not crazy ?

 

Firstly I've been away a little while, so I'll admit I skipped a post here an there, is there a link where the explicit goal was to compete with Triple-A engines* (see footnote).

Well, when you consider everything that people ask for, which can in the majority of cases be distilled down to, one of several categories


1) game-engine x has a feature y, why doesn't torque.

2) I want the best game engine money can buy... for free, also... open source

3) I want feature z, totally not because ive seen it in some cutting edge tech preview or something


As for updates, while I'd like to see more mini-updates with some writeup on progress every few weeks or once a month say, i'm pretty sure the breadth of stuff being worked on may well make that an ugly and long task anyway. I'd recommend that in the absence of such, hanging around discord or just watching the specific branch may well reveal more detailed information. (been lots of updates/merges today, for example, havent looked at them in detail yet but this is 5 weeks? ish after the last such update.



* as a side note since AAA means almost nothing any more can we just dispense with the pretence that it actually exists, you either have infinite money or you don't, some indies have infinite money, some don't, so even that distinction is gone. On top of that the so-called AAA(Developers/Publishers/Engines) pump out some utter garbage, so quality is also not a distinction, seems to me AAA is a made-up term used to malign others in some way these days, especially since every man and his miniature giant space hamster has their own nuanced definition.

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damn it ive been waiting 10 years and still no make game button :P lol


Shouldn't try to rush the guys doing the work here they are doing it not only in their free time... but also for free! People need to realize that the only reason unity and unreal have massive features is because they have people earning money to do it and have to create results or they don't get paid. Torques steering committee are not getting anything and are still producing results at an alarmingly fast rate for a free team! so much so ive been trying to get a few influences from outside these forums to do a write up for a while now on just the steering committee so they can get some form of exposure or admiration for their work outside of the forums. They need to see just how valued their efforts are instead of hearing moaning and complaining all the time from us!

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I'm not sure there's a lot of complaining so much as the annoying whine of "are we there yet" from as far as I can tell a variety of people who do little else. This 'are we there yet' crew exists in all formats, from the forums to discord, usually from people who are new and don't know where to find the news (hint: it's just past the lair of the minotaur, you brought string right?) and generally dont hang around more than 10 minutes to hear the answers.


TBH I completely ignored the half of the post where razor tried to hive-mind with duion and completely dump on parts of the engine he could care less about :p


the use of 'indie' is almost as badly abused as the term 'AAA', which of course is patently obvious since these are the only two models in existence, so anything that isnt 'AAA' is by definition 'indie'.


Assuming what razor said is true, then we already have all the game engines we need for indie developers, RPGMaker and Gamemaker, anything beyond that is apparently frivolous :p

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I think the development to improve the engine is great....modules/assets + build-in live scripting with debugging in editor = really improve workflow with Torque engine....also project manager Will be great...all this means more joy in game development and it means more new community members...

...and PBR for Torque ...for a new great graphic and better looking assets....all means a sea of ​​work and enthusiasm .... thank god this engine has such great developers.

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Man, look what happens when I get too nose-to-grindstone and forget a workblog update! So I missed my usual monthly-ish target which is definitely my bad, but that means this update'll be packed, but man we've been crunching on stuff.


Well, you know what? Lets get that taken care of now then!


I figure i'd preface things now by saying that the Preview build people have been graciously beating on for testing has worked as an absolute gem for spotting issues and us doing pretty rapid testing on. And that's the important part. While we are bringing T3D up to modern snuff, the Preview builds have been line a 90% focus on bugfixing and catching stuff that's needed to get the work done. Almost nothing that's gone in it so far has been a random off the wall 'hey lets add this because it'd be cool' bullet point - especially not in an attempt to blow-for-blow match AAA funded engines.


It's important to understand that this line:

Perhaps Torque 4 need to shift goals from trying to grow as big realistic 3D engine, to small but very usable and customizable engine.

 

Is very much the point. I've made it pretty clear on the discord that I angle at things from a "does this actually help people get their games made" and all the extra cool doodads are just bulletpoint fluff. Yeah, it's NEAT to have a full augmented reality, realtime cinematic blending of prerendered movies and game render and all that jazz. But 99.99% of people aren't ever going to use it for their games. We're not in the business of making movies. I'll leave that to hollywood and 3ds max, maya, blender, and all that.


We're here to make games, so we're going to implement stuff that facilitates that, and that alone.


Which I think is part of why 4.0's going to be pretty neat. Sure, you've got your obvious stuff like getting PBR implemented to bring things to modern standard. But other things, like the asset pipeline which leans on a smart importer to try and streamline/semi-automate bringing assets in and other such tools are designed to help people just get their work done. Technically, for a wider audience outside this community, because we've focused on those low-level usability/refinement improvements, we have less flashy stuff to show off to draw attention.


But there's time for loading up on cool art and demos as 4.0 nears release. For now, adding stuff to make getting work done faster, easier and more reliable, and fixing issues and polishing everything to a mirror sheen is much more important. In the discord a HUGE focus has been getting bugs squashed, what problems people run into when trying to import/convert assets and resources, how to get levels and scenes and gameplay working. All of this to create a very open and crazy flexible platform, and with this workblog update, hopefully you'll get a whiff of that.


Plus, if you can/are inclined to, should nerd out in the discord with us. Great place for testing and feedback of stuff very quickly :P


Anywho!

Regarding the builds, I should have the next build up tomorrow to coincide with the workblog tomorrow. It's a pretty long one so it's taking a while to get put together.

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I'm not sure there's a lot of complaining so much as the annoying whine of "are we there yet" from as far as I can tell a variety of people who do little else. This 'are we there yet' crew exists in all formats, from the forums to discord, usually from people who are new and don't know where to find the news (hint: it's just past the lair of the minotaur, you brought string right?) and generally dont hang around more than 10 minutes to hear the answers.

 

 

It is not crazy or strange to assume an update will be listed on the game engines site. People shouldn't have to track down an update by going to discord or analyzing the code. Simple updates on the website of the engine is and should be normal, especially considering we all want to promote the game engine and make it grow. I am offended you seem to lump a bunch of people together including myself as a "whiner" who does little else. Asking for an update is not "whining", I have been nothing but polite in my inquiries, I am not demanding it be done now, I am and have been patiently awaiting updates from Jeff or anyone else, fully knowing this is a volunteer project. Quite frankly you sound like some elitist mule. Because people love to use an engine when they ask about it and are called whiners who do nothing by a developer of said engine on their public forums (which IS the logical place most people will go for information about the engine).

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updates: such as they are, are generally found here, I see a relatively constant stream of information in there. if you want more detailed information, then yes you need to do more work, deal with it, because of the small size of the 'workforce' updates are likely to be slow, so yes, if you want MORE information you have to visit the sources of the information, this is a basic/trivial academic exercise.


as for the website, sadly pretty much everyone knows this is an utterly useless waste of space mainly due to lack of organisation and coordination from aeons past, that has yet to be corrected, because of the small or should i say ridiculous tiny number of available manhours available to the even smaller number of people able to effect such changes.


Torque is a functioning engine if people who do nothing except ask when the latest and greatest new version is coming out and do apparently nothing except constantly asking 'are we there yet' then, I'm not about to apologise.


Since you go out of your way to shitpost on my name in particular and be 'offended' when clearly you are not qualified or intended to be lumped into the group I mentioned, I can only assume you are some kind of bleeding heart ultra-liberal who gets all white-knighty on my ass because of a few half-assed sarcastic comments. Just out of curiosity, will you get triggered if I post Tucker Carlson links?


[Moderator's Note: The meme image wasn't necessary and doesn't contribute to discussion]

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Really not necessary, guys. Ix-nay.


@XIXWYRMEXIX Yeah, been trying to figure out how to best update/rework the landing page for going forward. As blood noted, it's currently not very useful, part of that is because as neat as it is that it's flexible to update being git-driven, it also means that it's not quite as easy to post/update stuff as, say, a wordpress site. Tony from the discord's been putting some ideas forward we've been mulling on to get the landing page updated with an easier channel to, at minimum, link back against stuff like my workblog.


Mack's also going to help run the twitter going forward, so once we're a bit more ready for wider attention, we'll be pushing updates along that channel as well.


So going forward, yeah I definitely want to have a more outward-pushing stream for updates. But in the current term, easiest route for people'll just be to keep an eye on the workblog or chum around in the discord.

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I will just ignore Blood like I do Duion as I consider them the same class of people, Jeff. I did nothing except ask about a status which is natural when something new is coming out in ANY subject on said subjects website. You know, in the thread about the progress of the project. His response is laughable to me anyway, as none of it has anything to do with reality. I am "triggered" yet he is the one throwing memes and more insults. I did not nor have ever demanded results by x date, have never said the team needs to do anything in regards to timetable, features, or give reports on any timetable. I just asked and was insulted. Also note I am not asking every day or week, I have inquired once a month, and last time almost once in 2 months, hardly someone demanding anything or whining about anything. Does that mean anyone new coming here gets the same treatment? Yeah that's the way to promote the engine and its use.


So I will now ix nay it as requested. Blood need not respond as I now have him ignored. No big deal. I will continue to ask about the status however, especially considering this SHOULD be the place and thread such an inquiry actually belongs on a forum dedicated to said engine. I am about promoting this engine and doing what I can to make it better, for ANYONE that wants to use it. I want this engine to do better, it is a fantastic engine and deserves to be more recognized as a tool for building games. As I have said repeatedly in other posts, I have nothing but respect for the devs and am thankful they put in the time and effort on their own for making this project move forward.


In regards to the landing site in particular and the website in general yes I have noticed it has become dated, with old information, old tutorials, and some broken links here and there. I am hoping it can be cleaned up and redone eventually, the landing site and the forums are the forward public face of the engine and will turn some people off from using the engine. I know peoples time is limited and have no idea on who or when such a spring cleaning can take place but knowing it has been brought up (both in the forum thread about the site and you just now), is a good thing. I would volunteer but I am not a webdev, I know just enough to make me dangerous in that realm and just enough to make TERRIBLE websites. I am currently slowly collecting a lot of the older tutorials and updating them for 3.10/4.0, its one of the things I can do.

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on the website front, we were having a conversation in the forums before about changing certain things, but it seems that changing too much is a bad move due to google and such. Although i did go ahead and make a few mock designs using wordpress if its at all inclined for anyone to see them i can upload them to my server and let you guys see what yas think?

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on the website front, we were having a conversation in the forums before about changing certain things, but it seems that changing too much is a bad move due to google and such. Although i did go ahead and make a few mock designs using wordpress if its at all inclined for anyone to see them i can upload them to my server and let you guys see what yas think?

 

I suppose it then becomes a question of at what point does sliding in google ranks as opposed to making the site actually reflect the current engine and current wiki/tutorials/assets. At what point does it become "needed" to change it in spite of any google results? I would love to see your mock ups personally, I am sure others would as well. Though this is starting to derail the thread and I suppose the conversation should be moved to the appropriate thread. If you can post the mockup in the websites thread so people can check it out I think that would be a good thing. Then everyone can check it out and give feedback. Changing the site will have to be done eventually. It will just keep getting longer in the tooth and slide further from the current development of the engine.


Sorry for the derailment of the topic.

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its not just the website, tho calling the spiderweb-like system we have in place a website in the singular is a little generous, one of the problems is there's nigh on 2 decades of internet data with regards torque, there's a lot of misdirects, there's still a lot of stuff that points to GG and they haven't cared in a decade. there's at least 3 different hosts for the main parts of the site, the forums, the wiki and the front pages.


Wikidot is a surprisingly decent host as far as the wiki is concerned even if the format is non-standard and no usable helper applications exist.


Forums are forums, I have a preference for SMF myself but they all operate the same way (well, so long as you keep Lukas and his hello kitty personality subdued)


Access to the main website seems to be the issue, perhaps if the entire website was redirected to the wiki and the frontpages reworked into Wikidot format, while I haven't explored nor do I understand it, GitHub also has its own website system that can be pointed at so the entirety of the current site and wiki site cold be redirected to the torque GitHub organisation. this would if nothing else at least centalise the control and the organisation responsible areas.

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