[Bloodknight]

Might seem a little late in the day, but I wonder if we shouldn't have a specific forum for just 4.0 Preview?

I'm doing a lot of testing and as a consequence of my anti-Midas touch gift... a lot of breaking, my general dislike of GitHub black hole system for tracking 'issues' hasn't changed, so a more central and usable location for all discussions specific to preview 4.0 would be useful I believe.

It would also clear the cruft out of this particular thread, which should be just an announcement thread imo.

[marauder2k9]

there is a specific forum for 4.0 preview viewtopic.php?f=40&t=1594

[Bloodknight]

I did actually mean a forum so that individual issues could be posted, from my end mostly testing and bugs, but also requests for documentation on features, not an individual thread.

I could continue to use discord, but most of it is unread/ignored/forgotten; discord has its uses but it is pretty useless for most things that need to kept or located or referenced.

[suncaller]

I think there are a few critical realization here, that might be missing, and are important to actually speaking about Torque -- or any software development tool -- in a meaningful way, that isn't just, "Well, I like the engine, but add this, that, and the other thing, and I'll consider using it." Torque3D fulfills a different function, for a different set of people, than many other engines (i.e. Unity, Unreal, etc.). If there's any triple-A engine it could be somewhat -- but not very -- reasonably compared to, setting aside budgets, staffing, adoption, and other similar concerns, then it would be Unreal Engine. Even then, only in the sense of why someone would adopt T3D instead of Unreal Engine, and it probably applied more before the current iteration. And, yes, there are very good reasons. They just probably aren't the reasons most of the people making demands or offering vague suggestions have ever thought about in a clear and meaningful way.

The reality is, most novice developers don't even know where to start asking the right questions, and the problem is that they start offering vague, and offensively worded solutions in the face of that. Do those making such claims, in similar situations, perhaps see why that makes people angry, and may not be entirely appropriate?

More realistically, T3D might be compared to other open source engines such as Godot, Urho, Quake, etc, and then only along the vectors that matter. These engines also don't solve the same problems for the same sets of people. That's a good thing. They are options that exist for different groups with different needs.

What are appropriate questions to ask?

For starters, let's try: given options x, y, and z, all tools that seem to me like they will contribute to the completion of my goals, which will help me reach those goals while possibly also, as a bonus, meeting my secondary and tertiary requirements? As opposed to: tool x has good features, but it's missing other good features from tool y -- why aren't the people behind tool x implementing the features from tool y, so that I don't have to think about this problem?

Other important questions, that I'm not sure enough people ask themselves, might be: what am I doing; why am I doing it; what do I see as the best and worst case outcomes; am I trying to maximize one side, or minimize the other? It might be useful to start there, and iterate until the right path shows itself.

Another, possibly unrecognized realization, is that unlike other parties offering "free" tools, the reason for this one are very different. Az has done a good job of pointing out what some of those are. But is it clear why other companies are offering free solutions, for those that seem to think "consumers" are powerful, driving entities in this domain? This engine has no need to harvest vast amounts of personal data from users; or foster adoption from a truly mind-boggling number of people to recoup losses or drive sales; or to establish dominance in terms of mind and market share with the hope of creating a monopoly in the industry.

Anyway, that's all just a brief attempt at offering perspective, from one hobbyist to others that seem to need it, and genuinely not intended to be offensive. If it did offend anyone, I'm glad, and I hope you take that pain and doing something positive with it.

[Razer]

Finally, what is the roadmap priority about :
- New character physic driven system with capsule and ragdoll collisions

not a high priority

I think beginners will ask for a good and versatile character system with physics, this is perhaps one of the most important features, because most beginners wil try to mimik games like Uncharted , Dark Souls or Halo, and many times they will try to make some open world game around characters.
The old T3D character and strange cubes collision system should be replaced with new characters physics and new separate control and camera scripts.

- Support modern character import like GLFT or get Blender 2.8 support

assimp does that. may or may not need a few additional tweaks. will have to check with one of the folks that already added it to the engine instead of demanding others do all the work for them.

Beeing unable to import your characters and animations you made or you bought or having issues and you're stuck on your project.
I got some characters from some stores, i can do tests when T3D will get import fully working.
Also Blender 2.8 is the open source leading software, getting some direct import for Blender files can be something to consider as T3D is also open source.


Like @ Bishop said, Godot can be a great inspiration for T3D in some areas like project management that seems to be better.

Finally, what is the roadmap priority about :
- New character physic driven system with capsule and ragdoll collisions

not a high priority

- Support modern character import like GLFT or get Blender 2.8 support

assimp does that. may or may not need a few additional tweaks. will have to check with one of the folks that already added it to the engine instead of demanding others do all the work for them.

- Add a general game input system no more relying on old T3D code and system, able to map any joystick values or keys to actions

no. we've already got joystick et al support. it's pointless to redo it from scratch.

- Adopt a popular scripting languages like C# instead of Torsion nobody knows

you're getting also-c# from lukas. drop the instead of garbage. it's not going to happen.

- Entity system, and the ability to add scripts to objects

frontend is already protoyped. and mentioned in this thread.

- Better projects organization with scenes management per project

better is a useless datapoint. scenes are in, and they trip game modes. be specific

- Easy system to store, read game data and organize data structures, similar to databases.

asset system button is

- XML integrated save/load game system

that's a 'you' problem. scripts already got hooks to write/read text-based files. I've even done html output.
that being said, if you actually tested the system you might note that .taml files *are* xml.

- Terrain,foliage and water enhancement with modern shaders and lighting

being worked on

- Cinematic quality post effects : DOF, Aces tone mapping, cinematic bloom

being worked on

I'm pretty happy with T3D direction. But when all those will be ready ?

[Bloodknight]

- Support modern character import like GLFT or get Blender 2.8 support

assimp does that. may or may not need a few additional tweaks. will have to check with one of the folks that already added it to the engine instead of demanding others do all the work for them.

Beeing unable to import your characters and animations you made or you bought or having issues and you're stuck on your project.
I got some characters from some stores, i can do tests when T3D will get import fully working.
Also Blender 2.8 is the open source leading software, getting some direct import for Blender files can be something to consider as T3D is also open source.

I don't understand the 'this is open source we should worship the same false idols' mantra, do you go to the same Stalman Zealot group as Duion?

you are harassing the wrong people try here https://github.com/assimp/assimp :p

also, if you are asset flipping, unity is #1

[Razer]

- Support modern character import like GLFT or get Blender 2.8 support

assimp does that. may or may not need a few additional tweaks. will have to check with one of the folks that already added it to the engine instead of demanding others do all the work for them.

Beeing unable to import your characters and animations you made or you bought or having issues and you're stuck on your project.
I got some characters from some stores, i can do tests when T3D will get import fully working.
Also Blender 2.8 is the open source leading software, getting some direct import for Blender files can be something to consider as T3D is also open source.

I don't understand the 'this is open source we should worship the same false idols' mantra, do you go to the same Stalman Zealot group as Duion?

you are harassing the wrong people try here https://github.com/assimp/assimp :p

also, if you are asset flipping, unity is #1

For example UE4 has a very strong character system as a starting template, does that mean that all published games are called assetflip ?
Using assimp is one more step to convert files, while T3D should use a modern import, like showing up the import dialogbox when it detects some new files on the project folder.

And i don't know about Duion group and what it is about