Torque 3D Development - 1.1 Beta 1!

Despite a disruptive move to Las Vegas and a major change in our leadership, the Torque 3D team has been patiently plugging away on the first Beta for Torque 3D 1.1.

As of this Beta, Torque 3D 1.1 is feature complete but not quite bug free. The team is working very hard to clear up all of the bugs but we love enlisting the help of our community to find and fix bugs alongside us!

Torque 3D Professional owners can now download Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 1 from their accounts!

Torque 3D 1.1 Alpha Features Recap

It has been a few months since we released the Torque 3D 1.1 Alpha so I thought I would quickly recap the larger features that we introduced there:

Forest Editor

Originally intended as a for-pay addon to Torque 3D, Sickhead Games' "Forest Pack" was rolled into Torque 3D 1.1 as a core feature freely available to everyone who purchased Torque 3D.

The Forest Editor allows you to quickly paint down trees, shrubs, and other foliage with an easy to use editor and offers a number of optimizations to Torque 3D to allow for rendering large groups of objects in an efficient way.

            

Sketch Tool

The Sketch Tool allows you to rapidly and easily build simple geometry inside the Torque 3D World Editor. We recently had a chance to make use of this tool at the Global Game Jam 2010 and was amazing how quickly it allowed us to get basic geometry in place. It is definitely a "must have" tool for rapid prototyping.

Prefabs

Another thing we found incredibly useful at Global Game Jam was the Prefabs feature of Torque 3D 1.1. This allows you to quickly group a set of objects together and then to stamp them out into the world as many times as you like. You can even turn around and update the prefab and have all instances of it update to reflect your changes.

            

GUI Profile Editor

It is amazing how much difference a simple addition can make to your experience. Not having to drop all the way down to TorqueScript to change the shared properties in a GUI Profile is a huge time saver and is a lot more convenient. Every Torque GUI designer out there owes
Rene Damm a huge thanks!

            

New Features in the Torque 3D 1.1 Beta

Physics Refactor

Aside from bugfixing, performance optimizations, and further refinement to the features introduced in the Alpha, a large amount of the work put into this Beta went into a major overhaul of the Torque 3D physics API. This will allow people to plug new physics systems into Torque with far more ease. Be sure to try out the new PhysicsShape object which is a replacement for the older RigidShape but is built on the new physics abstraction. There were also a number of changes to allow for better support for physics primitives.

Included in this refactor, is the addition of a Bullet Physics implementation. Bullet is a powerful cross-platform, open source physics library started by a former Havok employee.

We also still working with nVidia to continue to update our PhysX implementation and the changes in Torque 3D 1.1 will make this easier. Be sure to grab the latest PhysX SDK if you want to use that feature.

            

Megashot

Ever wished you had a wall sized poster of your Torque game? Well, Manoel Neto has been a busy contractor for us recently and one of the things we had him do was to merge in Sickhead's "Mega-Screenshot" code and update it to work with the latest and greatest rendering capabilities of Torque 3D.

If you use the TorqueScript command "tiledScreenShot(4);" on the console, you can quickly generate a huge screenshot of your Torque scene (I recommend using the Ctrl-H command to hide your game GUI). Crank that "4" up a bit and watch Photoshop fall over trying to load your screenshot. Be sure to click on the image below to see the full sized 4096x3072 version!



Click to see the full sized Megashot!

Options

Quite a bit of work has gone into building a more powerful and flexible Options system for Torque 3D. On the surface this may seem like a simple change but it actually can have a huge effect on the performance of your Torque 3D game. The new system will allow you to customize the settings for your games on a case-by-case basis so that you can ensure your game will have the maximum performance for your customers.



Subtle changes can have huge impacts!

We are working hard to polish Torque 3D 1.1 and to get it released in its final state. We expect to have another Beta ready in the next month and then to drive hard for the finish line. There are also some really cool demos in the works which we will be showing off at GDC so be sure to keep an eye out for that!

I really want to thank everyone in our community for your undying support. We really appreciate it!

Torque 3D development blogs:

• Post #1 - Kickoff
• Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
• Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
• Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
• Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
• Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
• Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
• Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
• Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
• Post #11 - Depth of Field
• Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
• Post #13 - Soft Particles
• Post #14 - World Editor
• Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
• Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
• Post #17 - River & Road Editors
• Post #18 - Beta is UP!
• Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, and the Material Editor
• Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
• Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
• Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
• Post #23 - pureLIGHT
• Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
• Post #25 - Beta 3!
• Post #26 - Documentation
• Post #27 - Beta 4!
• Post #28 - Shape Editor
• Post #29 - Beta 5!
• Post #30 - Collada Import GUI Dialog
• Post #31 - 1.0 Release!!!
• Post #32 - The only good bug...
• Post #33 - 1.1 Alpha!
• Post #34 - Binary Announcement and Release
• Post #35 - Torque 3D 1.1 Beta 1!
• Post #36 - Coming Soon!