When will Constructor ship?
by Matt Fairfax · 11/08/2005 (3:10 am) · 105 comments
I started to write this up in response to this thread but Ben suggested I post it as a .plan instead:
When will Constructor ship?
The problem with giving a date for Constructor is that we don't know what the date is going to be ourselves. I got pulled onto the Marble Blast Ultra project almost 4 months ago and haven't had a chance to even look at Constructor. Dave and John have been doing a wonderful job working on it without my help but I am going to have to get back in there before it will get done. Personally, I'd estimate I have about a month to a month and half worth of work left to do on Constructor (and of course you should always double a programmer's estimate ;) but there is still a month left on MBU and I am unlikely to be cycled off it in any real capacity before it is nearly done. Factor in the work both Dave and John have left (including stuff they can't even start till I am back), time to port to Mac and Linux (mostly covered on an on-going process but there will likely be issues), time to beta test, bugfix, polish pass, and time to test a release candidate and fix any new bugs and you could easily see how our release date can be a bit fuzzy.
Those who saw it IGC can attest that it is already a fairly functional product even right now (not enough to do production on but close). The way I see it we have a few key/risky areas of tech to finish: face texturing, vertex editing, csg operations, and static dts lightmapping. These are all very important pieces of what Constructor is and, though we have a pretty good handle on the scope of those, there is just enough unknown/risk on those that it is hard to set in stone any kind of deadlines/milestone dates for them. We also have several other pieces of tech left to implement and, while they are more easily scoped, they just have to be steadily worked on and that takes time. I have always tried to be pretty open about where we are on the project so that, even though I can't give any realistic deadlines, you guys should be able to make educated guesses.
We want Constructor to launch as a very solid tool that you guys can jump right onto and be productive with immediately (no fighting bugs, no missing core functionality, no unintuitive workflow). We also want it to launch so that it is very flexible and moddable right out of the box so you guys can start creating new tools and functionality for it. We want it to be a polished product and that simply takes time (especially when a third of the programming team vanishes halfway through the project).
Should I buy Cartography Shop or wait for Constructor?
I'd like to believe that Constructor will be worth purchasing when it launches even if you already own Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio. It will be fully cross-platform, it will be highly moddable (especially if you are already comfortable with TorqueScript), it will have what I feel is a better workflow, better tools, will truly be WYSIWYG when it comes to making Interiors for Torque (the exact same code for rendering and Interior generation), a completely new map2dif, and last (but definitely not least) it will be backed by this awesome community! It is going to be the foundation for a rewrite of the built-in Torque tools (like the Mission Editor) and will eventually be mergable into Torque itself (1.0 will be a stand-alone application). Once you are comfortable in Constructor, you will be comfortable in all of our future tools. And, it will be very competitively priced ;)
Whether or not you wait on Constructor or not has to be your call. You need to consider your project needs (can you limp along on Quark or Hammer for the time being or is your project being blocked?), your pocketbook (can you afford CShop and Constructor or only one?), and your personal preferences (will CShop meet all of my need? do I like the workflow of CShop? do I want to support GG?). At this point I can tell you that, while we respect the creator of Cartography Shop for shipping a brush editor, he is not getting any sort of support/love from GarageGames (he hasn't even purchased a TGE license) nor is he even getting support from the creator of Pipeline (Tom Spillman) so it is hard for me to recommend Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio as any long term solution. If it works for you in the short term though, go for it. I have long been an advocate for using the right tool for the right job.
Finally, for those of you who need visual stimulation to make anything interesting...here is a screenshot I made when playing around with an error texture for map2dif_plus:
When will Constructor ship?
The problem with giving a date for Constructor is that we don't know what the date is going to be ourselves. I got pulled onto the Marble Blast Ultra project almost 4 months ago and haven't had a chance to even look at Constructor. Dave and John have been doing a wonderful job working on it without my help but I am going to have to get back in there before it will get done. Personally, I'd estimate I have about a month to a month and half worth of work left to do on Constructor (and of course you should always double a programmer's estimate ;) but there is still a month left on MBU and I am unlikely to be cycled off it in any real capacity before it is nearly done. Factor in the work both Dave and John have left (including stuff they can't even start till I am back), time to port to Mac and Linux (mostly covered on an on-going process but there will likely be issues), time to beta test, bugfix, polish pass, and time to test a release candidate and fix any new bugs and you could easily see how our release date can be a bit fuzzy.
Those who saw it IGC can attest that it is already a fairly functional product even right now (not enough to do production on but close). The way I see it we have a few key/risky areas of tech to finish: face texturing, vertex editing, csg operations, and static dts lightmapping. These are all very important pieces of what Constructor is and, though we have a pretty good handle on the scope of those, there is just enough unknown/risk on those that it is hard to set in stone any kind of deadlines/milestone dates for them. We also have several other pieces of tech left to implement and, while they are more easily scoped, they just have to be steadily worked on and that takes time. I have always tried to be pretty open about where we are on the project so that, even though I can't give any realistic deadlines, you guys should be able to make educated guesses.
We want Constructor to launch as a very solid tool that you guys can jump right onto and be productive with immediately (no fighting bugs, no missing core functionality, no unintuitive workflow). We also want it to launch so that it is very flexible and moddable right out of the box so you guys can start creating new tools and functionality for it. We want it to be a polished product and that simply takes time (especially when a third of the programming team vanishes halfway through the project).
Should I buy Cartography Shop or wait for Constructor?
I'd like to believe that Constructor will be worth purchasing when it launches even if you already own Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio. It will be fully cross-platform, it will be highly moddable (especially if you are already comfortable with TorqueScript), it will have what I feel is a better workflow, better tools, will truly be WYSIWYG when it comes to making Interiors for Torque (the exact same code for rendering and Interior generation), a completely new map2dif, and last (but definitely not least) it will be backed by this awesome community! It is going to be the foundation for a rewrite of the built-in Torque tools (like the Mission Editor) and will eventually be mergable into Torque itself (1.0 will be a stand-alone application). Once you are comfortable in Constructor, you will be comfortable in all of our future tools. And, it will be very competitively priced ;)
Whether or not you wait on Constructor or not has to be your call. You need to consider your project needs (can you limp along on Quark or Hammer for the time being or is your project being blocked?), your pocketbook (can you afford CShop and Constructor or only one?), and your personal preferences (will CShop meet all of my need? do I like the workflow of CShop? do I want to support GG?). At this point I can tell you that, while we respect the creator of Cartography Shop for shipping a brush editor, he is not getting any sort of support/love from GarageGames (he hasn't even purchased a TGE license) nor is he even getting support from the creator of Pipeline (Tom Spillman) so it is hard for me to recommend Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio as any long term solution. If it works for you in the short term though, go for it. I have long been an advocate for using the right tool for the right job.
Finally, for those of you who need visual stimulation to make anything interesting...here is a screenshot I made when playing around with an error texture for map2dif_plus:
About the author
#2
11/08/2005 (3:50 am)
Thanks a lot for the update. I do have a question regarding Constructor if it can be answered at this time. I did notice that 3D World Studio was capable of importing .3DS files and was curious if Torque Constructor did anything similar, either with .3DS or another format. I've been doing structures in 3DS Max with hopes of transferring them over to the level designer that I plan to purchase. This is probably one of the deciding factors for me, along with price. I appreciate any information you can share, thanks :) 
#3
- LightWave Dave
11/08/2005 (3:58 am)
Oooo...I can see this .plan getting a lot of comments! You trying to go for some kind of record, Matt? :o)- LightWave Dave
#4
Hell
Yes
:D
11/08/2005 (4:08 am)
Quote:It is going to be the foundation for a rewrite of the built-in Torque tools (like the Mission Editor) and will eventually be mergable into Torque itself (1.0 will be a stand-alone application).Oh
Hell
Yes
:D
#5
11/08/2005 (4:13 am)
It will be well worth the wait... Thanks for the update 
#6
11/08/2005 (4:27 am)
*droool*
#7
11/08/2005 (5:41 am)
Kinda settles it with me, I'll be holding out for Constructor.Quote:he is not getting any sort of support/love from GarageGames (he hasn't even purchased a TGE license) nor is he even getting support from the creator of Pipeline (Tom Spillman)
#8
Pipeline was a short term solution, and there is no need for it with 3dws, as it builds a dif directly.
At least someone got off thier asses and built something that worked with the community here ( Josh and the Sickhead games guys) , it took GG 4 years to a decent CSG editor rolling, and its not even done.
GG depends on the community for so much of their products. They even list 3rd party tools as "Features" of TGE... Kinda shady IMO.
11/08/2005 (6:38 am)
Quote:At this point I can tell you that, while we respect the creator of Cartography Shop for shipping a brush editor, he is not getting any sort of support/love from GarageGames (he hasn't even purchased a TGE license) nor is he even getting support from the creator of Pipeline (Tom Spillman) so it is hard for me to recommend Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio as any long term solution.
Pipeline was a short term solution, and there is no need for it with 3dws, as it builds a dif directly.
At least someone got off thier asses and built something that worked with the community here ( Josh and the Sickhead games guys) , it took GG 4 years to a decent CSG editor rolling, and its not even done.
GG depends on the community for so much of their products. They even list 3rd party tools as "Features" of TGE... Kinda shady IMO.
Quote:Interior exporters for QuArK, Cartography Shop, and any Valve220-compatible map editors
#9
Is it depending on the community for us to let discreet or alias make a kick ass modelling package? They make buckets of money from it. :)
How about letting Adobe make Photoshop? It's a great tool, and they make money from it, too.
Or audio editing - SoundForge is a pretty solid app, and well worth the money.
Would it be smart of us to try to write our own versions of those tools?
CSG editing isn't unique to Torque, so there's no reason to expect that _we_ would have to write it. We've gone out of our way to try and give the community ample opportunity to capitalize on this opportunity. This is a product that will sell, and we'd sort of like to a) not have to spend time on this and b) let somebody make a fortune off it. Quark is OK, but not that good. Radiant is too expensive, Hammer has licensing issues (and neither of them are all _that_ wonderful - we've looked at licensing them for our own projects and decided not to).
But apparently no one really wants that, so we've ended up having to do it ourselves. Is it bad? Well, not really, it'll be a great product and very useful to people, but it's not exactly critical to our business to do it. But it would have been better if someone had capitalized on the opportunity. ;)
I guess by your argument we should be writing our own C++ compilers, IDEs, and graphics card drivers, too. :)
(Incidentally - 3dws just calls map2dif, like every other CSG tool that supports Torque, except Pipeline.)
11/08/2005 (6:55 am)
Well, we sort of figured that someone would write a good CSG editor. There are good modelling packages (Max, Maya... Blender, other things, too), and good 2d art tools (Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Gimp), and good sound tools (SoundForge, Audacity), and even good video tools (iMovie, Premiere). So why shouldn't there be a good CSG editor out there? :)Is it depending on the community for us to let discreet or alias make a kick ass modelling package? They make buckets of money from it. :)
How about letting Adobe make Photoshop? It's a great tool, and they make money from it, too.
Or audio editing - SoundForge is a pretty solid app, and well worth the money.
Would it be smart of us to try to write our own versions of those tools?
CSG editing isn't unique to Torque, so there's no reason to expect that _we_ would have to write it. We've gone out of our way to try and give the community ample opportunity to capitalize on this opportunity. This is a product that will sell, and we'd sort of like to a) not have to spend time on this and b) let somebody make a fortune off it. Quark is OK, but not that good. Radiant is too expensive, Hammer has licensing issues (and neither of them are all _that_ wonderful - we've looked at licensing them for our own projects and decided not to).
But apparently no one really wants that, so we've ended up having to do it ourselves. Is it bad? Well, not really, it'll be a great product and very useful to people, but it's not exactly critical to our business to do it. But it would have been better if someone had capitalized on the opportunity. ;)
I guess by your argument we should be writing our own C++ compilers, IDEs, and graphics card drivers, too. :)
(Incidentally - 3dws just calls map2dif, like every other CSG tool that supports Torque, except Pipeline.)
#10
"Is it depending on the community for us to let discreet or alias make a kick ass modelling package?"
Saying a FEATURE of TGE is ability to use maps from Cartshop is an underhanded attempt to make people think you can directly move from Cshop to TGE, when in fact you cannot. That would be like a car sales man saying this car can go 250 MPH, when it only goes 150 without buying some addon crap from another company.
Acting like your editor is going to be the holy grail of TGE editing is very presuptous, as ever editor I've seen for a GG product is buggy, and underfeatured. Track record says thats in Constructors future.
11/08/2005 (7:04 am)
Wow, totally missing the point, and not even close to the same thing."Is it depending on the community for us to let discreet or alias make a kick ass modelling package?"
Saying a FEATURE of TGE is ability to use maps from Cartshop is an underhanded attempt to make people think you can directly move from Cshop to TGE, when in fact you cannot. That would be like a car sales man saying this car can go 250 MPH, when it only goes 150 without buying some addon crap from another company.
Acting like your editor is going to be the holy grail of TGE editing is very presuptous, as ever editor I've seen for a GG product is buggy, and underfeatured. Track record says thats in Constructors future.
#11
11/08/2005 (7:16 am)
Ok, so is there a target price for it? If so can I place an early order for it? Please!!!!
#12
But yes- I suppose you're right, you do have to buy an addon to get Cartography Shop to talk to Torque, ie, Mr. Spilman's excellent Pipeline product. For $12.
Unless you use 3dws, in which case, it will... ah... export automatically to DIF with no additional products or work. Although you'd then be paying $15 extra for the privilege.
In any case - if you don't like Constructor, or don't expect it to be good, don't feel obligated to be excited about it or buy it when it comes out. Dollars vote louder than words. :) Meanwhile, we like it, and it seems like there's a fair number of people here excited about it, so we'll probably keep on developing it.
11/08/2005 (7:33 am)
@Chris - That seems pretty pedantic. :)But yes- I suppose you're right, you do have to buy an addon to get Cartography Shop to talk to Torque, ie, Mr. Spilman's excellent Pipeline product. For $12.
Unless you use 3dws, in which case, it will... ah... export automatically to DIF with no additional products or work. Although you'd then be paying $15 extra for the privilege.
In any case - if you don't like Constructor, or don't expect it to be good, don't feel obligated to be excited about it or buy it when it comes out. Dollars vote louder than words. :) Meanwhile, we like it, and it seems like there's a fair number of people here excited about it, so we'll probably keep on developing it.
#13
You betta keep at! ;)
11/08/2005 (7:48 am)
Quote:...so we'll probably keep on developing it.I can not help to laugh at this :)
You betta keep at! ;)
#14
Woah buddy...starting to get a little personal aren't you. When did this go from being a friendly discussion to something nasty? We've never made any claims like that. We've just been working hard to provide the best possible product we can. I think we've been very open and honest about what you can expect from GG and Constructor.
As I mentioned in my .plan:
Obviously, it is difficult to release completely bug-free code but we try our best.
Honestly I am not sure where all of your bitterness is coming from? If you don't like GarageGames and our products, then why are you hanging around?
11/08/2005 (8:39 am)
Quote:Acting like your editor is going to be the holy grail of TGE editing is very presuptous
Woah buddy...starting to get a little personal aren't you. When did this go from being a friendly discussion to something nasty? We've never made any claims like that. We've just been working hard to provide the best possible product we can. I think we've been very open and honest about what you can expect from GG and Constructor.
Quote:as ever editor I've seen for a GG product is buggy, and underfeatured. Track record says thats in Constructors future
As I mentioned in my .plan:
Quote:We want Constructor to launch as a very solid tool that you guys can jump right onto and be productive with immediately (no fighting bugs, no missing core functionality, no unintuitive workflow).
Obviously, it is difficult to release completely bug-free code but we try our best.
Honestly I am not sure where all of your bitterness is coming from? If you don't like GarageGames and our products, then why are you hanging around?
#16
11/08/2005 (8:58 am)
@Chris, I think you may be missing the point here, Constructor IS the Holy Grail of GG editing products, thats why I for one am so excited about it. Even if it were a buggy demo, at this point I would sell my own mother to get a copy. It's the final piece missing from the whole GG equation, it IS the Holy Grail.
#17
^ months ago, the GGs were poo pooing anyone complaining about QuArK, and telling them to get Cshop as an alternative... Now, all of a sudden "it is hard for me to recommend Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio as any long term solution". Seems now that their tool is on the horizon, all of a sudden other options cease to be a decent option.
11/08/2005 (9:02 am)
LOL, and you know this how? The demo you used? Thought so. You are mearly assuming it will be the holy grail.^ months ago, the GGs were poo pooing anyone complaining about QuArK, and telling them to get Cshop as an alternative... Now, all of a sudden "it is hard for me to recommend Cartography Shop or 3D World Studio as any long term solution". Seems now that their tool is on the horizon, all of a sudden other options cease to be a decent option.
#18
I do feel that TGE's mission editor is still f'd up..... but I haven't used 1.4 yet, and I know for a fact that some things are better, if not fixed.
Keep on truckin - most of us appreciate your work. :)
EDIT:
CW: Yes, I have used the alpha demo. And it is SWEET.
Months ago, Cshop was the best thing available, and the only tool that the Community had contributed, so of course GG was pimping it. They were trying to help the community initiative and letting people know what their best choice was. What the hell do you expect? If they had said "No, wait for Constructor" you would have had an even more violent response. In your mind, is there a right answer, or are you just looking for things to complain about?
11/08/2005 (9:05 am)
Nice .plan, Matt. I am seriously looking forward to Constructor and I know it will be the best product that it can be. I do feel that TGE's mission editor is still f'd up..... but I haven't used 1.4 yet, and I know for a fact that some things are better, if not fixed.
Keep on truckin - most of us appreciate your work. :)
EDIT:
CW: Yes, I have used the alpha demo. And it is SWEET.
Months ago, Cshop was the best thing available, and the only tool that the Community had contributed, so of course GG was pimping it. They were trying to help the community initiative and letting people know what their best choice was. What the hell do you expect? If they had said "No, wait for Constructor" you would have had an even more violent response. In your mind, is there a right answer, or are you just looking for things to complain about?
#20
11/08/2005 (10:49 am)
Will Constructor be usable for engines other than Torque, including commercially? Does it export to "standard" .map format(s)? If so, I'm assuming it could be appropriately customised for whatever game or engine using TS.
Torque Owner Brian Wells
;)