Getting started with Torque…

Well, I just licensed Torque last week, and am finally getting down to the business of building the first game with it. I’ve actually got multiple things I’m working on.

The first game is unnamed as of yet – I’ll start filling in details after I get that particular part of the project figured out. Right now, the working title is “Trajectory”

One thing I’ve noticed that is completely awsome about the Torque engine – the community. It’s more like the mod communities that most of the professional game developer communities I’ve looked at. Most of the project that I’m working on primarily at the moment (Trajectory) is being done from code out of the forums. I’ve got two newish things to figure out that no one has done yet, and I’ll contribute them back as soon as I create ’em.

One problem I’m facing is on the fly deformation of landscape, which isn’t THAT big of an issue since part of the code I need is setting in the Terrain Editor code, and the other part is harder – when you modify the terrain, you have to relight it, otherwise it looks pretty horrible – shadows are wrong, etc. Problem: when you trigger relighting a scene, it does everything. That’s unacceptable, speed wise. Instead, I need some way to pull off lighting a single area – IE, the area I just deformed. I figure having to light a smallish area will be fairly fast (I HOPE 😉 The problem is figurin’ out how that works 😉

There are some problems with the Torque engine, however. All is not well – I see quite a few graphical anomolies under a TNT2, and some serious performance issues using a Matrox 440 on a dual-head display (the machine is a Dual PIII/400, with 512 MB RAM. I’m surprised there’s ANY speed issue. A Dual PII/266 with a TNT card in it out performs it!)

This will definitely be an interesting experience working with the Torque engine. Having a community to talk to about the engine, contributing to the community, and getting things back from the community is a new experience!

Phil Carlisle   (Apr 05, 2002 at 15:39)

I had issues with torque on my tnt2 until I got the last unified drivers from nvidia. cleared it all up.

Phil.

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