GarageGames announces Torque Game Builder Trial Available!

[Stephen Zepp]

EDIT: Due to changes in the marketing plan, I've edited the title and body of this message. More information on actual contest oriented details will be forthcoming as I learn them.

Torque Game Builder 1.1.0 is released, and includes a 30 day free trial.

[Sky]

Fetuspult, here we come!

[HaemishM]

--be one of 5 finalists brought to our IGC convention in October and compete "American Idol" style in front of a panel of industry experts (BIG names, can't release quite yet).

Don't make me want to stab you. No one should follow the American Idol formula for anything.

[Stephen Zepp]

--be one of 5 finalists brought to our IGC convention in October and compete "American Idol" style in front of a panel of industry experts (BIG names, can't release quite yet).

Don't make me want to stab you. No one should follow the American Idol formula for anything.

IANAMG. Similar to "I Am Not A Lawyer", but marketing ;)

Actually, it's not a bad formula, it's just that American Idol has it's own special taint painted into it that may leave bad tastes.

Honestly however, it is a pretty good formula for what's intended here, and that's to provide (as GG always has worked on) a streamlined path to make it easy for indies to make games...and this particular contest will bring the best games directly to the attention of the most important people around when it comes to getting those games published in a very, VERY big market.

We've isolated indie game dev down to it's fundamental characteristics: blood, sweat, and a hell of a lot of work, and then reap the rewards. Zero startup cost (the pending final release of TGB will have a time-limited license version that's free for this contest in particular)--all it takes is some good ideas and a lot of work.

[Margalis]

What is GG stance on games that don't use Torque at all? You guys tend to put out very mixed messages on that.

[Stephen Zepp]

This particular competition is designed to market and publicize our Torque Game Builder, so part of the entry requirements are that it be made using our toolset.

In general however, if a game is high quality and appears viable, we are interested in any dev technology for publishing purposes--just not this particular scenario.

In your case in particular I really wish I had been able to say more, but I did try to sway you as much as I was allowed, since your idea sounded so interesting as it became more fleshed out :( Sorry that I couldn't be more direct in my suggestion...was kind of stuck with internal NDA requirements until it was announced.

[Margalis]

I won't be finished until 2019 anyway so don't sweat it.

[Signe]

You need to put a hustle in your bustle!  Remember, the world ends in 2012.  Some Mayan said so.  That's why I'm not concerned about the 2038 Unix meltdown.  Ha!  Mayans - 1, Computer nerds - 0.

[Margalis]

Trying the best I can. I've actually made some really good progress the past couple of days. The map is all working and I even have some (bad looking) textures and lighting in place. The logic for moving around and attacking is there but there are no graphics to go with them since I am converting to 3D but I will hack together something quickly.

The want to get to the point where two armies can fight and I can tell if it is any fun or not. I was there in the 2D version but not in the 3D version quite yet.

The good news is it runs about 25x faster. Yay 3D FTW.

[Yoru]

Hey Stephen, any updates on this? If nothing else, I'd like to get my grubby mitts on your tech, if only to poke at it for a bit. :-D

[Stephen Zepp]

Wednesday the big day for announcements  As always, the team is in final crunch for last minute bugs that have crept in, but we are still currently looking at having the competition kicked off this week.

[Stephen Zepp]

Just a quick update: Our office move impacted things a bit more than we'd hoped, and combined with some last minute polish-ups in the latest release candidate, GG has pushed the TGB final release to next week. I'm expecting not later than friday.

[Yoru]

<-- Still waiting patiently.

[Yoru]

So GarageGames knows the concept of Virtual Friday as well, eh? ;)

[Stephen Zepp]

We're not real excited ourselves, but those damn beta testers keep forcing us to make the product even better!

Not gonna give an estimate now since the first two got blown, but I -will- post as soon as it's official. So much for giving heads up news with an exact date--will refrain from that in the future!

[Margalis]

Is there going to be a Simon Cowell type character?

"Frankly this game is utterly horrendous and you have absolutely no talent whatsoever!"

[Stephen Zepp]

TGB 1.1.0 ships.

30 day free trials are available for download.

[Yoru]

 

Now take the rest of the day off, at least.

[Surlyboi]

I'm not going anywhere near American Idol's taint...

[Stephen Zepp]

I'm not going anywhere near American Idol's taint...

Heh...interestingly enough, that marketing concept is being strongly re-thought ;)

[Margalis]

What does showing off a game "American Idol style" mean anyway? You get in front of some judges and demo it for five minutes?

Actually American Idol isn't really different than anything else with judges. You present, they judge. American Idol just brings Simon and the drama on top of that.

You shouldn't call it Idol-style unless you expect to make at least one presenter cry.

[Kail]

Is this a team thingy, or are entries supposed to be one man projects?  If it's a solo thing, I'm hosed (yikes, 30 days?).  If it's a team thing, LFG?

[Stephen Zepp]

I don't have 100% info yet, but marketing took another look at the time frame, and realized that given the time the contest would have had to have ended (our annual IGC) competition, we've decided that a full bore competition isn't going to be the best route. Currently, marketing and management are working madly on some form of monthly competition (and you'd be surprised what you can do in a month!) each month until IGC.

The trial version of course is still available, and even without a full on formal competition, we always have a large "show off your games" section at IGC, with quite an audience of industry experts to show off to!

[Xilren's Twin]

The trial version of course is still available, and even without a full on formal competition, we always have a large "show off your games" section at IGC, with quite an audience of industry experts to show off to!

Got the trial and was fooling around with it.  Going to try to run through all the tutorials but I've already discovered my biggest scripting flaw; I'm a godawful typist.  Spelling and punctuation shall be my undoing...
Still, neat package.

Xilren

[Stephen Zepp]

There is a script editing IDE called "Torsion" (avaialble at Sickhead Games) that allows you to do integrated script editing and debugging (including pre-compilation of code, as well as setting breakpoints, watches, etc.) that may be able to help out!

It's not a GG product (part of our third party community), but many of the TGB developers use it themselves, and it provides a lot better functionality than notepad...

And I agree, with a typeless, "declare on use" scripting language, typos can make it rough to debug :(

[Sauced]

Having a hell of a time getting this to download, update, and/or install properly.  Didn't have a chance to dig around the forums to see if there were currently any known issues with the one mirror that's serving up updates, but overall not an awesome first impression.  Could be me, though.  Currently, the updater is downloading what appears to be a single file into the .bit_rock folder under Docs, and then crashing.  But, hey, each time I try I get a new file.  I suppose I'll get them all eventually.

[Stephen Zepp]

Having a hell of a time getting this to download, update, and/or install properly.  Didn't have a chance to dig around the forums to see if there were currently any known issues with the one mirror that's serving up updates, but overall not an awesome first impression.  Could be me, though.  Currently, the updater is downloading what appears to be a single file into the .bit_rock folder under Docs, and then crashing.  But, hey, each time I try I get a new file.  I suppose I'll get them all eventually.

We've been getting very occasional reported issues (you're roughly the third out of thousands of downloads) of installer issues. We actually had BitRock right a custom installer interface that would do some basic auto-patching as well, and it seems that something slipped by.

I'll try to track down a "pure" link that drops the entire installer in the download for you and post it here.

[sigil]

Downloaded  this last night.  Went through the first two demos in about an hour and a half of reading. I find that  the programming of this is coming very easy to me, which is shocking.  As someone who has not really done much along the lines of programing, outside of of some scripting to make life easier in my work, this is actually, dare I say, enjoyable. ;)

I'm using Notebook ++ for my editing. I love this program for editing languages. Does wonders for making sure my syntax is in good order. I'll try the  IDE you reccommended later on, if I decide to fork over a 100 dollars for a new hobby.

[Sauced]

I'll try to track down a "pure" link that drops the entire installer in the download for you and post it here.

That would be awesome.  I'll try on the desktop tonight, but I do most of my work nowadays on the fancy new laptop, which is where I'm having problems.

[Yoru]

I have to say I was delighted to find out there's a textpad highlighting set for torquescript; I've had a textpad license for who knows how long and it's served me quite well.

Although I've been spoiled recently by using Whole Tomato's VAX for Visual Studio.

[Stephen Zepp]

I have to say I was delighted to find out there's a textpad highlighting set for torquescript; I've had a textpad license for who knows how long and it's served me quite well.

Although I've been spoiled recently by using Whole Tomato's VAX for Visual Studio.

I do suggest that you get to know Torsion (or alternatively, CodeWeaver). Having a fully TorqueScript aware IDE that can also remote debug is key to success!

No word on the link yet, I'll do my best to get one tomorrow for sure. Is there a chance you have a hefty firewall blocking off the installer trying to get it's files remotely?

[Yoru]

I do suggest that you get to know Torsion (or alternatively, CodeWeaver). Having a fully TorqueScript aware IDE that can also remote debug is key to success!

I fully intend to; I'm quite aware of the Real Ultimate Power endowed by proper debugging tools and libraries. Things have just been a little nutty lately and I haven't had the time to properly sit down and play with things.

[Sauced]

Apologies for not following up, but things are working fine now.  I had given up for the night on Friday, and two hours later it magically finished (thread running in the background?)

Either way, the tutorials have been fun, what time I've had to spend on them anyway.  Only criticism about them at this point, is that somewhere along the way, you'd think whoever wrote the PDFs would have said "Hey guys, I keep writing that they have to restart TGB to get changes to game.cs.... can we just add a refresh button or something?"

[Stephen Zepp]

Apologies for not following up, but things are working fine now.  I had given up for the night on Friday, and two hours later it magically finished (thread running in the background?)

Either way, the tutorials have been fun, what time I've had to spend on them anyway.  Only criticism about them at this point, is that somewhere along the way, you'd think whoever wrote the PDFs would have said "Hey guys, I keep writing that they have to restart TGB to get changes to game.cs.... can we just add a refresh button or something?"

Yeah, this is a frustrating issue with trying to migrate a core technology (Torque) to a fully dynamic level building style system. Currently, with external editors, Torque isn't set up to be able to automagically track what's been changed except by going through the whole application startup process again.

We're working on reorganization of the underlying tech to allow for this in a future release, and there is a workaround:

if you place all of your scripts exec() statements for scripts that you may modify in the "startGame()" function, it will in fact reload them since we also have a Prefs flag that defaults to "ignore previous dso files". So the tutorials are actually just being as safe as possible since it requires the new person to know exactly what to do to be able to handle re-loading scripts without restarting.

[Sauced]

Cool, I'll look for that later.  Got through the tutorials and references, and am about to start messing around on my own.  Gotta get the most out of this month, make sure I want the investment, but so far so good.