Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 07 Dec 2017, 06:40

With the soon upcoming release of Torque3D 4.0 that includes many interesting improvements(such as physics based rendering, faster torque script and various editor improvements) it would be great if we could find a team of people willing to update Terminal Overload to it. Linux/64bit support has also improved since the earlier days when TO was still active, so things should work a bit more smoothly now.

I don't have much experience working with Torque3D, but I guess one of the important first steps would be to get the TO codebase to work with the upstream engine releases so that much of the current maintenance burden of also compiling and releasing engine modifications is removed. In the end TO should hopefully work as a pure torque script mod to be used with upstream engine binaries.

I also have various ideas on how to improve the graphics and started an art collection on OGA:
https://opengameart.org/content/termina ... oot-assets

Also see for some potential neat additions:
https://github.com/John3/awesome-torque3d

Another interesting development would be to include a simple COOP mode. Torque3D now has much better pathfinding and AI support, so a basic "defend the base against the horde" type of COOP or single player mode should be relatively easy to implement. This would likely also solve the lacking player base issues to some extend.

Last but not least, anyone willing to host a test server for TO again?
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 14 Jan 2018, 17:52

Looks like Torque3D 4.0 is somewhat delayed until Q2 2018 or so, see:
http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.ph ... &start=190

But lots of awesome features to come :)
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby XenoK90 » 02 Feb 2018, 00:45

Hi Julius

I was just browsing and reading some forums on internet and came here :) I'm not either user of the game or the forum.

Either way, I have experience in Torque3D from quite some time now, never did any game through just goofing around, yet I did help some guy to update his game (published on steam) from T3D v1.2 to the last development version right now (pre-v4??), to be exact commit from december 2017 and moved his game to linux too. I think I can ask for a reference don't know

I can help in update Terminal Overload XD

anyways if your are still interested to team up give me a PM :)
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 02 Feb 2018, 14:22

That's cool!

Did you already have a look at the current Terminal Overload source-code? https://github.com/fr1tz/terminal-overload

I guess it will be really better to wait for the actual 4.0 Torque3D release, but I'll message you for sure then. Or do you think it makes sense to start working on it now to be ready at the same time as the Torque3D 4.0 release?
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby XenoK90 » 02 Feb 2018, 16:56

Did you already have a look at the current Terminal Overload source-code?

I forked at some point, I think before the license changed, and yes I did play around a little for sure :D but I didn't take a look in the code.

Or do you think it makes sense to start working on it now to be ready at the same time as the Torque3D 4.0 release?


Well, definitely the answer is yes. Start right now. The most changes will be en the engine side.

The best thing would be to move to only TorqueScript, and start using the new "Module" FPSGameplay, is more organized, this way you can be used with the upstream binaries or "modules", like you mentioned, without any change in your game, unlike how it was before.

If you have some free time next week, we can start ;)
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 02 Feb 2018, 20:05

XenoK90 {l Wrote}:I forked at some point, I think before the license changed, and yes I did play around a little for sure :D but I didn't take a look in the code.

Hmm, yes that license change to GPL is a consideration. But I guess if we want to motivate the original author to come back to contributing a bit we should probably respect the license change. Personally I don't mind working on a GPL project at all.
Edit: reading the comment from Fritz again on the license change, I guess it would make sense to start with a MIT licensed fork and not utilize the very few mostly unrelated changes he did after wards. Even though I don't mind the GPL, there is no need to restrict our options at this point and Fr1tz wrote that he is fine with the "core" staying MIT.

XenoK90 {l Wrote}:The best thing would be to move to only TorqueScript, and start using the new "Module" FPSGameplay, is more organized, this way you can be used with the upstream binaries or "modules", like you mentioned, without any change in your game, unlike how it was before.


I asked Fr1tz a while ago about how much of it isn't Torque Script and he said the relevant parts are all in Torque script, so definitely a move to all upstream engine is the way to go. I also think that new FPS module is worth a look, but TO has a quite specific and well "polished" movement feel to it, which IMHO will be hard to replicate if the core FPS code-base changes significantly. And at least the older FPS demos from Torque3D where always a bit crappy when it came to movement handling.

XenoK90 {l Wrote}:If you have some free time next week, we can start ;)

Sort of committed to a larger web-dev project in the short term, but I'll have a look at it and at least try to set up a Torque3D development environment on my Linux system at home. Bit I will probably not have very much time to work on it before March/April :(
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 02 Feb 2018, 20:19

Here is the latest MIT codebase on my Github account:
https://github.com/poVoq/terminal-overload

Julius {l Wrote}:Another interesting development would be to include a simple COOP mode. Torque3D now has much better pathfinding and AI support, so a basic "defend the base against the horde" type of COOP or single player mode should be relatively easy to implement. This would likely also solve the lacking player base issues to some extend.


I still think this is vital as the player-base was always lacking and there needs to be a way to enjoy this game more in solo mode or when idling on online servers.
Any qualified suggestions on what existing bot / NPC code would be recommended to integrate for a COOP mode?
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 03 Feb 2018, 13:00

Ok, as soon as I can get some Linux development builds here:
https://github.com/John3/Torque3D_Unoff ... -362695631
I'll get started. But initially progress will be slow from my side as I have really little clue how Torque3D works internally.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby XenoK90 » 04 Feb 2018, 22:34

Julius {l Wrote}:I still think this is vital as the player-base was always lacking and there needs to be a way to enjoy this game more in solo mode or when idling on online servers.
Any qualified suggestions on what existing bot / NPC code would be recommended to integrate for a COOP mode?


I not really played too much this game :( I need to start playing and see how is this game... and then we need to develop the AI Bot, it seems like a UT or Quake3 style.

with COOP mode you mean team deathmach? As a "code" to be integrated exist a few, it seems "BadBehavior" it will integrated.

Julius {l Wrote}:I'll get started. But initially progress will be slow from my side as I have really little clue how Torque3D works internally.

I can teach you, is easy really if you have some exp in programming even a little.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 05 Feb 2018, 09:16

Regular gameplay (a kind of team deathmatch with capure objectives) is probably too complex to play with bots in a satisfactory way. The overall system however also lends itself in my opinion to a sort of NPC horde coop where computer controlled enemies are spawned in waves and players have to protect or capture the objectives.

While I am interested to learn more about game programming, my experience is actually more in 3D modelling. Thus while teaching is also apprechiated, your contributed time is probably spend more efficiently on the actual code while I concentrate on porting the art assets and general improvements on assets and smaller coding tasks.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby fr1tz » 18 Feb 2018, 01:09

:)

I was just listening to some com truise (ether drift) and wanted to look up some old TOL WIP screenshots just to find this thread by accident (didnt get an email notification). Im still alive, still dont have a decent machine for TOL development or a proper internet connection. But then again I lucked into some proper living quarters (/w an actual bed, yay). I didnt forget this project (or all the chocolate that I still owe a couple of people) and Torque 4.0 looks interesting. More collaboration (meaning more than 0) with upstream would be necessary to get dev back on track. The prospect of having to update (or maybe even re-implement) TOL on Torque 4.0 is quite daunting (remembering just how much I underestimated the amount of stuff I had to do just to get to 0.1 back when TOL started, and back then I had a machine that didnt burst into flames at the mere thought of doing 3D stuff ;)

License stuff (GPL vs MIT or whatever) would once again mostly be a question of which license might attract devs. No idea. No concrete plans. No way to justify sinking more than a couple hours per week into continuing TOL right now. We ll see :) basically just wanted to say hi

fr1tz {l Wrote}:hi julius
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 18 Feb 2018, 14:37

Hi fr1tz!

Good to know you are still around to ask questions then :)

Right now it is a bit hard to say where this will go, but I might take some time off work in April/May/June? for unrelated reasons and at least in theory that should given some time to get into this. Torque3d 4.0 is still a bit out anyway, so no real urgency I guess.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 28 Feb 2018, 16:21

This unofficial build works fine on Linux:
https://github.com/John3/Torque3D_Unoff ... /tag/v1.23
(but you might have to install the OpenAL-devel package for sound to work).

I have a very busy month ahead, so don't expect much from my side for now... but if anyone wants to start already just let us know here.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 02 Apr 2018, 13:24

For future reference: https://github.com/TwistedJenius/UAISK
(newly released enemy AI and bot system)
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby Julius » 21 May 2019, 09:40

https://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=1594

Looks like the 4.0 release of Torque3d is finally happening.
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Re: Anyone interested in helping to update this to T3D 4.0?

Postby fr1tz » 21 May 2019, 19:55

Great news :)

I'll take a look at it as soon as I've set up a decent game-dev machine.
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