IMPORTANT ! Proposal for Game Engine Change !

[Dante]

Hey all,

As I'm sure you all know about my recent dive into trying out the
Torque engine, I would like to propose it for Flashover. The reasoning
for this proposal is A. I think this will allow us to complete the
project much faster and B. It would be a lot less work for me, seeing
that it is not likely that we will find more coding help anytime soon.

I think this could make our lives easier with this project because
Torque is a full middleware solution, out of the box. It has a built
in in-game world editor and terrain editor, which is much better than
any other indie priced or free package out there. It has built in
support for portals, to make performance improvements for wide open
spaces as well. The engine has tons of optimizations, which means we
can have Flashover be one huge open world if we want. And all basic
common code systems are already in place for things like options menus
and character animation features.

So far I have implemented a smart camera that follows the player in
3rd person, and lags a little behind (Like Assasin's Creed). A object
sensing targeting crosshair, that makes selection boxes and pops up
names of interactable NPCs and objects. A Dialog system fully
implemented and ready to use. And I just recently implemented the
basics of our quest system.

In a few weeks I have surpassed the work done with Irrlicht by at
least 2x fold.

For the art direction, I think you guys would have an easier time as
well because there are plenty of resources available on www.garagegames.com,
and I can give you already defined art standards for how to work
instead of learning through trial and error.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, as I am very excited to take
hold of this engine for our project.

Also, it is Torque Game Engine Advanced, which means we can still have
our Normal Mapping support.

-Dante

[Gera Gundorov]

Sounds good by me. First question: does torque support overlapping
UVS for normal maps? It would be much better for us, we can overlap
arms and legs and have a better texel density. Second question: any
recommendations regarding making assets would be great. I was going
to make a base mesh for the guard, take it into zbrush for normal
mapping, bring it back to maya and retopologize, then texture. Is
there a better way of going about it? Faster or easier are both
welcome. I will get started on this as soon as I finish an asset I am
making for Global Conflicts (which should be no later than
tomorrow).

Also, please give me some feedback on the emblems when you get a
chance. Am I going in the right direction? Anything you like?

Gera

[Dante]

No, I don't think it supports overlapping UVs for normal maps. As I
understand it, not many engines do.

I'm not sure about the second question. Why do you need to Normal map
in ZBrush? I believe there are some tools out there, one from NVidia
specifically, that makes normal mapping much easier, and some
photoshop plugins?
I think the base mesh idea is great!

Tyler, could you chime in on this?

[Praetor]

Sounds good to me, are you still planning on using Ageia? I haven't
been able to work much on the wrapper lately (guess it's a good thing
if the engine will be switched...). I can still adapt the wrapper to
Torque if there aren't any other Ageia wrappers available for it (I
had the main structure done, but never had time to completely finish/
test it..). Also you said it has normal mapping support, is that
through some internal means or does it support shaders in general (if
so I have a lot of shaders (hlsl/cg) from the fps I'm working on that
could be adapted fairly easily)? I haven't been able to work on much
lately, but by summer I should have time to help out a bit more.

Also, Torque uses C++, right? For whatever reason I seem to associate
it with C#....

Also as for normal mapping, a while ago I was playing around with
Melody (I think that's what it was called) an NVidia application that
takes a high res mesh and normal maps it to a low poly one, I didn't
do much with it, but it seemed to work, maybe that's what you're
after? Also, Blender supports baking the normals of a highpoly mesh to
a lower polygon one (though that's just for object space normal maps
which I guess wouldn't work right with something that'd be animated...
but maybe it'll help).

-Praetor (Riley)

[Dante]

Riley,

I'm happy to hear you are still with us. Torque Advanced is a C++
Engine that is controllable with its own scripting language, called
Torque Script (it has C like Syntax). Even though we are changing
engines, it would be cool for Irrlicht people to have an Ageia
integration. Right now the standard Torque physics will do the job
fine for this project, but if you are interested in giving it a go for
integration, I'm sure it would definitely be useful in the future. Let
me know what you think via email (dantef...@gmail.com).

Torque Advanced is a full shader engine. I'm not sure yet how they set
up their normal map support, but yes, it supports HLSL. At this time
it is only a Direct X engine, with OpenGL support planned for the
future.

[Praetor]

Sounds good, I'll put some thought into the physics stuff, I can't do
much until summer, but I'll start playing around with Torque a bit
when I have some time.

I looked into its shader support a bit and it looks good, it said
something about importing shaders from rendermonkey or fxcomposer,
which would be very nice (with my Ogre project if I want to prototype
a shader in rendermonkey I have to go through about 20 steps to get it
from rendermonkey to Ogre....). And I think as long as it has HLSL
support it should support most any normal mapping shaders (assuming it
has some means for generating tangents, which I think would be the
only other requirement for normal mapping).

On May 24, 5:05 pm, Dante <dantefalc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Riley,
>
> I'm happy to hear you are still with us. Torque Advanced is a C++
> Engine that is controllable with its own scripting language, called
> Torque Script (it has C like Syntax). Even though we are changing
> engines, it would be cool for Irrlicht people to have an Ageia
> integration. Right now the standard Torque physics will do the job
> fine for this project, but if you are interested in giving it a go for
> integration, I'm sure it would definitely be useful in the future. Let

> me know what you think via email (dantefalc...@gmail.com).

[Gera Gundorov]

Does the engine support double sided polys?

[Dante]

Yes, it supports double sided polygons. But I'd like a good reason for
wanting to use them... Everything should have thickness, no?