The goods

A departure

Getting involved

The future

In conclusion,

That's right! At long last, your new T3D Steering Committee is going to be making our first release. Those of you who follow our GitHub milestones with rapt attention may have noticed that our goal for releasing Torque 3D 3.6 is September 30. That day is rapidly approaching, and we're nearing our goal - as of writing this, GitHub tells me our issue list is 84% complete. But we can't get the rest of the way without you! That's right,. If you use Torque, we want your input on proposed changes and modifications, to ensure that the engine's development is both democratic, and technically sound.So what's in this release? You'll have to wait for the final release blog to get the precise details, but here are some rough statistics for you ( with source ): we've closedissues or pull requests, of whichwere bugs (i.e. the engine was broken or behaving wrongly),were defects (code cleanup, more sensible behavior, general improvements) andwere new features. And there are still more of all of those to be processed!Notable new features include being able to officially generate projects with CMake for the first time, being able to use English names for common colours (like in T2D), Visual Studio 2013 support, Googletest unit tests, and hopefully one or two more special treats. But beyond those glamorous items, a whole host of improvements have been made throughout the codebase - old/dead code has been removed, compiler warnings resolved, visual glitches ironed out and documentation added.At this time we'd like to say a fond farewell to Andrew Mac, who due to work commitments has had to resign from his position on the Steering Committee. He'll still be around in the community, but a bit less active. We thank him for his significant contributions to the engine and the Committee, and wish him the best of luck for the future!And, of course, that means we'll be looking for another Committee member to fill this vacancy. If helping to maintain, develop and grow a large open-source project like Torque sounds like a fun time to you, and you have skills and energy to bring to the Committee, we'd love to hear from you! More information about the Committee is available on our website If you're a Torque user and you want to help improve the engine, we need you! Right now especially, we're looking for testers to review this branch with a 64-bit compiler compatible version of the engine, which we'd like to include in the 3.6 release. Otherwise, a great place to start is with our Final Review label. We tag PRs with it when we've looked it over, we like it, and we think it's ready to merge. It's like that moment at weddings when they ask if anyone has any objections. If the final review queue is looking a but short, take a look at the rest of our issue list , which you can point at any milestone we have, and have a look for issues that nobody's commented on.Does the issue affect you? Does it solve a problem you've had? Does it solve it in the right way? Would you have to rewrite parts of your game if this change were accepted? Does the code look stable and useful to lots of users of the engine?These are the questions we'd like to ask every single user if we could. So give us a hand and make your voice heard!Torque, and the broader game engine landscape, are changing rapidly these days. After this release, the SC will be taking some time to regroup and discuss what we can do with the engine in the immediate future. We already have over 30 issues lined up for 3.7 , and many more to work on that have been assigned to other milestones, or not assigned at all yet. In addition, we (and the community) will be continuing on our personal work with the engine - BeamNG's Linux and OpenGL work, Jeff's entity/component system, etcetera.We'll also be considering Torque's place in the developing engine marketplace - what makes Torque unique? What are its strengths, and why would you choose it over the competition? Especially when there is such good competition out there.Torque 3D 3.6 is coming, but we need your help! Much love, peace to all, and see you again at the end of the month when we announce the 3.6 release officially - if all goes well!