Torque 3D Open Source 3.5 Launch

Recast/Detour path finding through an invisible station mesh

What’s New for 3.5

Change List

Where to Find Torque 3D 3.5

In Closing

On December 19, 2012, we launched T3D v2.0 as the first new release under an open source MIT license. Then on May 9, 2013, we launched T3D v3.0 , our second MIT release. Since going open source in September 2012, we’ve had over 1,400 people star and nearly 600 people fork our main repository.Back in the Spring the Steering Committee proposed to the community a roadmap for T3D 4.0. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons that have been outlined in the Committee’s meeting minutes that roadmap became unattainable. In the Fall the Steering Committee decided to package up what it could and release it as v3.5 to allow those that rely on the precompiled package to take advantage of the bug fixes over the last six months.Torque 3D 3.5 is largely made up of bug fixes submitted by the community and Steering Committee, along with a couple of new additions. Here are some of the larger changes:Daniel Buckmaster took his Recast/Detour resource and submitted it for inclusion into T3D 3.5. This allows you to generate navigation meshes and find paths across these meshes. You may read more about this work on the resources page (login to the GarageGames website required).Ryan Mounts had posted a Blinn-Phong shading resource a couple of years ago and Ron Kapaun created the pull request. With v3.5 we’ve moved over to the Blinn-Phong technique which provides much improved specular highlights. You may see some examples of this in action on the resource’s page.In addition to updating Torque 3D to make use of the latest Oculus VR SDK that includes magnetometer-based drift correction, a standard method of obtaining the user’s IPD and chromatic aberration correction, Torque 3D’s rendering pipeline has been updated to better handle the side-by-side rendering required for the Rift. These fixes include all water rendering, reflective and refractive surfaces, as well as the glow and SSAO post effects.These Oculus Rift fixes have the side benefit of also correcting a number of viewport issues with these systems that non-Rift games may have experienced. These objects and post effects now respect the boundaries of the current viewport and should not spill into the rest of the screen or cause other strange rendering artifacts.In addition to these rendering changes, the scene culling routines have been improved to take into account the projection offset required for Oculus Rift side-by-side rendering. This means that small or distant objects (including terrain chunks) should no longer visibly pop into and out of existence at the screen periphery.The turbulence and caustics post effects have been updated for both speed and to respect the boundaries of the current viewport. Caustics now also correctly turns off when leaving any body of water. With these changes the caustics shader has now been turned back on by default.The gamepad thumbstick’s and joystick’s dead zone calculation was incorrect causing a jump in speed once you left the dead zone. This made the joystick range from 30% to 100% and had the player suddenly start moving. With this fix the joystick’s range outside of the dead zone now produces the correct 0% to 100% range.When using a relatively short visible distance in your level you could end up with decals disappearing at particular camera angles or not show up at all. The decal manager has been corrected to work under all circumstances.This one has been missing for a while and has been brought back. The default terrain materials have been set up once again to allow for footstep sound effects and kicked up dust.Below is a list of all changes that have been made to thebranch of the Torque3D repository since the 3.0 release and are now part of Torque 3D 3.5.As always you may find Torque 3D over on GitHub. Here is a list of all repositories:With the release of Torque 3D 3.5 all changes in thebranch have been moved into thebranch.In addition to GitHub we also have our own ZIP package that combines the Torque3D repository with the updated TorqueScript documentation, the, and compiled versions of each of the templates. This package is ideal for those that do not wish to compile Torque 3D on their own, and is available here:With another Torque 3D release now behind us I wanted to end with a long time community member’s game that was recently released into the wild. Steve Acaster’swas built with Torque 3D and is now available for sale from his web site www.yorkshirerifles.com/webpages/store.html - Dave