Homeward Bound
We're getting ready to make the (relatively short) trek back home today. I didn't manage to do any fishing, which I was really looking forward to. Tuesday was the day, in spite of my cold, but we had thunderstorms all day. With illness, weirdness, and uncooperative weather, I can't say this was an ideal vacation. Alas, considering my track record, I can probably say it was a pretty typical one. However, we caught Cedar City during the Shakespearean festival - and so yesterday we caught a production of The Foreigner. Not a Shakespeare play, but one of the funniest plays of all time, and my favorite. With that, visiting relatives, and seeing some incredible scenery up in the mountains, I can't say it was a bad trip.

I've been able to put a serious dent in some of my game development tasks thus far this week, which has been nice. I complain a bit about working with the Torque engine - especially for a single-player game. But there are two huge advantages to it - it's relatively mature (fewer bugs), and it's got a very large and supportive community.

During the final stages of Void War I was working psycho hours trying to get the game done. I'd find myself idly surfing the net occasionally with this little subconscious wish that someone somewhere had written the remainder of my game, and posted it up in the public domain. Silly, but when you are sleep-deprived and stressed you get weird fantasies. Fortunately, with Torque, when I'm having difficulties or I need to implement something new, about half the time I can do a search (with GarageGames' new-and-improved search engine) and find some resource or forum post that comes pretty close to addressing my issue. It can be pretty convenient (distracting, too, if you aren't careful!)

Another awesome utility which has really helped out is TorqueDev (now getting re-christened "CodeWeaver"). Now, it's nowhere near as fully-featured as Visual Studio (but it's pretty much been a one-man show, without the hundreds of man-years put into it like Visual Studio has). But for working with the higher-level, more abstract scripting language for Torque, it's a real life-saver, if only for it's IntelliSense-style hinting and completion alone. It's still in Beta (or "Delta" as the author calls it), and it's got some serious funkiness with the authorization / registration piece right now. But it's already a seriously handy tool, and it's likely to be a "must have" for Torque development when it's completed.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:56 AM (Permalink)