Hey guys,

I was hoping Thomas still had the source for TBG but he said he deleted the source to the engine so I guess I'm out of luck. I was going to try my luck at working on it but I guess all thats left to do is either write my own engine (probably wont be too successful) or port TBM2 to the TBG engine.

I'm going to be working on porting it (right now actually) and releasing a package with everything in it.

A couple things I won't be doing is including things like the nuke and such, unless someone can find the link to the nuke fix that I couldn't seem to find. I'll be picking and choosing what will go in the package and what will be left out from the original TBM2 package.

Suggestions on what to leave out and what to add are appreciated but other then that its going to be a custom package with Thomas' engine and different things.

I'm wanting to include many of the good maps but I'm also wanting to make a few of my own special to this release. I'll be map making, coding, and porting most of this all myself.

If you want my to include a map other then the ones I'm making post a list of the ones you want me to include and I'll see what I can do.

Hope you guys enjoy the release (this won't happen over night ^^, )

The project has been taken over by elfprince13 and calc84maniac.

Progress:
Checklist for first demo release:
===========================
remove extraneous "skins" (easy) COMPLETE
rewrite any still-missing function (thanks Kier) COMPLETE
fix the inventory rotation... (medium) COMPLETE

ensure ALL gui's are usable + "pretty" (tedious but easy)
(e.g. everything lines up correctly, including the image on the loading GUI) partial

get IRC back in place (SAX replacement) partial
fold in iGob mod (easy) COMPLETE
fold in TBG (work!) COMPLETE
fold in DTB (easy?)
finish CemetechAI 4 (work!)
fold in CemetechAI 4 (easy)

clean+repair maps directory structure (tedious but easy) partial
fix poorly bounded bricks (DShiznit?) COMPLETE
remove all files which aren't used (easy)

design auto-updater (Python)

switch Mod_Image to "tbm/dtb" mode. (easy)
You're welcome to my folder to pick through any unreleased vehicles and maps I have, and afaik you can modify a current Torque release into a Blockland0002 replacement with very little modification.
Sounds good. Looks like my weapons pack I was writing will have to wait. I'll probably release my weapons pack in the release hopefully.

I'll first port TBM2 to the TBG engine and then I'll see how far I get with modifying the blockland0002 source Razz

If you could send me a zip or something like that of your folder Kerm I'd be glad to look through it Razz

I don't have a license yet though either, so I'm either going to have to save up the money or be careful >.<"
KermMartian wrote:
You're welcome to my folder to pick through any unreleased vehicles and maps I have, and afaik you can modify a current Torque release into a Blockland0002 replacement with very little modification.


I'm going to pack up what we had done of TBG and fix some of the errors with TBM, there's some nasty incompatibilities between the loading scripts for vanilla bl and TBG. the real issue is that TBM is still closed source in parts and the old DSO's won't run on newer engines. I'm in the process of trying to recreate our missing functions.


[edit]
calc84maniac, please send me your copy of the iGob source and any other quality mods you did, I don't want to have to deal with weeding through Orange Block.
Glad to see you're working on something similar. If we could work on this together that would be awesome Razz
Elfprince, did you ever make any significant progress on the rendering and/or network problems that were plaguing Blockland/TBM?
Thats one reason why I wanted to TBG engine source, cause I knew it would've at least been a start on the matter.

In the beginning I'll be a bit lost. If you all can provide my with support when I run into problems that would be great. I'm not new to C or anything, but I'm not extremely experienced in it. I'll be happy to work on this though, because I'm sure it will help me learn more Razz

For the most part I think I know what I'm doing XD

Thomas, if you still want to try and make TBG or something similar I'll be happy to dedicate my time to it as well. That goes for anyone else who is interested as well Razz
If you guys get blockland up again I'll defiantly join in. I would love to help but computer programing is not my strong point.(I only know a little python, not enough to do anything with though) I'll help in any way I can though I believe I deleted all of my old BL files. If I can find a copy of them they may be some help to you though I think it was all binaries and not any code.
Edit: I could also setup a sever if you guys made a *nix compatible version I'll be reinstalling XUbuntu on that comp tonight, the other issue would bee speed because the comp is only 733Mhz

@Kerm do you sill want to host some saxjaxy code on that comp or should I just wait until I get my site up and then ask again?
Well I do have my old TBM2.0u1 installer with pretty much everything you need in it, and theres also TheOrangeBlock which DShiznit made and released. They're both TBM2.0u1. TOB has a bit more goodies in it but I think they went a little too far with it, lol. I was thinking of getting my dedicated server up though, I can either host TBM2.0u1 or TheOrangeBlock (which I have been hosting lately, just cause of the amount of users that use it).

I'm wondering Kerm, am I able to upload my TBM2.0u1 installer into the Archive? Its a bit large just cause it has everything in it. Its bare-bones TBM2.0u1 but with my maps in it along with it, so theres really no difference. Its just all packaged up nicely ^^,

Also,
Swivelgames wrote:
If you could send me a zip or something like that of your folder Kerm I'd be glad to look through it
KermMartian wrote:
Elfprince, did you ever make any significant progress on the rendering and/or network problems that were plaguing Blockland/TBM?


we fixed one issue, and then Luq, et al. were being rather a-ish, so I left. Gobbles and the rest had quit already. interestingly, Luq and ShadowZ claimed to have "solved the problem," but wouldn't release any source to go with it to help us out.

Kerm, with the harddrive issues you've had, I'm assuming you don't have the source for the missing tbm source files anymore, so its down to Luq or Kier giving it to us out of the goodness of their hearts (gobbles lost his copy). I got along pretty well with Kier, so that at least is a possibility. ShadowZ "might" give us the source for the IRC stuff if he gets around to removing the dependency on his bots. and calcy, get me the iGob stuff when you get a chance.
EDIT: You know what, nevermind. Any time I get re-involved in crap I regret it.
Hey Luquado, good to see you again. Needless to say, as I'm friends with you and with elfprince13, I'll try not to get in the middle of the past occurrences and leave it up to the two of you to duke that out. The thing that highly interests me is the coding part, which as you explained it extremely well, sounds relatively straightforward to pull off after glancing through the engine code to gain some familiarity with it. In fact, if anyone still has the code lying around, I'd appreciate them letting me know so I can look through it and find out precisely where I'd need to add server and client signaling of object creation/deletion/modification for static stuff like bricks.

Edit: whoa, whoa, you had some good points there. I'm saving that post if you don't mind.
KermMartian wrote:
Hey Luquado, good to see you again. Needless to say, as I'm friends with you and with elfprince13, I'll try not to get in the middle of the past occurrences and leave it up to the two of you to duke that out.
Nah, I regretted posting that, and I removed it from here and thebettermod.org as well. No reason to crap up your forums. He may have, uh, borrowed code from someplace and not been a team player at the time, but he's older now and hopefully wiser.

Quote:
The thing that highly interests me is the coding part, which as you explained it extremely well, sounds relatively straightforward to pull off after glancing through the engine code to gain some familiarity with it. In fact, if anyone still has the code lying around, I'd appreciate them letting me know so I can look through it and find out precisely where I'd need to add server and client signaling of object creation/deletion/modification for static stuff like bricks.
Are you a TGE licensee? If not, you'll probably want to acquire TGE in one way or another, and I may very well mean buy it. Or not. I mean, there are several places to get it. If you're looking, that is. TO BUY, of course.

Glad I could be of service. Also, glad that I could in a way somewhat dispel doubts. Remember, what I always told people that said "TGE can't do it": Badspot did it, ergo, it must be possible.

Quote:
Edit: whoa, whoa, you had some good points there. I'm saving that post if you don't mind.
Feel free to save it; I have it stored locally like I do all long forum posts, so here's the relevant, non-flaming parts:

Quote:
You want to fix lag? OK. While I've long since deleted all of my code, here's how to do it.

It's not rendering. gobbles and I did tests with hundreds of thousands of polys with little slowdown. TGE already has a kind of culling system in place; it got better with later versions of TGE and depending on the object type you use (compared to how it was in BL classic on 1.2). This could be improved, but it's not the biggest problem.

It's not lag, it's processing time. You have to decrease the work required on each server tick that TGE does when tons of objects exist. This should be obvious to anyone when you profile the executable.

What work? Scope check. This is why elfprince's octree stuff was pointless. TGE already divides the game world into a series of zones, and only objects in your zone are considered to be in-scope. You can see this if you were around in Kier's universe build servers; that's why the builds would be spaced so far apart; if TGE didn't already have a tree-like scoping structure, that wouldn't have helped. Logic, people.

However, looping over all of those items to determine scope - especially with builds, where there are a ton of objects in the same zone - is the performance killer. Making zones "larger" won't help (and will cause issues elsewhere - I tried that.)

What you need to do is create a new object type that is not part of the object system on-server. As far as the server is concerned, it almost completely doesn't exist. So, instead of checking for scope on every single tick, these objects are ignored. Instead, you issue commands to the client on stuff like adding of a brick, changing color, and etc. outside of the built-in scope check. The client would also have to be modified to continue to render these objects even though they're not coming down the pipe as a result of the server's scope check. There's a couple more modifications you'd have to do on the client than just that, but that's the basics.

Stuff like destruction and ownership is easy. Again, just commands to and from the server but outside of the normal object scope so that you don't get hit on each tick.

Here, think about it: after a brick is placed on a build, why the heck should you "check on it" every 10 or so milliseconds? It's not a moving object. You only need to know which one it is, where it's placed, who placed it, and its color. Maybe some other static properties. You have a command that tells the clients "hey jerks put this brick here as this color" and the clients do that and the server forgets about that brick. Likewise for delete.

Easy-peezy. Incidentally, I think that's how Retail did it too, and hence why the original versions (and the current version as of this writing) didn't support crap like brick scaling and animation. There is only a limited subset of normal object tracking & functionality implemented in this new brick class.


I'm sure there's other ways to solve this issue, and probably solutions that increase performance even more, but that's how I had done it.
Quote:
BEAUTIFUL Luquado. Thanks for the post and I wish you fair well where ever you go! ^^,

Seriously though, Thanks so much for that post Luquado and I'm sorry your visit didn't seem to turn out to be a good one. Sad


I was going to post what I could if he didn't post it here ^^,

GreyMario wrote:
You have no idea on how many points you are wrong.

I have nothing else to say.


I have a feeling thats why he left... These are the people I just want to beat over the head until they have nothing left in them to bleed out T_T

lol, sorry for that last comment, not like me XD
I agree wholeheartedly that it's criminal how certain people feel it's their right to disagree with, contradict, and undermine other people just for the sake of being contrary.
These are the people who have been busting the TBM community apart from the inside out >.>

Meh, I again thank Luquado for the explanation and will gladly do my best to try and help out with anything. As you all may know I do not know much about Torque development aside from scripting simple things like weapons for DTB and such. I'm going to try my best to help out in any way I can. I would love to get my hands on the source even just for learning purposes ^^,

This is a project I am very interested in observing and, if possible, helping out.
As am I, although as usual, I make no promises due to my already extensive time commitments.
Understandable.

As I hope to help out with this project and learn as much as I can from it, I am also busy with other projects and hope to finish them on time (that would be a first actually, eh? Rolling Eyes )
swivelgames wrote:
Understandable.

As I hope to help out with this project and learn as much as I can from it, I am also busy with other projects and hope to finish them on time (that would be a first actually, eh? Rolling Eyes )

Haha, for me as well. For a perfect example, take a look at the laughable falsehood in my signature.

|
V
Luquado wrote:
He may have, uh, borrowed code from someplace


who hasn't in the process of teaching themself a new subject (and for that matter a new language, since despite C++ not being my forte I was the only one who volunteered to work on the engine)? TBG wasn't going to be a commercial product, I had no need to worry about it because I was only halfway or so done replacing it with my own code. This would have been fantastic information to have a year ago. I'll see what I can do with my year off, my eagle project is wrapping to a close in the next 2.5 weeks (almost finished it today actually), as is my summer research job.
  
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