Week 19 -- More Torque

Cruising along on learning TGB. I learned GUIs pretty well, and I think they'll probably be useful for the game. The highlight was learning a neat trick to show any scene objects as part of a GUI, which at first I didn't think you could do. You create a t2dSceneWindow in your GUI the size of whatever scene elements you want to display. Then you create a new scenegraph (or I suppose you could use part of your main level), arrange your elements, and set your mini-window's camera to cover what you want to show. This is the detailed tutorial where I found this.

I also covered some smaller things: mouse handling, mounting objects, timers, and paths. Everything's going well. Paths took some trial and error to figure out, as the included documentation says nothing about the path functions. Eventually I found a better reference on the TGB wiki.

Indeed, the biggest frustration for me has been that it's hard to find materials for learning TGB as a beginner. I've found a lot of good things by now, but it's often been just chance browsing on the forums or searching on the wiki. There are several different "reference" sections that all have varying information. I'm happy figuring things out through experimentation, but I wish it were easier to find basic information for getting started. Maybe that'll be my next GarageGames post.