I've been spending the last few days with the the Torque Game Engine, and I must say, this is some of the most fun I've had programming in a very long time. Here's a quick run-through of the things I've been playing with over the last few days. Of note, though, is that I haven't stayed up this late in a while, so I may not be quite as witty (read: less than zero), verbose (no treatise on immersion :(), nor creative as I may [or may not] usually be.

The first thing I did with Torque was, naturally, play around with its terrain editor and particle editor. After about an hour of playing around with the editor, which has a built-in texture blender that can blend up to six 256x256 resolution textures (this 256x256 is a limit which made me angry) and having a lot of fun trying to figure out the particle editor without having so much as a clue as to what the various parameters did, I came up with this image:



The particle editor in Torque was surprisingly capable and powerful, though maybe not quite as powerful as the Max Payne 1/2 particle editors, nor as some of the particle engines I've cooked up over the years, but this will certainly do. And it will certainly do better as I update it. One really nice thing is that the editor already has support for a relatively large number of animated textures for the particle sprites (if I remember what I read correctly, it can support up to 5^6 animated textures for particles).

After playing with the particles and terrain, I set up an empty project in VS.NET 2k3 for all the various script files for the project I was working on at the time. It's a fairly large image (height-wise), so I don't want to post it here, but it's there if you want to take a peek at it.

Throughout yesterday and today, I was working with the GUI system to create a slightly more aesthetically-pleasing look for the game's option screen, and though I haven't started work on fine-tuning the rest of the GUIs yet, they do operate off certain parameters/images that I altered while playing with the look of the options window. I still have yet to finish my tweaking of this window, since I had gotten sidetracked, but eventually I'll be adding transparency to every GUI window as well. Here are a couple shots of the options window (left being the original look, middle being a rough draft, the third/final image being the near-current state of the options GUI):



What I got sidetracked with was the build of the Torque Shader Engine (I am now officially near-broke with just enough money to cover the first month's rent of my house for school this fall) that I decided to buy, going against my previous claim that I wanted to upgrade the engine with an entirely unique shader system of my very own (instead I'll just be working on a dynamic lighting and shadow system of my own). This decision came from the fact that I got an actual game idea in my head that I plan to flesh out and create a prototype level for all in the next six months. The screenshot below is the first build of the engine where I finally (only after about an hour of work) got the FPS demo from the first screen in this post working with the TSE:



If I didn't have class tomorrow, I would almost certainly be able to stay up all night just playing with the engine. I'm having an absolute blast with this. Another update tomorrow night.