torque 3d game development cookbook

www.it-ebooks.info Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook Over 80 practical recipes and hidden gems for getting the most out of the Torque 3D game engine David Wyand BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI www.it-ebooks.info Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: January 2013 Production Reference: 1180113 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-84969-354-7 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Valentina D'silva www.it-ebooks.info Credits Author David Wyand Reviewers Logan Foster Ahmad Iftikhar Konrad Kiss Chip Lambert Acquisition Editor Kartikey Pandey Lead Technical Editor Arun Nadar Technical Editors Prasanna Joglekar Merin Jose Dominic Pereira Copy Editor Ruta Waghmare Project Coordinator Anurag Banerjee Proofreaders Clyde Jenkins Dirk Manuel Indexer Monica Ajmera Mehta Graphics Valentina D'silva Production Coordinator Pooja Chiplunkar Cover Work Pooja Chiplunkar www.it-ebooks.info About the Author David Wyand grew up in Toronto, Canada, and graduated in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1994. Following graduation, he went to run the network management system at a major telecommunications company; did freelance 2D compositing and 3D animation work for the Toronto entertainment industry; and started his own consulting rm to set up network management systems at various telecommunications and power companies in Canada and the U.S. He then left that behind to work in the video game industry. Starting with the successful 2005 launch of a tool for game artists to visualize their work in real time, he moved on to game engine development. In 2006, he joined GarageGames as a full-time contractor and has been working with them ever since. During this time he has had his hands in nearly every game engine the company has released. Today he is the Head of Torque 3D Development at GarageGames. In 2009 he started Gnometech Inc. ( http://www.gnometech.com) to begin developing his own commercial games. In 2010 he released Greenwood Faire, a web-based 3D world in a medieval setting. Since then he has created other online 3D worlds under the Zworldo.com banner, and is looking to the future of virtual reality and unique input devices. Big thanks to Julie, Matthew, Malcolm, and Melanie for their love and support. Especially Julie, who took the kids away many a day so I could write. I also want to thank my mom and dad for all the usual reasons. www.it-ebooks.info About the Reviewers Logan Foster is the Art Director for Fluik Entertainment Inc., a mobile game development studio based in Edmonton, Alberta. As a 13-year veteran of 3D and 2D art development and production design and development for games and digital media, he has contributed to over a dozen original IP and contract PC/ Mac, console, mobile, social, serious, and web-based games during his career. Outside of his normal work duties, he also contributes as a private beta tester for Autodesk, has spoken at several independent game development festivals on the topic of art production for games, and in 2009 helped co-found and continues to help run GameCamp Edmonton, an industry organization whose goal is to help further advocate and network the game development industry in Alberta. I would like to thank my wife Erin and kids Nathan and Seraphina for putting up with all the long hours and craziness that comes with working in the game industry. Ahmad Iftikhar, 25, is the CEO of a cutting edge design and development company, Creativebugs Pvt. Ltd. He received his B.Sc. Honors degree in Multimedia with majors in game designing from the University of South Asia, Lahore, Pakistan. He has over 6 years of experience in design and development, and has expertise on in various tools including Autodesk 3DS Max, Maya, Zbrush, Adobe Photoshop, illustrator, After effects Premiere, Unreal Engine, Cry Engine, Crytek, Unity3D, and Torque. www.it-ebooks.info He has worked on a number of projects for renowned organizations including iWin, Digital Chocolate, Game View Studios, Tintash, Sandlot Games, Bramerz, Hands-on, and several Google-afliated products. He has also rendered his services for National Guard Services, on the Pennsylvania Project. He has a number of projects to his credit including Coconut Queen, Tap Fish, Tap Ranch, and several other 3D game projects based on game engines. Konrad Kiss is a programmer by profession with over 16 years of eld experience. He is a co-founder and acting CTO of the Hungary, Europe based independent game developer studio, Bitgap. His eld of expertise primarily includes massively multiplayer architectures and strategic game design. He received a honorary associate status from GarageGames in 2009. In his free time he enjoys exploring new possibilities in cloud computing through Amazon Web Services. He is currently working on an HTML5 game framework focusing on multiplayer 2D action games supported by Amazon DyamoDB and a scalable Node.js based server architecture. First of all, I’d like to thank my wife, Ildiko, for putting up with my crazy work schedules and my kids, Lia and David, who would always help me rediscover true fun in playing games. I’d like to thank the Torque community for being friendly and professional. They kept me going even when it was overwhelmingly hard. I also owe a great deal to David Wyand, the author of this magnicent book, along with Steve Acaster, Daniel Buckmaster, Rene Damm, Ben Garney, Michael Hall, Manoel Neto, Phillip O’Shea, Chris Robertson, Tom Spilman, and of course the entire team at GarageGames—past and present. You guys are the best! www.it-ebooks.info Chip Lambert has been a member of the GarageGames community since early 2002 and has followed each iteration of the Torque engine since then. He owns Crusader Games, a small independent company in southern West Virginia that uses the Torque engine family and publishes tabletop RPG supplements. When not trying to change the world with his products, he works as an Applications Developer for Blueeld College. I would like to thank my beautiful wife Kelley who is my moon and star, my true sunshine Kaitlyn, my mom, and of course dad, I still miss you. Thank you all for the love and encouragement. And of course everyone at GarageGames for their hard work over the years. www.it-ebooks.info www.PacktPub.com Support les, eBooks, discount offers and more You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support les and downloads related to your book. Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub les available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at service@packtpub.com for more details. At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks. TM http://PacktLib.PacktPub.com Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt’s online digital book library. Here, you can access, read and search across Packt’s entire library of books. Why Subscribe? f Fully searchable across every book published by Packt f Copy and paste, print and bookmark content f On demand and accessible via web browser Free Access for Packt account holders If you have an account with Packt at www.PacktPub.com, you can use this to access PacktLib today and view nine entirely free books. Simply use your login credentials for immediate access. www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1: TorqueScript: The Only Script You Need to Know 7 Introduction 8 Accessing delimited elds within a string 8 Iterating on words in a string list 14 Retrieving components of a variable using accessors 17 Iterating on objects in a SimSet or SimGroup collection 22 Getting a random object from a SimSet or SimGroup collection 24 Finding an object in a SimSet or SimGroup collection using its internal name 26 Executing a method on a SimSet or SimGroup collection 30 Creating a new SimObject instance 33 Creating a new internal name only SimObject instance 36 Creating a new Datablock object 37 Creating a new singleton 39 Extending a SimObject instance using the class property 40 Using a variable to access methods or properties of a SimObject instance 45 Using call() to call a variable method on a SimObject instance with arguments 48 Using call() to call a variable function with arguments 50 Using script arrays as dictionaries 53 Using ArrayObject and custom script sorting callbacks 55 Scheduling SimObject methods 59 Scheduling functions 61 Activating and deactivating a package 63 www.it-ebooks.info [...]... objects within a given range, and making use of Torque 3D s message producer/consumer system What you need for this book Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook is useful for the majority of Torque 3D developers Each chapter covers a common topic of game development, starting with TorqueScript, the scripting language of Torque 3D used to define game objects and build gameplay rules It is expected that the reader... source code is the reason, a number of educational institutions are using Torque 3D in their courses Torque 3D Game Engine Cookbook is a practical reference guide to the latest version of the Torque 3D game engine, and takes the reader beyond the basics provided by the GarageGames FPS Tutorial Each chapter covers a common topic of game development, and exposes the reader to some less understood and hidden... on the GarageGames site (www.garagegames.com/products /torque- 3d) or the equivalent A basic understanding of TorqueScript and using Torque 3D s built-in editors is required 2 www.it-ebooks.info Preface Torque 3D is now an open source product under the MIT license, and is available for free to everyone Links to the latest version and other useful information is available from the Torque 3D product page... repository Any text editor may be used to create and edit TorqueScript files Torsion, a commercial TorqueScript editor, may be used as an alternative It is available for purchase from the GarageGames web store Who this book is for Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook is aimed at developers that are interested is working with the latest version of the Torque 3D game engine This book will be helpful for developers... on the GarageGames site at www.garagegames.com/ products /torque- 3d The source code and example templates are also available directly from the GitHub repository at www.github.com/GarageGames /Torque3 D In order to compile the game engine from the source code you will need to have access to Visual Studio You may also download a precompiled package by following the instructions on the Torque 3D GitHub repository... the internals of the Torque 3D game engine, and be inspired to try new things that they may not have thought of before What this book covers Chapter 1, TorqueScript: The Only Script You Need to Know, covers the scripting language of Torque 3D TorqueScript is used to define game objects and to create the rules of play This chapter teaches some important— and often lesser known – TorqueScript concepts... Networking, provides several examples of connecting Torque 3D to various external network services, and how to make Torque 3D respond to network requests This chapter also covers how to send event messages between a game s clients and server Chapter 10, Miscellaneous Gameplay Features, looks at the various parts of Torque 3D that help you expand on the gameplay rules that are already available, as well... www.it-ebooks.info Preface Torque 3D is a low cost, fully featured game engine that provides a time-tested foundation in multiplayer networking and a next generation graphics engine This game engine provides the TorqueScript scripting language to allow users to start building their games, and also full source code to the engine when users are serious about making the game engine their own Torque 3D comes with a... Graphics Evolved, introduces Torque 3D s graphics pipeline through the creation of custom-coded materials and postFx This includes taking advantage of Torque 3D s advanced lighting model This chapter also covers using the built-in video recording features of Torque 3D Chapter 6, Make That Sound Happen, is where we discover the various methods of playing sound effects in Torque 3D and when to use them This... chapter make use of Torque 3D s built-in GUI editor to arrange controls, as well as TorqueScript to define how the controls operate Chapter 4, Camera and Mouse Controls, explores the various camera types available in Torque 3D, and their control by the user and the game Beyond controlling the in -game camera, this chapter also covers using the mouse to manipulate objects within a game Chapter 5, Your . www.it-ebooks.info Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook Over 80 practical recipes and hidden gems for getting the most out of the Torque 3D game engine David Wyand BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI www.it-ebooks.info Torque. educational institutions are using Torque 3D in their courses. Torque 3D Game Engine Cookbook is a practical reference guide to the latest version of the Torque 3D game engine, and takes the reader. range, and making use of Torque 3D s message producer/consumer system. What you need for this book Torque 3D Game Development Cookbook is useful for the majority of Torque 3D developers. Each chapter