The Year Long Cycle and IGC

A number of projects that came out of last year's biz-dev cycle are now coming together, interestingly enough, at the same time – hey it's IGC season. In fact some of the projects will celebrate their one year anniversary since inception with a release party (what better way? :).

Others, like Constructor, have just passed the one year development mark (since Synapse Gaming's involvement), and are looking fantastic.

In fact one of the bigger projects here at Synapse Gaming just wrapped up and I'm very glad to see this thing finally going out the door. The project itself was not long, just on a rather accelerated development cycle, and a lot of energy and effort went into it. It'll be interesting to see the software in the wild, and to see the crazy things people will do with it. An official product announcement will be made very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Work doesn't slow down though, not with IGC on the horizon. There are always other projects to take the front-and-center, and in this case those are also mostly complete and heading into the home stretch. IGC will be very interesting, we should have more products this year than tech demos in the past. But we'll see what happens between now and October.

And what about Constructor? Constructor just hit beta 7, which is nearly feature complete, and the response from our beta testers has been very encouraging (that's an understatement :). With the impressive features and near completeness (what an odd word) of the project I'm hoping Constructor is one of our stops on the road to IGC, but obviously that is just my hope, and not a promise.

Two months to go...

-John Kabus

GI10H - Extreme Kork Paintball!

My GID team and I (two brothers Alex and Ross) were bored waiting for the next GID, so we got together for a mini-GID or GI10H - a game-in-10-hours. This time around we made the theme "paintball", and our game features everyone's favorite orc; Kork.



Our GID rules were simple:

-Start with a stock Torque Lighting Kit (TLK)
-No code changes allowed other than applying paint to DTS objects
-Ross and I mixed up our roles a bit (Ross worked on scripting and GUI, and I worked on modeling and DTS painting)
-Alex worked on interior and texture creation
-And we only had 10 hours to complete the game



This GID was a blast and the game is awesome to play. Everything apart from the DTS painting is stock TLK with some very creative use of TLK features by Ross (all in script), and even with switching roles we pulled it off in only 10 hours.




GI10H - Extreme Kork Paintball Video (10M)

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

Latest Batch of TLK Resources Available

A new group of Torque resources were just approved on the GarageGames site including a bunch of new TLK resources.


Torque Lighting Kit - Scene Exposure and Filter Control

Provided by Synapse Gaming this resource allows exposure/gamma control over any area of the Torque window. The gamma can be controlled by both floating point value and texture overlay, which is stretched over the gamma controlled area. The same mechanism also allows filtering the screen area by the floating point and texture color.


Coming soon: TLK CG Gamma Control

The CG Gamma Control being developed by the TLK community will provide similar features to the Synapse Gaming TLK Scene Exposure Control in a CG post-processing filter.


TLK CG Water + DRL

This resource makes adding the CG Water and DRL 2.0 resources easier than ever by combining them into one set of source files and instructions.

(image from Code Name: Monster Island)

Along with TLK private resources there are some awesome new Torque resources (available for both TGE and TLK) designed for use with TLK. Here are a few that caught my attention:

Updated Object Selection (with TLK bonus)

fxShapeReplicator: Up to 16 random shapes

fxShapeReplicator (Square Area Enhancement)

8 Terrain Textures for TGE/TLK 1.4


It's always cool to see the enhancements others are working on. Awesome job TLK community!

-John

Synapse Gaming Site Update

Ahhh... I made a final pass on the Synapse Gaming site this week – doing a bit of needed reorganization and a few copy/bug fixes.

Along with reorganizing the menu flow, adding support for Safari, and a more consistent layout across browsers, I resolved an issue with browsers applying old cached stylesheets to the site.


The Torque Lighting Kit page was also updated with downloads to the TLK Shaman demos:



-John

Wow it's been a month

Wow it's been a month since I last posted – I can't believe how the time flies. We've been so insanely busy here it feels like GDC was only last week.

April is always a killer month (killer bad, not killer good), with taxes, both my wife's birthday and mine, and what seems like an unusual number of new products and contracts that always flood in around this time. To complicate the mix I attended GDC this year, then followed it up with a trip out to Eugene to talk shop with the GG guys, and also have a major project finishing up in a few weeks with a second hot on its heels.

So to put it mildly... my brain hurts...

Why is this time of year so busy? Every year March through May (but mainly April) seems to bring in enough projects for the year (or more) and kick off another round of explosive growth. Maybe it's the industry conferences this time of year, or project alignment for the holiday season – I don't know, but it's definitely a good time of year.


Torque Lighting Kit

Due to popular request we've added Visual Studio 2005 Express support to the Torque Lighting Kit. A new download link was added to the VC2005 TDN article outlining how to use VC2005 with Torque.

Torque Lighting Kit users need to download the TLK update instead of the TGE update, and follow the existing directions outlined in the article.

I created a feedback thread in the TLK private forums, so if you have any questions or comments pop over and let me know.



Bah, it's four in the morning, and at this point I've exceeded my ability to think – time for sleep...
or maybe a quick game of Guitar Hero... :)

-John