Roaming Gamer

Posts Tagged ‘tstk’

Although I have been quiet for some time, at least with regards to game development work, I have not been idle. Over the past six months (or so) I’ve been spinning on various projects.

Spinning being the operative word.

Among these projects were (in no particular order):

• TSTK – Torque Script Tool Kit – A conglomerate release of many scripts I’ve written (some written by others) to make scripting tasks easier under all of the Torque engines.
• TGB SSK – Super Starter Kit (for TGB) – A free drop-in kit than can be used with TGB 1.74 to accelerate game(++) development. There is a lot more to be said about this, but there is not point in my repeating the details which can be found on the Wiki.
• A Wiki – In addition to using WordPress for my main site, I’ve added a standard Wiki. I added this because I wanted to produce documents which were simpler to format and ‘control’. WordPress is great for Blogs and short articles, but tutorials and documentation work better under a Wiki.
• MAGS – A couple of years ago (at least) I dreamt of creating a sub-site containing all kinds of tutorials for making games with the Torque Game Engines (TGB, TGE, T3D, and eventually T2D). I’ve gone beyond dreaming and am almost ready to release the first of these tutorials. This is what I’m spending most of my time on now. I am calling this the “Make A Game Series” and will be dividing it between TGB, TGE, T3D, and T2D (when it is released). In this series I take a single game idea or generic variant of a game genre and walk through the steps to make the game using one of the aforementioned engines. I’m starting with TGB and then I’ll work out to T3D, etc.
• Games - I’ve actually written (read as partially completed) several games in this time. I’ll start releasing some finished games as time allows, but my main focus is on MAGS, so don’t hold your breath.

Let’s see what else? I’ve still go the day job taking up an inordinate amount of time (sigh… where are those big bags of money), and life itself takes time, oh and I’ve been playing squash recently… and that is about it for this update.

So, till next time. I wish you all the best in your game dev(++) endeavors.

- edo out!

I went ahead and opened/created/installed a Wiki for maintaining documentation on my site.

I’m currently documenting my second major for-free product, namely the TGB Super Starter Kit (SSK).  There is a lot of work yet to do in terms of releasing, organizing, and documenting, but you can download, install, and try the kit now.  Simply go to the SSK page and follow the directions you will find there.

After I finish up the SSK release and documentation I will move the TSTK and other lesser-product documentation over to the Wiki.  I will continue to provide support for my book here, but using a Wiki for documentation, tutorials, etc is far superior to using the WordPress ‘Pages’ mechanism.

Today, I am (officially) releasing the Torque Script Took Kit (TSTK). This kit is a collection of utility scripts (and other stuff) that I have written (and continuously improved) over the years.

I strongly encourage all Torque engine users to download this kit and to become familiar with it. I guarantee that this kit will save you hours of coding and debugging, and that it will help you write better scripints of your own.

I provide basic documentation on the kit here. However, at this time, I do not have a complete users guide for the kit. Instead, you’ll need to take a look at the kit and try some things out on your own. Don’t worry though, most of the scripts are self-explanatory in name and signature. Also, I will occasionally blog about features of the kit and give examples. To that end, let’s get the ball rolling. Let me show you a couple of my favorite TSTK features.

My Favorite TSTK Features

There are some features in TSTK that I use nearly every day, in fact I can hardly imagine writing code without them. I think, after seeing the examples below, that you will agree and start using them too.

SimSet::forEach

This first script allows you to execute any method or function on every object in a SimSet. Typically, when when you want to call a method or function on the objects in a SimSet, you write code like this: