Updated Mark Twain said, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” And so it was with Torque. They found a buyer and Torque 2D, Torque 3D, etc., (mostly) live on.

It looks like Torque has reached the end of the line — the company that owns TorquePowered, InstantAction, etc., shut it down and they are looking for a buyer. It doesn’t look good for anybody who wants to use Torque for games in the future.

If you’re doing mobile games you might want to check out Corona SDK — for the next week or so they’re offering 50% off to people who are switching from Torque.

Torque 2 Corona Sale

For iOS devices I think Corona beats iT2D anyway, so this is a great way to get in at a low price.

Hopefully someone will pick up Torque Game Builder and it will remain available in the future for desktop game development.

Looks like Tom and I *almost* have the problems whipped in the “deathray” chapter of the book. I have it working, but don’t want to post the fixes until after I understand *why* the changes work– because the problem isn’t just typos,it goes a little deeper than that.

The only things left we have to finish the book are making the ghosts explode and adding some sound.

After that the plan is to add a little more code to make the game more fun/challenging:

1. More than one ghost on screen at a time.
2. Ghosts come from both sides of the screen.
3. Score counts up when ghost is killed.

And maybe even a couple more things…we shall see.=:)

I finally got off the computer long enough to give Tom a shot at it a few days ago and he dove into the next chapter of 2D Game Building for Teens. In that chapter he gives Batty a raygun and can shoot the ghosts before they bump into him.

Well, that’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway. =:)

After fixing a few typos that Tom introduced I got the program to the point where I realized the code in that chapter wasn’t able to work right out of the book.

I’m going through it now and banging my head against things I just don’t know about in TorqueScript. I found one big problem fairly quickly, but the code still isn’t working, so now I’m down to looking at what should be happening rather than at the code itself.

Because I don’t even know if the logic is correct — I’d hate to be looking for typos when the problem is bigger than that.

More later when I have something positive to report…

Jay

Found a few problems in Chapter 7 of the book.

When you create the MeanBat object, step 9 on page 191 references a coin, but it means bat. But the big thing is they don’t tell you to check the Callback checkbox in the World Limits rollout.

Without that the enemy bats will just keep flying instead of turning around and wreaking havoc (which is what we want).

Code problems — the code on page 194 (and repeated on page 196) has three problems — all the same thing is wrong.

You’ll see reference to this in some of the lines:

%this.getRandom(%this.minSpeed, %this.maxSpeed)

That won’t work because there is no getRandom() function that’s part of the %this object — what should be there is this:

getRandom(%this.minSpeed, %this.maxSpeed)

That’s right, just knock off the %this. and you should be good. You’ll find that error in three different places in the code.

Also on those pages you’ll see a couple “case” statements, like this:

case "left"

You need to add a colon to the end of that:

case "left":

Do the same thing for the case “right” statement.

Tom and I are posting problems and fixes to the code in this book as we come across them, but if we miss something, please leave a comment and let us know — we’ll add it to the list so people just getting into the book won’t have as hard a time.

Thanks!

It’s a place where people who write in TorqueScript or who use Torque Game Builder, Torque 3D, etc., can find tutorial videos, code snippets, etc.

Of course the GG site itself has a community of people who can’t be beat, so why TorqueNation? Because it’s good to be the king.

I mean, so there’s a place my son and I can post things about Torque and I don’t have to worry about whether it’s in the right spot, etc. Oh, and so I can try and monetize my work with Torque.

How’s that for being up-front and honest? =:)

Anyway, I hope as this site grows you will find information that will help you develop your own games using the Torque products.