Gross. I hit a major major snag and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it. For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to see if I can buy an older version of 3D Studio Max to no avail. To make matters worse, I tried installing the latest demo on a rendering machine I’m borrowing(until I get my good machine up and running) and it says I don’t have the right kind of processor. It looks like I’m going to have to move to different modeling software to do all of my tests after all.

As far as the engine I’ve been working on goes. I installed some additional code to Torque Game Engine Advance(version 1.8.1) to allow me to use a better camera. After looking at what a bunch of other people have been doing, I feel pretty good about what I can and maybe can’t do with Dig. I have a lot more experimenting to do before I have something solid to show. And I also need a 100% functional test machine… and not something running Windows 7 Beta/RC1.

The browser based plugin I was working on hit another snag as I need to now come up with additional monies in order to afford the version of Visual Studio to easily create the DLLs I need to create. I guess I’m going to have to sell off a few more of the games and stuff I’ve collected over the years to get my money up… or maybe I should stop buying books (I picked up 6 books this weekend at various flea markets) ’cause every little but counts.

I have a lot of Torquing to do this weekend. That and trying to juggle mother’s day, I have my work cut out for me. I’m going to try my best to post something Monday as an update on progress.

I have GOT to get back in the swing of things.

The past few years/weeks/months(depending on when you think I got started) I’ve been tryign to rip out the controls for Torque to allow for a camera completely separate from the player object. After finding “Advance Camera for Torque” I tried applyign that along with another technique I saw to add a second player. It was very glitchy. So then I attempted to control an AI character using Torquescript exclusively. That worked, but had a few bugs that I couldn’t deal with.

So now I’m trying again. I think I’m going to have to unwrap the code for the player object/datablock and write my own. Which bothers me because I haven’t really touched raw C++ in a very very long time. I’ve moved on to C# which is similar… but I don’t know about similar enough that I won’t run into issues. Maybe I should pick up a new C++ book and pretend I’m starting over.