Torque Game Engine Documentation
TGE Version 1.5.2

Torque Engine Upgrade Guide

Introduction

Torque is a living, changing body of code. Things become superceded, outdated, deprecated. As a developer, you are probably interested in keeping up to date with the latest features in Torque - which means you have to upgrade your code to work with changes to the engine.

With such a large project as Torque, it is difficult to make sure that you're fully up to synch with a changing target. This section of the documentation describes changes to the engine in each version, along with what you need to do to get your code up to date, so that everything works together smoothly.

Note:: For a more comprehensive and fresher list of changes, see http://www.garagegames.com/docs/torque.sdk/changelist/.

Changes in Torque HEAD

Changes to Core...

Removed unused TagDictionary class (core/tagDictionary.*).

Changes to DGL...

Torque now supports loading textures up to 2048x2048! This is controlled by c_maxMipLevels in GBitmap, if you want/need higher res textures.

Changes to Net...

writePacketData() now returns void, as nothing was ever using the return value (nor was the return value being set). You will need to change all of your writePacketData() functions to return void.

Removed setDirtyState because it is no longer needed.

Changes to Game...

Removed CollisionTimeout from GameBase, as it is reimplemented in ShapeBase.

Removed mLastDelta from GameBase, as it was unused and confusing.

Changes to GUI...

Removed bitmapBase from GuiProfile class as it is never used.

Changes to Console...

ConsoleMethod() has been updated to automatically provide a reference to the current object of the right type. Formerly, manual casting was required; now via a template, the cast is automatically performed, with error checking in a debug build. Code which performs the manual task has not been entirely removed from the system; however, it will be in coming updates. All Con::addCommand() calls have been expunged. The preferred method is now the ConsoleMethod/ConsoleFunction macros.

Added three macros to help define friend relationships with console subroutines: friend_ConsoleStaticMethod( className, returnType, name), friend_ConsoleMethod( className, returnType, name), friend_ConsoleFunction( returnType, name). Use these instead of defining friendship with a munged name!

Grouping has been added to the scripting engine, via the ConsoleFunctionGroupBegin(groupName, usage), ConsoleFunctionGroupEnd(groupName), ConsoleMethodGroupBegin(className, groupName, usage), ConsoleMethodGroupEnd(className, groupName) macros. This is implemented via special field type. Release builds have grouping information removed.

Usage strings are not included in release builds.

Console auto-documentation has been greatly expanded.
See also:
Console Auto-Documentation
In Dictionary::getVariable(), added a check for accessing undefined variables. The global preference variable $Con::warnUndefinedVariables turns this off or on. This is very handy for checking that your script code is typo free, and tracking down subtle errors.

Added ConsoleLogger, a script-accessible class "designed to be used as a console consumer and log the data it receives to a file." This is used by the console autodoc support scripts to dump the documentation to a file.