Its been one month since the initial test drive with the game engine and some big announcements have made their way forward. XNA was announced as well as Torque X, the Torque extension for XNA. Plus the XNA beta hits this week, August 30th for those that signed up.

What happened in a month's time? Well aside from Torque I jumped into C#, I have a class starting next week and wanted to make sure I had some hands on experience. I sat down with an old friend and jumped into what may have been a bit rough of a place to start, a Tic-Tac-Toe game. It works! That was a lot to take in but I am getting the hang of it. The game still needs more code, in debugging many cheats were found.

As for Torque I have been posting all my troubles in the garage games forum. It may be a strain of bad luck or my unfamiliarity with 3D modeling. My strength is really in level design but I wanted to expand it to environment object modeling to populate these levels. I tried TrueSpace 3.2 the free version without success, ran the demo of GameSpace to follow the video tutorials but the export plug-in did not work as it is the "Lite" version. I have almost gotten it to work in Blender; I even rolled back after updating to newest version due to known issues in the latest build with the exporter. I just got a response stating that a texture is required to export and everything has to be done to a fine precision.

So that brings me to structure with QuArK. Things seem to be working here. I can get the meat of the level done and then return to Blender to add the details. I am still reading tutorials at this point and making progress. The texture is not taking yet but it shouldn't be long as I have an idea as to what went wrong.