Torque Game Engine (of Tribes 2) and Torque Shader Engine

[amk]

I am considering buying myself an indie licence for TGE, perhaps TSE later, from http://www.garagegames.com/, for purposes of writing games. The licence includes full source to the engine, and no limits on the number or nature of releases.

I do know what I am letting myself in for, which is partly why Torque attracts me - it is a complete games environment with excellent tools (plus support for free tools like QuArK and Blender) and a vibrant community. It is also why I am eventually going to decide not to do it

Torque also happens to have the features I want - huge outdoor environments with excellent terrain rendering and LOD on maps, and excellent Net code.

It doesn't seem to support moving brushes (e.g. doors) though, which is kind of odd.

The next most interesting engine I've come across is the Nebula Device, available under the Tcl/Tk Open Source licence suitable for commercial projects. However, it is not a complete framework, so lots of work required I've not found any Nebula-based frameworks yet.

Both Torque and Nebula have been used for AAA games, which is a big reassurance.

I've also looked at OGRE, Sylphis, Crystal Space, Cipher and probably others. Quake and Quake II (and Tenebrae) don't do outside scenes so well, and have the restrictive GPL licence.

I'd like to hear people's opinions on Torque, and any alternatives.

I'd particularly like to know what people think of the very unfinished Torque Shader Engine. I'm wondering how useful shaders would be on outdoor scenes, which may have very high overdraw (and will with what I have in mind...). I'd expect them only to be used on the highest LODs.

 

[Deecie]

I've been looking at it lately too, and while I know little to nothing about coding of any kind, it just boggles me how ridiculously good value the whole Torque package is. I mean, can you really go wrong for $100?

 

[DeanoC]

I've got a TGE and TSE license for my home code, great for making games rather than YATR (Yet another teapot renderer).

 

[Dexter]

I have been *really* considering spending $100 on Torque! I've been hacking away at several 3D engines with not much productivity as far as an end product, so I've been considering this engine. Can anyone tell me how it is to code / script? I haven't seen any sample code or such. Rather, to reword my saying, I'm a bit curious as to how extensive the engine is in a programming viewpoint.

 

[Khalin]

Personally i'm working and learning the trade with OGRE (www.ogre3d.org) and I like the flexibility. Mind you though its not a game engine per see but a general rendering engine with easily adaptable acces to external libraries. Its open source too. The only problem is it lacks decent artists on the team to showcase their proud project. So far however the engine has no problems with offset mapping, bump, specular, stencil additive or rendering BSP scenes.

Though it seems as if most optimization has to be done by the user..

 

[[maven]]

I've recently bought a license for Torque (not TSE, though which for my needs is far to incomplete and liable to change --- I will probably buy it at a more mature stage (even if it costs me $50 more)).

The script code is reasonable close to C++ but I haven't worked with it yet.
The code for the engine itself seems to be well written and structured. Also the source is not a huge bloated mess, but a manageable size and compiles out of "the box" (i.e. CVS) on both Windows and Linux.

A few things a dislike (or am unsure about):
- DirectX renderer (simply an OGL wrapper), most obvious reason to eventually buy TSE
- Terrain only seems to support a single (though repeating) 256x256 heightmap tile

Interestingly, the terrain engine is very (very) similar to what I did for Europa 1400 - The Guild (with the exception of the dynamic LOD --- my version is much coarser than Torque's), right down to the use of MMX code for mixing texture tiles...

Alltogether, $100 sounds like a lot, but you do really get a lot for that under very fair conditions.

 

[amk]

This looks to be a good engine database:

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/

Personally i'm working and learning the trade with OGRE (www.ogre3d.org) and I like the flexibility. Mind you though its not a game engine per se

I've heard good things about OGRE, but as you say it's not a complete framework, although there are OGRE based frameworks out there. Networking support is an issue in particular.

]- Terrain only seems to support a single (though repeating) 256x256 heightmap tile

IIRC TSE will support heightmaps of arbitrary size. Dunno about tiling. The terrain system is being rewritten entirely.

 

[DeanoC]

There are lots of user source patches to torque, worth hunting through the website for various bits and peices.

IIRC there some major overhauls of the terrain system...

 

[Johnny_Physics]

I've recently been brought in on a project that's using Torque and I've spent an unnecessary large amount of time digging through documentation and other resources just so I can start doing any relevant work.

The least appealing thing with Torque, if you ask me, is the documentation and the haphazard feel of the scripting - the latter feels like C mixed with a couple of aspects taken from Java and PHP.

But that's just my opinion as of now, it's clearly a potent engine and some of the stuff we've done with it is pretty cool.

 

[[maven]]

There are lots of user source patches to torque, worth hunting through the website for various bits and peices.

IIRC there some major overhauls of the terrain system...

Yes, but as far as I can see, they're only for an older version of Torque and the patch has vanished since.

So, I'm holding out for TSE to change this for the better...