Engine Details
| Torque Game Engine |
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| The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is a fully featured AAA game engine with award winning multi-player network code, seamless indoor/outdoor rendering engines, state of the art skeletal animation, drag and drop GUI creation, a built in world editor, and a C-like scripting language. Unlike most commercial game engines, as part of the low cost license, you receive all C++ source code to the engine, so you can make any additions you need for your game. |
| Author |
GarageGames |
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| Graphics API |
OpenGL, DirectX |
Operating Systems |
Windows, Linux, MacOS |
| Programming Language |
C/C++ |
Status |
Productive/Stable |
| Documentation |
Yes |
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| Features |
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General Features |
Object-Oriented Design, Save/Load System, Other:
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Multi-Platform and a journaling and Integrated hierarchical profiler |
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Efficient memory manager with extensive debugging features; Resource Manager and a File/Stream IO |
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Unicode international strings support |
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Scripting |
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C++ like syntax |
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Local and Remote Debugging |
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Bytecode-compiled |
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Built-in Editors |
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World Editor allows you to manage terrain generation and object placement as well as Construct, place, size, scale and rotate objects visually |
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Terrain Editor, Terrain Generator, and GUI Editor. |
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Physics |
Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
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Built-in physics engine |
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Lighting |
Per-vertex, Lightmapping:
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Animated lightmaps |
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Control lighting via World Editor |
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Vertex and multi-pass lighting |
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Shadows |
Projected planar, Shadow Volume:
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Projected object shadows (clipped against the environment) |
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Texturing |
Basic, Multi-texturing, Mipmapping:
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Multi-pass texturing with detail and decal support |
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Scene Management |
Portals, Occlusion Culling, LOD:
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Portal based interiors with seamless integration with the terrain engine. Buildings can be instanced, placed, manipulated and scaled with the world editor |
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Spatial Database |
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Quark and WorldCraft converter and lighting |
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Support for Cartography Shop and almost all .map-compatible brush editors |
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Animation |
Inverse Kinematics, Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending:
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Supports, bone, mesh, texture bitmap, texture coor. and visibilty animation |
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Mesh vertex deformation and multi-bone mesh skeletal animation |
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Simple interface to multi-sequence animation manager |
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Meshes |
Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive, Tessellation:
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Continuous level of detail based on a progressive mesh algorithm |
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Damage and collision detail level |
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Supports Milkshape, 3DStudio Max, and Blender plug-ins, including an exporter and helper objects |
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Special Effects |
Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Sky, Water, Decals, Fog:
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Integrated particle system with scripting engine. |
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Supports texture and scale animation as well as particle generators which can emit multiple particle types at once |
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Layered volumetric fog |
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A water engine that supports dynamic waves and multi-pass wave crest and shoreline textures |
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Terrain |
Rendering, CLOD:
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Continuous, seemless, LOD mesh generation and Aggregated tile mip-mapping |
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Dynamically generated blend tiles and Altitude based fog banks |
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Seamless integration with the interior engine |
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Networking System |
Client-Server:
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Award winning client/server architecture, which uses UDP and TCP |
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Bit level stream, message, and string packing |
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Uses the optimal Notified Delivery Protocol |
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Packet stream and Object ghost manager with partial object updates |
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Sound & Video |
2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
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SFX/Music driver using OpenAL |
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3D sound support; panning, volume, doppler, cones |
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Multi-channel prioritized SFX manager |
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Built-in Theora video codec playback |
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Artificial Intelligence |
Finite State Machines, Scripted:
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Highly customizable through TorqueScript |
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Rendering |
Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture, Fonts, GUI:
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True spherical distance fogging (for terrain, buildings) |
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Spherical distance clipping (for terrain, buildings) |
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| Features: |
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Ease of Use: |
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Support: |
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| Date Added |
Thu, 24 Jun 2004 |
Last Updated |
Mon, 18 Jun 2007 |
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There are currently 94 reviews for this engine
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| License Name |
Price |
Source Code |
Comments |
| Other/Custom |
$150.00 |
Yes |
Per programmer price. As long as your company has less than $250,000 in sales, you can publish your game anywhere, for any price without any royalties or further commitment to GarageGames. |
| Other/Custom |
$749.00 |
Yes |
For individuals, companies and government entities whose revenues are above $250,000 |
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Screenshots:
Member Reviews |
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NOTE: The ratings and reviews below reflect the opinions of their respective authors and as such, do not reflect the opinions of DevMaster.net or its staff.
The reviews are not moderated and some are completely inaccurate. Therefore, most reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. If you find any inaccurate or inappropriate reviews, let us know by stating in detail why you think the review should be removed and any links/documents that support your contention.
Complete Professional Game Engine SolutionPosted by:
ricko
at Aug 17, 2004 |
I am a co-founder of GarageGames and one of the several in house developers who upgrade and maintain the Torque Game Engine.
Over the years the Torque has proven to be a very flexible code base producing a wide variety of both commercial and indie games -- everything from action arcade to first person shooters. The engine was originally developed for Dynamix/Vivendi-Universal to power the award winning multi-player game Tribes2. Dynamix also used the Torque to create the original Tribes, Starsiege, FrontPage Sports: Skiing and Kings Quest 9. Since GarageGames acquired exclusive rights to the Torque code base a number of fun and successful indie titles have shipped including MarbleBlast, Orbz, ThinkTanks, Lore, Tennis Critters, Legends, Produce Panic and many others.
Torque is a complete game solution not just another rendering engine. Rendering engines are easy, you do one thing and you do it well. It starts getting challenging when you support multiple platforms (mac/pc/linux/others TBA), multi-player (2-256+ players), a master server, physics, scripting, resource management, rendering, particles, GUI, terrain, interiors, meshes, multi-track animation, LOD, skies, water, fog, lens flares, sound, wysiwyg tools (GUI editing, world editing, terrain builder), etc, etc, all running smoothly and efficiently together... whew!
There are over 600 pages of getting started and scripting language documentation and thousands of pages of functional level code documentation. And yes there is still room for more documentation. Premier Press' #1 selling technical book "3D Game Programming All In One", written by Kenneth Finney, is an outstanding, 800+ page, step-by-step guide to developing games using the Torque and a great resource for those not as proficient at cruising source code.
Where the documentation leaves off our community begins. The Torque on-line community is composed of thousands of active professional to novice Torque owners generously sharing knowledge, code and resources. GarageGames also hosts the Independent Games Developers Conference (aka IGC), www.indiegamescon.com, each year. IGC is a great place to meet fellow indie developers, learn more about the Torque, and meet the guys at GarageGames as well as guest speakers/engineers from O'Reilly Publishing, GameHouse, nVidia, ATI, Apple and others.
Join Us! |
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| Excellent Community |
| I've been using Torque for about a month and I've learned alot. There's a great community behind it and there's plenty of potential in the engine to do great things! |
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| The best all-around engine. Period. |
Torque is evolving at an incredible rate. I have owned a license for a year and a half, and some incredible improvments have been made in that time.
They have the best community I have ever seen for a game engine. Forums and an IRC channel have people with lots of Torque knowledge, and someone will almost always have an answer to your questions. Their documenation is decent, and it is also improving rapidly. There is even a published book about using Torque (highly recommended).
The toolset is growing fast, with lots of "content packs" surfacing. Some of these packs are community-made, and some are made by GarageGames. These packs include code enhacements (like lighting), models (buildings, vehicles, etc), and even genre templates (RTS).
The mentality from the hard-working geniuses at GG seems to be to "support the indies." They walk the extra mile to ensure cross-platform compatibility and to endorse tools that are cross-platform where possible. They want everyone to be able to play. They also look at what is often requested in the forums and direct their efforts toward meeting the requests. Their shader engine and RTS pack are fine examples of this.
The features really are amazing, and you can make a very pretty game, even without the newest shaders. That mostly depends on your artist. If you really want the shaders, GG also offers the Torqe Shader Engine (base on the Torque, but a separate license for $300).
The only downside I can think of is the learning curve. It takes some time to get used to how things work in Torque. The benefit of that drawback is the engine is extremely expansive. The sky is _not_ the limit here... it is closer to saturn or jupiter.
The amount of benefits you get for $100 is astounding. If you are serious about making games, you _must_ take a closer look at Torque. It is awesome. |
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| The Price Is Right! |
Im going on my 4th or 5th month of development with Torque. Out of all the low budget and free game engines Ive demoed or tried, Torque surpasses them with ease.
Its not the most user friendly engine in the world. Extensive documentation exists, it is scattered throughout forums and the web, and not particularly well organized. Ive found that the GUI documentation is particularly difficult to ferret out.
The Garage Games website banners an upcoming documentation release for an additional fee. Im of the opinion that if you produce a product, have the good manners to supply the documentation to use it with the initial purchase!
Again... Torque comes with minimal docs that do adequately explain how to set it up and get going, and cover some of the basic features, but SOOOO much is completely undocumented. I suppose that is a roundabout credit to the depth and potential of the engine.
There is an active community. Code snippets galore are available if you want to go hunting for them.
The sock engine comes ready to go with some demo games. If you have no programming knowledge, you could still jump right in and start moding off of these. To do an actual original game, some coder expertise is going to be required.
The world editor is a bit quirky and not the most intuitive world editor Ive used. But it gets the job done, and beats the hell out of coding content in manually.
Graphics importers exist for a good sampling of 3d programs.
All-in-all if you have a clue about what youre doing, its a great engine for the price. If you have $250k or more to blow on something a little more intuitive and organized... go for it!
I wanted to add that the powers that be at Garage Games recently updated the docs and are coming out with a new and easier to use installer.
Thanx for listening to the peanut gallery guys!
I would also like to revise my earlier statement that Torque comes with a minimum of docs. I think Ive read on the forum that there are somewhere in the range of 1600 pages of official docs and additional forum documentation. The trouble with the documentation is more "finding" what you need to know in a timely manner. For example, To a new Torque Developer, discovering what the 4 little numbers in the Sun object editor mean - becomes a research project.
I still think its a great game engine though, and look forward to making some great games with it! |
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| Powerful Tool |
I have been participating in the Garage Games community for just over a year now and have a couple of "spare time" projects brewing. (who has spare time?)
In that time I've been able to get a very solid feel for the capabilities of the engine and also the Garage Games community which supports it.
The community is excellent. While the learning curve is steep, help is available. Ken Finney also wrote "3D Game Programming All in One" which is a greate resource on using Torque.
The engine itself shows its Tribes 2 heritage while also evolving with the times.
Strengths: the multi-player networking support is absolutely world class, outdoor scene rendering capability is strong (check out the skies in the demo) and vehicle support - both ground and air based - comes built into the engine. And let's not forget multi-platform support which opens markets for independant developers.
Weaknesses: interiors, although rendered well, are not the engine's forte. There are some minor lighting anomolies (which most gamers never notice) and also weird default bounding behaviour when a character who is holding an object bumps against walls. (the player stops but the object protrudes through the wall) If your levels are largely outdoor based and the action moves in and out of buildings you will find the interior support effective.
This is a very powerful platform for most 3D game development purposes. |
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| Nice Engine |
| I've been a Torque user from the very beginning and with the great support from the community and GarageGames anyone can make a game. The tools are pretty easy and straightforward to use, and even if you have no programming ability you can always mod the sample game that comes with the engine. This is definately deserves it's due as many people at GG worked hard to bring this to the world. |
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| Torque Game Engine |
For the price it cannot be beat. A true commercial game engine used in published titles for $100. Awesome community support.
The code is under development from a large group of developers, adding new features and improvements constantly. With the license purchase the source code is all included.
Excellent book on Torque development available. Many online resources. |
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Torque is very impressivePosted by:
Dig
at Sep 9, 2004 |
To be honest, its not easy to use, but thats because it has so many features, and you get the full source code to the engine.
For $100 there are very few engines that can compete with Torque, it is consatntly upgraded and has a fantastic world editor, GUI editor and straightforward scripting language.
Better yet there is a huge, supportive community. I used to use a different system (following guidelines and not mentioning it) where people regularly got flamed for asking for help, despite the 'community' being an advertised feature of the engine. With GarageGames there is a community of people genuinly interested in making games and supporting independent developers, this makes it easy to ask for and find help on any project.
I've made and released a game using Torque, no commercial success, but fun and playable nonetheless. I used it to teach myself the Torque engine, and it took about 3 months from not knowing anything at all about it!
Besides Torque is one of the few affordable engines that power commercial successes (Tribes 2 most notably, but look at the other Torque Games for sale at GarageGames and you'll see commercial quality is a reality)
Can't wait to have the free time to get back into game development :)
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| Torque's pipeline issues |
Torque, while powerful for the price, has serious pipeline issues they need to address before adding their 'shader engine'.
The art pipeline for skeletal characters is horrendously convoluted and difficult, and the resulting characters are needlessly heavy on the system.
the LOD is a pain to set up.
The level editor is dated and difficult, twitchy in the extreme, also having some serious function issues.
For a starting project with patient artists and a good programmer, however, it's a good starting kit.
What it does have is good network code and a stable platform.
I'd actually recommend TV3d over this one for features, or Blitzbasic if you want more ease of use. |
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| be realistic |
Did you hear about someone by himself or with small team made an fps game and this game made big sales?i did not, but i heard about a mod did (counterstrike).
so making a complete game from scratch Using an engine (or making your own engine but in my opinion that will be impossible to make a decent engine and game by yourself unless you are immortal,because this will take a very very long time) will be very hard.
but if you use torque it will be like modding a game but with some extra features like the full source code which come with the engine so you can modify the core engine(like adding some extra lighting enhancments,adding physics suitable for your game but this for experts only the engine will give you all the tools and support for making your game through the powerfull scripting language without modifing the core engine) also you can publish your game and sell it with garagegames or any publisher.
You will find torque at first is hard -like any big project- but when you learn how to learn it you will find that it is the easiest engine ever which will simplify game making process. |
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| Great Indie Engine |
| I havent gotten too deep into the engine but the community is great and the support is excellent. You can get a response on almost any question asked in the community. They are experienced and if you have a dedication and patience to learning the engine you have many mentors in the community. It is a learning curve but if you are serious about doing an indie game you cant go wrong with this engine as long as you have the dedication. Not for whiners. |
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| BUY OR DIE |
This is the greatest game engine i have ever come across. It is so easy to use, and it has so many great features. I have found no glitches at all whatsoever, and the terrain is easy to shape and create. I recommend this for all beginning game developers. Whether you beieve it or not, I am only eleven years old and I'm using it without a problem.
Oh yeah. Curik, there is pathfinding. There ar a lot of tutorials that teach how to make bots move around like madmen. |
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| torqueEngine v1.3 |
I have only been using torque since Jan '05. During that time I have learned quite a bit about the engine and its use. Most people have summarized the engine strengths and weaknesses pretty well. I would like to add a bonus that many people overlook. The source code for the engine is impressive. After running dOxygen over it to get a map of the classes and such, I have found that it has really helped develop my c++ skills and understanding. That is a plus for anyone seeking to improve their programming skills. The $100 price tag seems very cheap even if it just involved getting to browse the source. It almost seems too cheap considering all that this engine can do, and the framework they left intact for you to adapt to your needs.
I have also spent time with other engines on the market and will say that there are some nice engine frameworks out there. While some engines are easier to use, and others have more eye candy, the torque engine has one of the most adaptable and effective code bases you will find. The only down side is that this professional strength engine requires a professional strength skill set in order to make it shine. Entry level Indies should be warned that if you develop with Torque your skills will have to improve if you want to make any radical engine mods. Be prepared to learn and grow!
B-- |
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| A great, affordable engine. |
I'm an amateur programmer, trying to rise to become a professional game developer.
I have purchashed the TGE about 18 months ago, and tried adopting it, but didn't get very far the first time around. I was spoiled by my previous experience with the Unreal engine, for which I have made dozens of creations.
Although the Unreal Editor and Unrealscript are both very high-level and extremely easy to use, you cannot get the license or C++ source code unless you're a millionaire with money to spare (plus extra for each Linux and Mac). I have spent a couple of years with the Unreal engine, making free content, hoping that I may get noticed one day and land a job at a fancy game company, but there's just too much competition out there. So that was a dead end.
Recently I've gone back to the Torque engine and giving it another go. It's going to be a little more work than I'm used to, but if making my own video game means I have to get my hands dirty, then it'll all be worth it in the end.
It's great that TGE will run on Linux and Mac, as I've used Linux for the past 6 years, and I'd love to see more great games for it, and Mac as well.
Being an open source programmer for the past 4 years, I love the fact that many of the supporting/suggested/recommended tools for developing content for TGE are open source programs. I'd imagine that in-depth programs like Quark and Blender can only be appreciated on a level such as mine, by open source programmers themselves.
If there's any paragraph worth reading in this review, it would be this one. For the price of the TGE, you are getting a lot more out of it than what you pay for (and that is an understatement). The Torque Game Engine has all the features I am looking for in an engine, and what seems to be a great community and environment to develop my first game in. |
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| Lots of value here |
For only $100 you get a lot, and there is a great BOOK available to get you started!
Others say they are easy but you are really on you own, but this one has real docs out there. :) |
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| A great engine |
I am new to game programming and development and have and have tried many other engines before i found torque but for just $100 it is the best one i have seen.
It has many features and plenty of documentation to show you how to use them. Anyone brand new to programming may find it difficult to get used to the C++ like scripting, but that is what you would expect.
However, the best part of the engine is the community. The forums are a God send, any problem you have will probably be able to be fixed by somone there, as long as you have taken the effort to try yourself (their not their to make your game!). Also, the creators of the Torque engine and many of its associates (people who have contibuted to the community a lot) are there and they are the best source of information you could need.
To conclude Torque is a high class AAA engine at a very low price, what more can you want? :D |
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| A professional engine for professional results |
I've been using this engine for a good number of years now, since realising that I'd rather be writing games than writing engines.
The fact of the matter is that there are *very few* game engines out there capable of pulling off professional quality games. Most are license based engines that cost in the high hundreds of thousands to license.
Torque is a professional engine, written by professional developers for professional games. The only limit with torque, is your own ability.
With that level of power of course comes a price. This isnt a point-and-click engine, it isnt an engine that wont require commitment. But given the level of support, the amazing amount of information available and the truly supportive community, there simply isnt any comparable competition.
Forget rendering gimmicks, if you want to make really great GAMES, then torque is your answer.
If you really *must* have render tricks, get the TSE, as they are based on the same concepts and you will be familiar in no time.
I teach game development and we use Torque and soon TSE for our classes as an example of a commercial grade game engine and I dont think any other engine offers the same level of comprehensive functionality.
.Zoom. |
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| The best engine at this price |
Bar none, there is no engine out there that matches the quality and feature set that Torque provides for this price. Sure you could purchase one of those "other" commercial engines and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the end of day, you'll have a few more features and an empty wallet.
This AAA engine is *the* choice for the indie developer who wants to empower their team with the best out there.
Features:
Torque features one of the best outdoor rendering engines out there but not only that, it renders bsp interiors and provides a seamless environment between the two. With it's built in editors there's no need for your team to write level editors, map editors, and other goodies from scratch. Torque brings you all the features you expect from a 3D engine and puts it together in a great package that any team can be proud of using without hurting your pocketbook.
Ease of Use:
For a developer just getting into games, the Torque Scripting Language is easy to learn and quick to pick up and for the most part you can practically do everything with. For the seasoned C++ developer you can dig in and add new features or tweak existing ones. Well commented code, a good structured object model and compatibility with standard tools makes it extensible and a pleasure to work in.
Stability & Performance:
With a rock-solid engine, Torque delivers and never stutters in that delivery. Even on older hardware, graphics are zippy and games you build with it are stable and reliable. Torques network performance engine cannot be matched and delivers 64 user games without raising a sweat. With the right infrastructure, 128 player games just plain works.
Support:
The Torque community is out there and live. Hundreds of new messages posted each day with responses from engine owners, the creators, and an elite group called Associates will help you, guide you, and get the answers for you. There is no community out there like this that responds to what you need. |
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| Best Game Engine |
Hey there! I gotta say, this is one of the best engines I've ever used. This is a pretty good engine and is fairly easy to use. It's nice for someone like me who is just a kid and new to the gaming industry. I think Torque is a great engine and it's worth more than what it costs. It also can do a lot of porting from system to system. It supports Xbox, PC, Linux, Mac, PS2?, PSP, etc. Need I say more? It's a great game engine all around. It's worth every penny.
-Matt |
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| Incredible Price, Flexibility, and Performance |
| Although I, myself, am not a programmer, nor do I understand much scripting, I am fully aware that the Torque Game Engine is the most solid low cost engine available. The TGE is supported and documented in a much better way than anything else out there. The artistic side is unmatchable by anything with the exception of the Havok, Source, and Unreal game engines. With several upgrades and content packs that can be purchased to better prototype a game, you can't do anything as easily. The makers of the TGE (GarageGames) do everything short of making the game for you. They provide you with friendly forums, easy to comprehend documentation, and the tools you need to start making your own games today. |
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| Unparalleled Support and Incredible Network code |
The two things that stand out most about the Torque Game Engine are the strength of the community (and the support that it offers) and the incredible network code, not to be outdone in pretty much any other commercial engine (even the expensive ones).
You can make a big game or a small one with this engine. I am the sole programmer on my team and we are about to put out our first major release after only 6 months of development with a major distributor. The previous company I worked at had Torque as one of two final engine choices to create the sequel to one of the biggest RPGs of all time.
If you want to create a game, and you don't want to spend the dollars for Unreal or Source, there honestly is no choice but Torque. Everything else is just a rendering engine. |
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Great Engine, Great Documentation, Great community.Posted by:
Drew
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Torque is a great engine, hands down. With a small amount of additional coding, our development team had graphics, shadows, sounds, and game play to rival the cutting edge games of today. Our current project is turning out great, and with the wonderful net code, even with 64+ players in a particle and graphics heavy environment, the game almost never lags, even over a dial-up connection. The extinsive and detailed documentation and an awsome community are just icing on the cake. A++
- Drew |
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King of the hillPosted by:
eXoDuS
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I've been using the Torque for over 3 years and almost reaching the fourth one. I've been motivated to write this review because I saw that other "engine" on top, which ain't really an engine but a library with bindings for every language, geez, what kind of quality you expect from something like that?
Torque comes in with full access to the source code, and you don't create a project around it, you work tightly into the engine source, so you can modify it to do whatever you are trying to do without going into ugly hacks that work half the time and make your game explode.
I consider Torque very complete feature wise since it has everything you would want to. Sure other projects might have a better physics engine, or maybe better rendering, but summing up all of Torque's features, there's no engine that can compare to all of them at the same time, and not to mention that the Torque Shader Engine is almost finished and eliminates the 'other engines have better graphics' problem.
As for the ease of use, I wasn't sure how to rate it, for me it's really easy, since I'm confident with my programming and I've already been using it for years, but some people without programming experience expect to use it and consider it difficult. So I give it 4 stars, if you are an experienced programmer, you will have no problem getting the grasp of it, if you are not a programmer you might do some stuff with the easy to use scripting language and the documentation for it. Not to mention the site is full of resources written by community members (including me) to help you out getting some startup features done.
The support! Ahhhh, what could be better? Being an open source programmer myself and being able to see lots of development communities, I have yet to see one as supporting as GG's. Ask something on the forums, get a response within couple of hours or if you are lucky minutes! Get on IRC and get your questions solved asap or email GG and they will helpfully answer your questions (although technical questions better be asked on the forums).
That's all I have to say, lots of people are using the Torque Game Engine, it's just that not many have bothered to come back here and review it, once you enter the Garage you don't have time for visiting more game dev sites ;)
Regards,
-Xavier Amado |
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| The Best Indie Engine Around |
My company, Large Animal Games, has been using Torque for almost 2 years now and have been consistently blown away by both it's feature set and the community of developers it has. Our first Torque based game, RocketBowl, went on the market late last year, and won the Technical Excellence award at this years IGF. (You can check out the game here: http://www.largeanimal.com/games/deluxe/?id=54 ).
Torque is a big, full featured engine - not just a rendering engine, and it gets better all the time. The folks at GG really put their heart, and their considerable engineering expertise, into improving it all the time, which is great.
In my opinion, there is just no 3D engine at anywhere near the price of Torque that comes close to it's features and power. Definitely one to check out. |
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| Without peer |
Not everyone can use TGE. It is a complex, AAA engine with an extensive pallet of features. I can very easily understand how inexperienced developers just learning the basics of game programming, or developers who can't commit to fully immersing themselves in a project could have trouble with the complexities of the engine.
That said, for an individual or a team with a solid understanding of the basic principles of game development and the willingness to immerse themselves in the Garage Games community, Torque is an extremely powerful and fantastically robust engine. Augmenting this engine is the amazing Garage Games community, which provides more support, advice and camaraderie than any other development community Ive been a part of. Finally, the Torque engine and the Garage Games community are constantly evolving, exponentially increasing the value of an already very affordable product.
I work with Torque on a daily basis at Large Animal Games, I use it to teach 400-level game development classes at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and I am using Torque for a personal side-project as well. I recommend Torque to anyone who is serious about making games and I will continue to do so until I find a better game engine at the same price point, which I dont see happening very soon.
Long live Torque! |
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| Brilliant |
Just a brilliant engine to work with.... I learn more and more about game dev every day using it.
And the community is just amazing... their always willing to help you out. |
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| Artist's dream come true |
This engine does it all, transform animation, morph animation, skeletal blended animation, IK, rigid body physics that are actually networked, awesome networking in general, beautiful rendering, many games have already shipped on it, awesome pipeline, BSP/CSG operations, awesome community.....the amount of features you get are alone worth the price. This isn't an SDK, this is a complete GAME ENGINE.
Pretty much, if you haven't got this engine, GET IT NOW. It's a decision you won't regret. This is clearly the best engine on Devmaster. Clearly. :-)
Once I went Torque I never looked back! |
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| TGE --> The answer to your needs and wants... |
I've been a happy owner of the Torque Game Engine (TGE) since 2001. In that time, I have found that:
- It has everything I could need already:
-- an efficient networking engine,
-- a highly evolved 3D rendering pipeline,
-- 2D & 3D sound support,
-- ready-made GUI controls,
-- a plethora of utility code,
-- a scripting engine with a familiar and deep access to the engine core,
-- embedded content manipulation and placement tools,
-- tools and elements ready-made for demo creation,
-- built-in profiling and debugging tools (including cross network debugging),
-- full (and expandable) feature set of 'game elements',
-- much more...
- The engine is flexible, powerful, and tunable.
- The rabbit hole is deep, but you only need to go as far as you want and are comfortable. Out-of-the box, TGE is ready to make games. Very little if any C++ coding is needed to make your game. In other words, you can focus on content creation, scripting, and what not, because what you will need for many games is already there and it is stable.
- If a feature that your game needs is not already present in the engine, you can likely find it contributed in the community resources and if not, you can always roll-up the sleeves and jump into the engine code, which you get with the license.
- If you fear coding or just want some help from time to time, you're in luck. The Garage Games community is active, large, strong, skilled, friendly, and above all helpful. Both the engine and the community surrounding it are mature. This means there is help when you get stuck, there are resource when you need them, and you will not be alone. Personally, I'm encouraged and inspired daily by the community and its members.
- The GG staff is professional and helpful. They are truly dedicated to the success of the community. They get involved and stay involved. They ride a fine line between helping and innovating. I'm not sure how they find the time to do the many things they do, to include: answering forum posts, improving the engines (TGE, Torque Shader Engine, and Torque 2D), attending conferences, throwing the annual Indie Gaming Conference (IGC), staying versed in new technologies, forming alliances with other publishing venues, bringing the engines to new platforms( Windows, Linux, OSX, XBox, ...), bringing game related products to market (Tools, books, improved web-site, etc.), and on, and on, and on.
Could I go on? Yes, but by now I hope you've read a few things that will entice you. If you're on the cusp, please let me encourage you in this. The $100 dollars you spend on this engine will be money well spent. I promise you that.
-Ed Maurina |
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| Across the board, one of the best low-barrier engines out there... |
At only $100 to get in on full source, what more can you ask for? It has a great multiplatform runtime, with full cross platform networking, and some pretty advanced features. And we're just talking the base engine here, not the expansion stuff!
The collision system and basic physics engine is more than enough for most anything you'd want in an FPS engine, but it can obviously be used well beyond the FPS genre. Indoor and rolling outdoor support, skyboxes and large water bodies, lighting effects, particle systems, player characters and vehicular systems ready to go.. just cool.
And, you don't have to be a coder to use it. If you want to be a 'modder', this is a GREAT engine to start with. Rather than a retail product mod, you can own the results, and market your own game. A full scripting system controls the majority of the UI and game logic, and the tools support continues to grow daily/weekly. Win32 has certainly led the way, but Mac and Linux are catching up.
Plus, what other engines out there have such cheap terms for commercial licensing? The ability to 'move up' to a next-gen shader version when you want to? OR, maybe 3D isn't your thing, but 2D that can leverage todays GPU is? The GarageGames folks have you covered.
More than anything else, GG is a REAL company. It's not a massive open-source collaboration, nor a one-man show.
And the engine has shipped successful titles across all platforms, AND a few products have even been 'picked' for console development!
Hard to go wrong, at this price, and with all the features and support. |
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| King of the hill for a REASON! |
And that reason? It's simply the best all-around engine available:
Support: Rock-solid, both from the company and the user community. IRC, forums, a wide variety of user-written "how-tos". There's also an introductory book in print, and I understand the author is working on a more advanced volume as well.
Stability & Performance: This engine has been around for quite some time, so the bugs have pretty much been worked out. New code means new bugs, but the community has access to the source, so most bugs don't last long and you can either patch them up yourself or wait for the next dot release (1.4 is at RC1 as of this writing). And if you don't like their collision algorithm (or whatever), roll your own.
Ease of Use: Game development is not for the meak. Too many people think an engine will write their game for them. Ha! TGE gives you a steady foundation to build on.
Features: Graphics, sound, animation, NETWORKING, script, some physics, and a bit of AI. A complete package, if lacking a couple of the high-end bells and whistles (shader support and EAX are lacking for example). It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux out of the box, and I understand there's support for XBox porting for those of you with XBox developers license... I also believe they'll support the XBox 360 when it is released. But you have to already be an XBox developer, which Ain't Cheap.
Going back to the community support thing again, there are a number of community developed "resources" out there to improve the physics, AI, add movie support, scripting languages (python)... all kinds of goodies.
They've recently strapped a Google-box to their site so digging up what you need has become as simple as one could hope.
Licensing: At $100 to get source, it's hard to top. Prior to publishing, you can even play around with script/level editing/art/etc for free. The FPS demo is mod-able.
You aren't required to publish through GG, though many do. If you start making too much money ($250,000 annually), you're required to shell out an extra $495 for the unlimited-revenue license. I think we all hope for that kind of problem.
Upgrade Path: Just about everything you learn about torque applies to the Torque Shader Engine, which is a rewrite of the graphics pipeline to incorporate pixel and vertex shaders. You can also "side-grade" to Torque2D if that's your bag. |
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Commercial-Grade Engine for a Budget PricePosted by:
Coyote
at Jun 12, 2005 |
Torque has been proven in a number of games, including older, AAA-quality titles. While it's beginning to show its age a little now, it is being upgraded regularly and GarageGames now offers an early-adopter version of the next generation of Torque, the "Torque Shader Engine," which takes advantage of more modern hardware. They also offer "Torque 2D," a powerful 2D game engine that I haven't had a chance to explore.
Torque is far more robust and fully-featured than most game engines in the budget price range. Unlike most engines featured here, it is NOT just a 3D rendering package, but a fully-featured game engine. It includes a robust client-server multiplayer network layer, sound, collision, rigid-body physics, a UI system and built-in editor, a built-in "mission editor," character animation system, very attractive repeatable outdoor terrain system, a "Quake 3"-style interior system, portaled transitions between interior and exterior environments, particle systems and editors, and a powerful scripting system.
In addition, Torque provides access to the full source code for registered owners, allowing developers to customize the engine any way they want. Due to their popularity and community, Torque also features a relatively mature tools path / content pipeline supporting many popular products (MilkShape, 3DS Max, Blender, Lightwave, QuARK, etc.).
One of the few complaints I could really level at the engine is its complexity and difficulty to "get started." There are plenty of Tutorials (and even a book available) to help the aspiring Torque user, but it's simply too big and powerful of an engine to simply jump in and start creating games with. |
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| Torque - Total overrated engine |
Our team has tested many engines to decide which one we will use. Our experiences with Torque:
When you first get your hands on Torque, you will be frustrated. There's so much to deal with and so less documentation (in fact: there IS documentation but rather then providing those engine docs as one package to the community, GarageGames seem to prefer to let their users do the search). The C++ is not straight C++, you will often encounter parts of the engine that are a mix between C and C++. But if you don't want to customize Torque, then you will never haveto deal with the code directly. Torques' features are massive but also old. The latest update of Torque was the last and if you want to have new updates, GarageGames wants you to buy TorqueShader engine. While this engine seemsto be pretty nice, for that price you can get a better engine with a less restrictive license. The stability is good as well as the performance but beware of Windows Vista! The future of this engine is not as clear as it seems to be (speaking just of Torque now). The support of GarageGames is good, as long as we're not speaking of documentation.
Not really the way to go, unless TorqueShader engines shows off. And even then you might not want to pay the price. |
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| A let down... of sorts |
This engine looks great. Graphically it is very well done engine. Though I am not a coder (though I am learning), the source is well commented and nicely documented, but it is a monster, loads of files. Scripting language is very 'C/C++' like and very powerful. My biggest gripe about Torque is the lack or easy implimentation of doors. Yup that is right a AAA engine that doesn't seem to have doors working. Other users have modified code patches to fit with older versions of the source code to get doors working, but if you are new to coding and want an engine that is easy(ish) this is not one.
New info, that has changed my review. The Torque community is very friendly and help out those people who are stuck/puzzled, offering my solutions and suggestions. |
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| bloated, difficult to get in, bug-ridden |
I don't understand all the rave reviews.
I found the Torque engine to be a bloated and very difficult to get in. It's documentation could be really improved. When I tried it, I spent far more time trying to understand the engine's conmtrol flow and finding and fixing bugs than with actual game programming. Especially the editor is quirksome and likes to crash often.
It's maybe okay if what you want to write is just another FPS or a racing game - then you might get away with just modifying the examples without having to understand the whole control flow.
From the Torque engine I switched to Irrlicht, where I just found what I need, a simple slim fast C++ renderer with good documentation. |
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| As good as quake 3 engine... (allmost) |
Hello,
This engine is very good, stable, feature "rich". The support is nice too. Very helpful. But there is some funny thing about the engine aswell... it's rather OLD.
It has the look of quake3 powered titles on it. Nothing special anymore. Plain rendering of meshes and actors, particles etc etc etc..
Garagegames is fully into creating the TSE (torque shader engine) to it's final release. This TSE will be the pimped shiny new edition of TGE (torque game engine). It comes with loads of new nice bells and wistles, like all new engines have. This is good.. but....
I have a strange feeling about the way garagegames introduces the TSE. Licensees need to pay for it, to beta test it?!? very strange way of dealing with new features. I see the TSE as an long over due upgrade of the OLD torque engine. So it should be cheap or even free for current licensees to grab a copy of it, and have the license automaticly updraded to this new TSE as it's comes out of beta. New aspirant licensees should pay the full price, thats normal.
I hope GG will put the price down for the TSE for current licensees. Otherwise i'm afraid this engine is doomed to the gray old engines closet.
still the TGE is a good learning and usesfull engine, but as said before.. old by the looks and features nowadays. |
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| Pain and Suffering Await |
The whole experience of purchasing a license and trying to use Torque has been painful. I even bought the wonderful 'little' book "3D Game Programming All In One", by Ken Finney which is an outstanding book and breaks down the whole work flow in Torque, but does not cover the engine source code itself. That would require another whole book. Still, the book functions as a very good "mod" reference, and is the best thing the engine has going for it in terms of documentation. Outstanding job, on the part of the author. He really did his homework. But why should he have had to work so hard? And therein lies one of the problems.
There is little formally compiled documentation for the engine (no comprehensive user guide, hard copy or .pdf). The online manual that is available, is simply lacking. It works, but it simply is not enough. Other documentation exist (kind-of), but you have to hunt, and hunt all over the forums for anything useful. If you hunt, and use the forums, you will learn. It will not be easy.
For the most part, I have always felt like I was using someones hastily crafted, poorly documented tools, that you have to gingerly wade through to get any kind of understanding. Wait a minute! That is exactly what Torque is. A game engine in the grandest sense. Not a product or application. It was never designed with the thought that one day it would be released, and people would actually try to use it and take it beyond its humble FPS beginnings. And, that is where the problem lies.
If you have ever tried to reverse engineer some kludged software, or get someone else's code to work that was pretty much slammed together to meet a deadline then you will understand the frustration of using Torque. That's the reality of an old school production game engine. It's not meant to be pretty, it's just meant to work to meet the deadline. It was never meant to be the product.
Perhaps one day GargeGames will release an updated version that is more user friendly better documented. For now Torque is simply too painful to do anything more than carefully "Mod" the examples that came with it. For an experienced developer, it is a painful process. For a complete beginner, it is a nightmare.
BTW if the engine is so good, and easy to use then there would be a whole bunch of little cheesy games and crappy examples out and a whole lot more really average games, and a few cream of the crop games out. As it stands, there are only a few games out by this engine, and those are the extreme minority. This simply means a handful of people have what it takes to make it work and produce something of quality. That is sad. |
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| T2D Early Adopter: Pretty good, and good support |
OK, so this isnt a review for Torque Game Engine, but rather it's new 2D child, "T2D".
T2D is a 2D only version of it's parrent, and is being optimized towards that effect.
It is currently in early adopter, so there are rough areas, most notibly around performance.
However I have to definatly say that this company (GarageGames) makes a genuine effort to help the would-be developers make the most of their products.
Sure, they cant hold your hand, and honestly, the documentation needs improvement (they are working on this, but as it's not finished i do not take the "working on it" status into consideration when writing this review)
I am happy with my purchase of T2D, it IS in early adopter, but i am very happy with the community support, and reasonablly happy with the employee support (i wish i could have someone at my beck-and-call, but dont we all)
This company has made "real" games with their product in the past, and as such their knowlege in this area should not be discounted.
There are areas that can/should be improved, but like anything, this takes time. And I see them working towards these goals.
-Jason Swearingen
PS: i hope the admins of this site delete the "review" a few posts up who gives everything zero. That is totally unwarrented. (same with everyone who gives 5 across the board) |
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| No longer worth the money or effort |
When I first purchased the Torque game engine, I thought that it was going to be a great purchase. The engine had after all been used to write tribes 2. How wrong I was.
It took me over a year to get precisely nowhere with the engine.
The art pipeline is a nightmare to say the least.
The GG staff play favourites with people who have associate status.
They are too busy working on their own games to make any real improvements to the engine.
The $100 price tag may seem cheap, but it will cost you 1000 times that in learning curve, purchase of add on components. Things that should have come as standard (and do with most free engines out there) don't work properly. I'm talking stuff as basic as decent lighting!.
GG thankfully seem to be moving back into full time game development. I'm only sorry that they will most likely be using my money (as well as every other sucker that purchased TGE) to do it.
After struggling with this engine for a year. I truly feel conned.
Buy it at your peril. If further proof of this engines lack of potential is needed. Just look at the games released using it. The only successful ones are written by the GG team! |
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| good engine |
| I want to tell about artifical intellligent. I want to cusstommize the engine. The engine have to option: first/third persion view. With third persion view how can I change camera and how can add pathfinding in the game |
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| Excellent engine for the price |
I am an experienced programmer and architect, but new to games programming which I have always had an interest in since programming my own rubbish games on my ZX spectrum as a young lad.
I recently started experimenting with writing games on various platforms (including J2ME, which is painful) until a friend recommended T2D. Now we are both writing our own games and sharing tips and having a ball.
The engine is very well featured, the API fairly easy to understand, and the forums make up for the relatively poor documentation (as somebody who has written libraries and frameworks myself I understand the imperitive to add new features rather than write decent documentation for the existing features).
My only main gripe regarding the documentation is that GG do not make it available for download assuming everyone will be online, which is annoying for me because with a fulltime job, wife and 2 young kids, I do all of my game programming on the train commuting to and from work.
Still, I am very pleased with this engine, and can't believe the price for all the features. I did experiment with 2 other engines but I found Torque's my particular favourite.
To put this in perspective I am written a very simple game in a matter of weeks, (which looks awful as I am not an artist) but I am having fun adding various types of pathfinding and AI behaviours to my enemy bots. |
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| Big rewards for those who put in the "wrench time"! |
Torque's a great engine if you've got a good work ethic. That's what it comes down to. Everything in life is equivalent exchange. If you put in the "wrench time" you will be appropriately rewarded.
I haven't seen a single other game development tool in the same price range that's produced games as successful as the one's with Torque behind them.
Do you see any Blitz games on Xbox, PC, Mac, Linux, and other platforms? DarkBASIC games? Cipher games? Anything else other than custom engine games?
Simply put you don't see any other 3D games made by indie teams going as far as Torque games. That's what I use to measure a game development tool. I started out making PC games with DarkBASIC, then I switched over to Blitz3D which was a move up ... more published games were created with it and it was a more dynamic and stable tool. Aerial Antics used Blitz3D ... but now I'm using Torque because by comparison Blitz is limiting. Torque will only limit you if you haven't reached that level of the hierarchy. If you can't do what you want with Torque then back off to something easier until you get a handle on your skills or suck it up and break a sweat for once! |
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| Unbeatable Value |
I'm at the hobbyist level, and TGE has been my most well spent $100 ever.
I've got countless hours of enjoyment digging through the source, learning how a real game engine works, and will continue getting that enjoyment for a long time to come.
If I have had a problem, I can almost always find an answer or at least a point in the right direction by searching the forums / resources. My impression of people that complain about the lack of documentation / complexity are that if they struggle to search some forums they have more important skills to work on than trying to make a game. |
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Large feature set, good price but that's where it endsPosted by:
Xest
at Jul 15, 2006 |
Whilst it has a wide range of features most are not too great. Whilst some are fantastic, for example networking support others are abysmal. Torque's physics system is rather weak and for a lot of games you're going to need a rewrite, the graphics engine is extremely dated, TSE will resolve this but that's not out or near a useable state for most game types just yet.
The engine also isn't particularly easy to use, there are books available but they don't help too much. The problem is the engine is old and messy, it has far too much legacy code in and is in dire need of a clean-up, even the upcoming TSE unfortunately goes nowhere to resolve these problems.
Documentation is extremely lacking and the community is often slow responding or doesn't respond at all in a useful way to more advanced problems although basic problems are generally resolved ok, many parts of Torque just have no support whatsoever, particularly the RTS pack which was released with an absolutely tiny feature set and hasn't been improved since, it hasn't even been updated for the latest version of torque months on.
The main problem with Torque is that you need to be a very good programmer to do much with it and if you can do much with Torque, you can write your own cleaner, more modern engine in the time it takes to learn Torque's confusing and particularly tacky engine design. |
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| documentation sucks |
Hi,
I've been trying to get somewhere with Torque for a while, and although there are two books now by Finney (which are OK books) I still lack at least decent documentation.
The engine features are OK but the code framework is huge and really needs good documentation to get into.
Tutorials and helpful staff is good of course, but an in-depth documentation is what really is needed IMHO.
Also, the TorqueScript have serious drawbacks to other scripting languages. I'm experienced with Lingo in Macromedia Director and it has a lot of low-level support (i.e creating models, shaders, textures on the fly, and access to scene graph). Lingo also has a lot of helpful functions for rotatating, translating etc. In Torque you really need to learn your 3D math before using the math lib included.
/thomas |
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| Super poor quality documentation undermines this product |
I have had this SDK for 9 months.
The engine seems to have a lot of features but I will have to take garage games word for it because the documentation is so terrible I can not figure out how implement very much of anything. Some things that would be rudimentary and easy to figure out in Blitz, Ogre, etc are an enigma in Torque. Basically if you cant find the answer through their basic getting startred documentation you have to post to the forum. Unfortunately a lot of people may have asked the same question already so in some cases their is no interest in answering basic questions. I do get more frequent response than similar forums however given the dearth of serious documentation posting to forums just doesn't cut it. So much of the overall frustration that all the negative reviewers have posted would be 90% diffused if Garage Games just simply made standard/proper documentation. If they had done this part properly something that has taken me 2 weeks to figure out could have taken me half an hour. Sadly this has been pointed out to them for years. Also sadly they would probably have a lot more sales since more projects would be developed with their product.
One of the reasons I bought Torque is that the company stated you could create content in maya and export for torque. This is only partially true. If you want to create interiors i.e. architectural structures you can forget it. Your geometry will get seriously mangled and you can not apply textures. The interior modeler they recommend, Quark, is super buggy, is not capable of producing geometry more complex than a simple arch and is also badly documented.
They say they are developing an interior modeling application called constructor. Based on the 9 month old screen shots it looks like it will be great. However it has been "almost ready to be released" for over a year and good luck finding out from them when they expect to release it.
They need to get the rudimentary asapects of their poduct ironed out before they think about developing advanced features.Yes look at what you get for only $100 but if you can not figure out how take advantage of those features it is pretty much like not having those feature to begin with. In that case get something better documented with less features that is free. |
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| a Good 3D game engine... |
4 Stars for feature and Perfomance
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It has lots and lots of decent features for it's price.
2 stars for Ease of Use and Support
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The official documentations of TGE is online, need to log into internet to access them all. Tutorials are scattered all over forums. Most people are too lazy to give explanation of simple or basic things, most people in forum assumes that whoever logged into forum has at least 15 years experience of programming and at least 10 years of Torque scripting experience.
If you want your game to look visually more stunning, you need to buy more additional packs, like Lighting, and Torque Shader Engine.
Final thoughts
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Despite it's drawbacks (documentations and tutorials), it's a great engine, for it's price; you'll get lots of features. I started my project with Torque and I'm going to finish it with Torque. Learning curve may be quite a challenged for some people.
I believe in years to come this TGE will be a great game engine with proper documentations. For now, let yourself struggle finding documentations and tutorials scattered in the forum.
Kind Regards,
broken_sword |
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| Torque Game Engine - using it for making terrains |
I have used Torque Game Engine to make terrains for use in another TGE-built game (following guidelines and not mentioning it). Now whilst I have not used some of the terrain editing features, the ones that I have used have been really good, and easy to use. It has yet to crash on me. I have given the suppot 3 as I have NEVER asked for support, because for what I'm doing, I don't need support.
The terrains that I make are used in the game I have mentioned to create new levels, as most people are used to the old levels.
Whilst I have not asked for support, the menbers of the other game (which I will not name) are very eager to make this game more modern, so to speak
It has most of the features I need (though it would be good to have 2+ levels of terrain, very good for the Theme Park mods I like building) |
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| terrain |
here's a post on the official forums regarding the subject of terrain size (TSE supports unlimited terrains):
http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=28950
as far as the GUI goes it's a bit non-standard in some ways because it's custom, but it's also identical on my Mac and PC, which is wonderful. get used to it and you won't mind so much. you'll be too busy making a game.
and yes, the forums are superb.
a further note on the pc-mac thing: not only do the "missions" i've created with torque run identically and immediately on both my iBook and my Dell, but all the tools for development are identical on both. if you're a cross-platform type of person, you'll love it for that. |
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| TGE: For $100, you really can't get better... |
Torque Game Engine
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The Torque Game Engine is by far the best ever games engine I have come across with a price tag of $100. That small amount gives you aload of features, with an easy to use, stable game engine that has very good support.
- Features
TGE has alot of features. That said, it isn't a premade "MMO" builder that many think these sorts of game engines are. What it is, is a stable game engine for someone with knowledge of programming in a common language like C++ (or PHP, I moved on from there) to create good, solid games.
If the feature you want isn't supported in the engine, assuming you have the required knowledge; you can add it in yourself, because you get the full C++ engine source!
- Ease of use
While TGE might seem daunting to the average user at first glance, on further inspection it isn't. TGE has all the features, as said above, to create many styles of games.
You don't even have to know C++ to create a game with it. TGE features it's own scripting language; TorqueScript, which is really easy to pickup if you are a good programmer or scripter.
- Stability and Performance
TGE is a very stable game engine, with several new stable builds. The newest is TGE 1.4, which, while having alot of minor bugs (you can find easy fixes in the forums and resources), is a fully featured new release.
- Support
There are a wealth of resources, tutorials and the new TDN (Torque Developer Network) to help the aspiring game developer out. The GarageGames' forums are an easy way to get an answer to your question(s) if you post in a sensible and understanding manner.
While some people say "oh that was a waste of money" it probably means that either, they thought TGE was something that it is not, because they did not do enough research, or because they did not fully spend the time to understand and learn TGE.
I've been working with TGE since around late 2004, and T2D (a 2d games engine by GarageGames featuring the same scripting language) since late 2005. These have been my best games related and games development related purchases ever!
The art pipeline may not be the best, but there are alot of official and non-official versions of exporters for many common graphics programs, such as Max, Blender or even MilkShape.
If your not satisfied with the graphic quality of TGE, or you want something more, I recommend you have a look at TSE - Torque Shader Engine. A visually improved version of Torque, with a redone graphics layer.
If you're thinking about buying a game engine, and have programming experience, then TGE will probably be the game engine for you.
If you don't have much programming experience, or non at all, find a book or tutorials on a language such as C++ or PHP, and learn how to use it. You can apply the style of programming to TorqueScript and the engine source code. :)
Thanks for reading,
Tom. |
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| Torque = Not what it's cracked up to be. Caveat Emptor |
GarageGames and its community have done a wonderful job of promoting and hailing the Torque Game Engine as the "go to" engine of choice for the indie developer. At $100 per license, how can you go wrong?
Well, if you take a look at some of the other options out there, in the same price range, featured on this site, you'll see very quickly just how you can go wrong.
For one, that Torque is a repurposed version of the engine that powered Tribes II is super impressive - were I typing this about 4 years ago. The tech was probably quite impressive back then. Now it's sorely out-dated. Not a problem, necessarily until you realize there are other engines available, for the same price, give or take $50 or so, that offer all the most up-to-date DX9 features, better 3D/2D asset compatibility, a smoother pipeline and better documentation and support. Suddenly that $100 on Torque doesn't seem so well invested.
And, it likely won't end with that $100. There are many "upgrades" that you will likely find necessary to bring your games out of the stone-age and into the present, such as a lighting engine which, with how drab and boring and incomplete the stock lighting model is in Torque, is a necessity. Unless you program it all in yourself, before you know it, you've spent a few hundred dollars and still do not have all the features you could get for that original $100-$150 if you'd chosen one of the other engines available in that price range.
Now, if you want more up-to-date features, GarageGames does have an option for you. However, you're going to have to spend another $150 for the still-in-development Torque Shader Engine to get it. What you're getting is an incomplete engine and all the bugs and instability that go with it - for the same price, again, as other options that are available now and in a more stable and completed state.
In short, Torque isn't the worst investment you could make. However, a fair overview and item-by-item comparison with other options out there will quickly reveal that it's not the wisest investment you could make, either.
So, as a final warning again... Garage Games and its community do a great job of promoting Torque while trying to silence any dissent. Don't buy into the hype. Do your own research and see for yourself.
Caveat Emptor... Buyer Beware. |
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| Torque very good engine , except the documentation |
I used in the past a lot of language/tools/engine in order to create a simple game.
My last test was with cristal space : may be a good engine , but no network support.
I can take like that all the engines one by one and found issues with all of them.
The main issue with TORQUE is the documentation : it is really a pity.
I know the answer : buy the book "3d game programming" .I got it ( illegal way) it is a pdf with 800 pages : same issues , a pity ... very very generalist, no enough detail on api.
If you are patient and try to understand the demo , you can use TORQUE in efficient way . On TDN ( wiki for torque owner) you can find sometime usefull documentation. But i repeat it is a pity : very poor documentation provided by garagegames.com.
Anyway Torque is very complete engine with all the functionnalities that i try to develop with other languages during 2 years.
Really the best choice today : you can use this tool NATIVELY to play to the same game with several players by network... It is the only one on the market at this period of time to provide this feature without specific development ! |
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| GRAPHICS <> GAME |
Torque is the perfect tool to make a "game" !
Its not the perfect "tool" for writing a graphics-demo.
Most people think they need a AAA-Very eye-Candy 3D engine in order to make a good game and thats WRONG.
Torque brings everything to make a good complete game, concentrate on gameplay and other elements.
Pixel-shaders, HDR, ... are not really necessary to make a good game!
I hate it when people talk always about GAME-programming but mean GRAPHICS.
With Torque the learning curve is "high" at the beginning and once you got a grasp of it development goes much faster. Most people complaining about Torque move to engines where learning curve is "lower" at the beginning but gets much higher later and i bet most of those people never get finished anything.
If you want to toy with an eye-candy graphics-engine that do it but don't say you want to make a game! |
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its easier to learn Japanese!!!Posted by:
dib
at Oct 3, 2006 |
I don't go neither to lose my time,
its possible to program a game without suffering and
the book for God's sake neither the author understands!´
30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words,30 words... |
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| Insufficient docs |
| Torque badly lacks documentation, especially for C++ developers. There are 2 books already released, but they both describe built-in script language. WhenI have asked on their forums for C++ documentation, I was adviced to read Doxygen created docs, or to explore header files myself. I even was unable to find some basic tutorial. All C++ documentations are hidden. One may only acces them, when he pays for engine! And nobody will return your money, if you will not manage find docs - look at headers, :) beg at their forums etc. In any case, I am not going to throw $800 for such... thing. Instead I am planning to use Irrlich for my project - it is free, it is for C++ programmers and it is well documented. |
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| An Engine for Non-Beginners |
Ok, while many people say that this is a 'bad' engine or a waste of time/money maybe there are a couple things to consider.
The things listed in here are up to the 1.4.2 version.
The engine comes with full Source Code, but maybe most of the people out there is not very familiar with C++ coding, so I will stick to scripting in this review. However, you should also notice that if something is not working, you can fix it by changing and/or modding the SourceCode.
The engine has Great features which give your game a good variety and visual impact. Even though some options from the Level Editor/Terrain Editor crash the SDK, you can go around them and get the same result by scripting.
You should get very familiar with datablocks, these will give the engine all the information about the objects you will be using, so learning how to declare them could be a real big step.
I must say, it is definitely not easy to LEARN, you need to be somehow related and familiar to game development, anyway, as far as I know, in the Engine's Description they never say it is for beginners.
When dealing with the stability of the engine, it is REALLY stable, plus it supports multiple platforms. If you consider that it also has an award-winning multiplayer architecture, you can develop a multiplayer game where you deal with the core programming at server side and don't worry about cross-platform games. This of course, helps your team a lot since you don't leave any audience out (Mac, Win and Linux)
Where you might have A LOT of trouble is with documentation. Most of the docs out there deal with previous versions (even the 'oficial documentation' at the website) but you get access to the forums and the IRC channel. Those places are great to ask questions but just be smart, there's no one (not even with other engines) who will give you complete games for you to distribute. The point is, people there is willing to help you, but not to make the game for you (unless of course you give a good amount of cash).
The books: I bought 2 out of.. 3(I think), they are 'good' books. However, one deals a lot with the most basic things (adding things to the mission, scripting simple things) and also gives a basic tutorial for 3D modelling. How to model items, vehicles, characters, buildings, and their textures. The other book deals with some 'advance' scripting, like particles and AI. The bad thing about all this is like someone above wrote, there are no books about the source code.
It is easy to buy this engine and then just say that it is way too hard(anyone can quit doing good stuff) but once you take the time to get to know this engine better, you will like it for sure.
Now they have released 1.5, which is $150 but it has more things than before. They added the Lighting kit and the ShowTool Pro, plus some fixes for Mac users.
Don't waste the opportunity, if you can buy this engine do it. Unless you are a quitter, you will do great things with this engine. |
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| Reasonable choice - Better options exist |
Features:
Torque is a complete solution for creating games and has a vast feature set however due to the age of the engine many things are performed in a less than optimal fashion - in two years of owning the engine I struggle to find a feature that works bug free. Modern features and techniques do not exist in this engine, which may not be a problem for some as it is an indie engine and best suited to simple puzzle/sports type games where advanced features are not required.
The engine will perform well on lower end hardware, as long as you design your game efficiently. Unfortunately, due to inefficient and poorly optimized rendering code, the engine will not take advantage of modern hardware features and will not run anywhere near as well as it should. This engine requires a pretty high end system to run a relatively complex game though only offers mediocre rendering and effects.
Ease of Use:
Torque is derived from the engine which powered Tribes 2, as such a lot of old Tribes 2 specific code still resides within the engine. The .dts format, which is used to import animated meshes into the engine, has not been worked on since the engines release and is very troublesome. When I complained about the .dts format an employee informed me that The engine is the technology that we are selling, not plug-ins. Therefore Garage Games will not be working at all on any of the exporters that come with the engine. This is why we supply you with the source code for the exporters, so that you may fix them yourself. Many 3rd party exporters have been written for the engine and for the most part they work pretty well however the .dts format is still a nightmare to work with. It does not make sense, no matter what anyone tells you. It does work once you spend many sleepless nights learning it, however it is not logical.
Torque uses another format for interior objects / shapes which require accurate collision detection. This is the .dif format and is in a horrible state at the moment. You must use a bsp based map editor (Quark, Hammer etc) to create a .map file which is then converted to the .dif format through the use of a supplied plug-in. To keep a long story short, creating .dif files is an absolute pain. To help remedy this Garage Games have been working on a new map editor named Constructor. This has been in production for around two years and only seems like a band aid solution to the problem. In my opinion, the .dif format should be rewritten or replaced with a new format.
As Torque uses a different format for each type of geometry you bring into the engine, they all have differing pros and cons and it makes level design confusing. They are all affected differently be lighting and shadows and generally speaking I feel this is a huge design flaw within the engine, at least by todays standards.
The editors that come with the engine are great. The only thing that lets them down is that they are not stable. Many tasks performed in the world editor will crash the engine, most users resort to scripting their levels as opposed to designing them in real-time. The GUI editor works well and is pretty stable though is only useful for creating simple 2D GUIs. There are also problems with positioning of GUI elements when changing resolutions.
The scripting language is powerful and exposes an incredible amount of the engines functionality. It is relatively easy to learn, my only problem with it is that it runs so slow. I have resorted to creating most of my game-play code in C for this reason.
Stability & Performance:
From a development standpoint, the engine is NOT stable. As mentioned earlier, editors will crash the engine. In older versions alt-tabbing would crash the engine as well as starting a dedicated server. Performance is poor. You can work around this by simplifying your game however be warned, using any of the engine's more advanced features or using a generous amount of particles, precipitation effects, high resolution textures and high poly models will bring this engine to its knees.
The engine will run on multiple platforms however Windows is by far the most stable. Mac performance is below average and unfortunately many tools which are needed to create content for the engine are not available on Mac. Linux support is community based, so dont expect running on Linux to be an easy task.
Support:
Support from Garage Games itself is pretty poor, unless youre a full time company with plenty of funding. The community is quite large and for the most part very helpful though sadly much of the active community is very young and immature. There seems to be a trend on their forums where the intelligent, experienced users leave the community for various reasons.
Conclusion:
Torque is certainly capable of creating a game; its just not as smooth a process as it is in other engines I use. I would highly recommend investigating other alternatives, of which there are now many within a similar price range. If you are still inclined to buy this engine, may I recommend that you start with Torque Game Builder (TGB). Its basically a 2D engine, is very easy to use, stable and has great documentation.
If you are testing the game demos on the Garage Games website in order to evaluate the engine, please keep in mind that not all games sold on their website are created with Torque. Garage Games are also a game publisher and will sell games even if they are not created in Torque.
*A lot of people use a game named Tribal Trouble to promote Torque however they do not realize that this game was NOT made with Torque. It was created with a custom in-house Java based engine.* |
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| The new TGE 1.5 is a city of bugs, hands down. |
This engine is pretty easy to use overall, with all of the features anyone could ever want. However, after upgrading from the previous 1.4.2, I noticed that if I wanted to use the GUI Editor or World Builder then I'd have to re-write the initialization script for those objects.
Pros: User friendly, plenty of documentation, plenty of features, pretty graphics.
Cons: User community is worthless, 100%. Most of the users have quite a bit of experience with the engine, and asking newbie questions in a newbie forum is most unwise. Garage Games will provide support... for a price, if you want a refund, or ask a question in the most polite of manners then you'll just get a message back saying either "Ask in the forums" or "You must pay for professional support."
Stability: ROFL! This is, as of 03-12-2007, one of the most BUGGY engines I've ever experienced. Editing mode is an instant crash with "unknown hardware combinations", and there are 1,232 Individual BUG posts, and, from what I read, less then half have responses in the forums. This new release is nothing more then a typical alpha project with no direction.
Overall: I'd rather spend my $150 on something with more support and stability, I'd say 3DGS was the best IDE if it wasn't for the idiot friendly language "C-Script" (no objects, imagine making a game without structs, classes, and objects... hehe). However, version 1.4.2 wasn't that bad, in fact, I'd say it was excellent, but those days are gone...
That's my two cents.
EDIT: Today, after searching through only (surprisingly) 30-40 lines of C++, I fixed one of the errors I was having, and I posted it in the bug report forum. Perhaps after I fix the 3 or 4 other major errors (and patches are implemented), then I'll write a new review. |
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| you cant script |
^this guy does not own the engine, he made multiple topic on how to make a game without coding. he cant texture, he has a old OS. It wont be stable to him.
So.....yeah he's not the best guy to review a engine. |
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| Best Tool For Prototyping... |
3D/Game engines used (alphabetical):
3DGS, AuranJet, Blitz3D, C4, Crystal Space, Genesis3D, Nebula Device, Ogre3D, Qube Software, and Torque.
I've been using Torque since the day it came out six years ago. When it first came out and for most of its life it was a sad mess. No docs to speak of, insanely bad code base, no art tools, hasn't been AAA graphics for years, etc. As a result the only thing I've used it for in all these years has been game prototyping. For this purpose it is probably the best tool around. The scripting engine is extremely easy to use and you can do quite a bit with it. Also, the built in (from its Tribes 2 days) terrain, UI, and mission editors make it extremely fast and easy to build a demo to showcase game play concepts. Actually digging into the source to build a complete game, however, is liable to cause migraines and suicidal tendencies.
Only recently has it become powerful enough, in my opinion, to be used for commercial games by a broader group of indy devs, and this is only due to books and tools being developed by its user base, only a few of which are free. The Garage Games site has become a get rich quick scheme for users creating "content packs" and other poorly executed "tools." In the past these items would have been free, mainly due to the incomplete and low quality nature of most of them, but it's such a hassle getting content out of most 3D apps (.dts format is crap) that most indy devs have no other option. Until recently the visual quality of the engine was extremely outdated, but this has been partially remedied by the free release of the Modernization Kit by Alex Scarborough. This is something that should have been addressed by Garage Games years ago, however they are here to make money and can not do so if you don't buy Torque Advanced.
For the most part, support is also provided by the user base via the forums. This is usually ok, but the majority of its users have a "fan boy" mentality even more so than most other engines (just look at the post above mine). You get a lot of sarcastic and otherwise useless responses. In fact, some of the Garage Games employees exhibit the same attitude and have been known to be combative.
I'm currently building my latest prototype with Torque 1.5.0 (1.5.1 is pretty bugged), but the final game will most likely be completed in C4. The quality of the C4 engine is much better than Torque, and there is no other engine with such clean and well maintained code.
Features: 2 stars out of the box. 5 with the Modernization Kit (great job, Alex).
Ease of Use: 3 stars only because of the original editors and scripting engine.
Stability and Performance: 4 stars because I've never had a problem with it (until 1.5.1) and it runs fast.
Support: 1 star only because you can buy a couple good books on scripting. They need to come free with the licensing fee in my opinion. |
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| A solid engine and the documentation has improved |
Torque 1.50 is a solid, powerful engine that comes with the Show Tool Pro, an easy to use test bed for your game art. Unfortunately, the $150 TGE is no longer available but you can get TGEA and Torque 3D (though at higher price points).
Good things: Characters cast shadows, realistic explosions come from your weapon, footprint decals are formed and fade, multiple layers of clouds move across the sky believably, water is easy to adjust and looks believable, there is a built-in GUI editor, a built-in terrain editor and painter, and you have the ability to drop sounds into your scene and control transmit distances.
Stability: I've not had stability issues with the engine, and I've been using it heavily for the last year. The crashes I have had I later found to be my own fault - because at first I did not know what I was doing, script-wise and export-wise.
Ease of Use: Yes you have to do some work to figure out the lay of the land; working with this engine is not for the faint of heart. You have to do a lot of searching, within the documentation and the forum areas, in order to figure out how to get your art into the game (if you are using 3ds Max, my book can help you with that, see below).
Forums: If you take an hour or so and search the forums and the user-created resources, you will be impressed with the experience level of this community. I think the way it works is that you are able to acquire the engine for a pretty low cost, so you are expected to do quite a bit of work. The answers are not just handed to you, but if your need is has not already been addressed by a user-created resource, ask your question in the forums and someone is likely to lend a hand.
A Step-By-Step Guide for Artists: As I learned how to properly export pickups and characters from 3ds Max to the Torque engine, I found myself making copious notes. The result is a book, Creating Game Art for 3D Engines, which was released late in 2007. I went to great lengths to make the processes clear with step by step instructions and 90 minutes of video tutorials on the book CD.
Read more about the book Creating Game Art for 3D Engines at www.3dcognition.com/book.htm.
More books: There are three other books on Torque already out, which focus more on scripting and general engine capabilities, and I know of at least two more in the works. So the documentation is coming, and that is to my mind has been the biggest hurdle with using Torque.
Sample Games: Check out the sample games for any engine you are considering. Torque has some pretty good ones, such as ThinkTanks, Lore, Shelled, Tribal Trouble, Rocket Bowl, etc.
Publishing: One of the reasons I bought Torque was the publishing assistance they give the independent developers. In the last month, they have completely redone their website and removed many of the games created by independent Torque developers; this may be to move the website towards a more professional appearance, but it takes away from one of the best features of the GG website, and I am no longer sure how much GG is committed to helping independents publish their games. More should be clear as they revise the new website and tie up loose ends.
Conclusions: Along with the Unity3d engine and the C4 game engine, Torque is one of a very few engines which are capable of making a powerful game at a reasonable cost.
Features: 3
Ease of Use: 3
Stability: 5
Support: 3 |
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| not good enough |
i have tge 1.5 since like 8-9 months ago and its concept its good but the implementation not quite..
easy at first sight.. but very frustrating over the time and you end loosing your time and money basically
the major problems are
1.- absolutely lack of will of making documentation for it, so good documentation and guides doesnt exist
2.- the tiny documentation that currently exists its outdated and mostly useless
3.- lack of game engine features and many limitations.. its scripting its good but lacks features and docs so you never know how to use it or what really can be posible with pure scripting
4.- impressive dependency of heavy engine modifications.. if you are not willing to modify or construct major chunks of engine specific c++ code .. theres no need to bother with it
5.- stability problems and sudden crashes when editing
6.- cumbersome and very problematic content pipeline, exporter crashes very often and many many export errors on official exporters
7.-support? what support? if you ask or complain they get angry and say basically ... dont ask just learn
they claim one of the advantages is the rich user community,well i would say the community is pretty useless.. because of the points stated above aprox 80%-90% of that community are people that dont know how to use torque in a apropiate way ..and the remaining are experienced developers who reconstructed major parts of the engine using his own methods and procedures
basically if you are not willing to reconstruct the engine with your self made feature sets and learn without documentation.. dont waste time and money
i regret the day i bought torque..
Cheers! |
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Not a good game engine if you want to make professional quality gamesPosted by:
Jman87
at Nov 1, 2007 |
I've had the Torque Game Engine for over 7 years now, and I regret spending the money to purchase it every day.
First of all, if you are using Torque, do not expect to use it to make games that will one day be sold in retail stores. The "greatest" game anyone ever made with it was Marble Blast, which was made by the same team that designed the engine.
Features -
Torque claims to have alot of fancy features, and while it does have a good world editor with easy terrain editing, that's where the superb features stop. You have to BUY EXTRA PLUGINS on their website to do anything custom. The most supported tool for designing buildings and indoor environments is QuArK, an out-dated piece of junk. You can forget using real 3d tools like 3D Studio Max and Maya to design the levels.
Torque is also very restictive in the sense that all games made with it begin by using a "starter kit." There is one for racing games, first-person shooters, and RPGs, and each one starts with an already fully-functional ( but low quality ) game that can be edited into something else. There is no starter kit for fighting games or aircraft simulations, and making one would involve reprogramming the engine's source code or using TorqueScript.
Stability -
Albeit hard to use and lacking in graphics capabilities, the games made with Torque are surprisingly stable and I've never seen one crash. TGE has always ran really fast on my machine, but that's not compliment. The buildings and terrain always have low polygon counts because it uses BSP and heightmap terrain.
Torque does not support arbitrary meshes!!
Support -
The TGE documentation is just awful. For any of you who own TGE, take a look at all of documentation. Most entries are not yet completed, and the people on the forums never answered any of my questions. |
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| My objective review |
Indecipherable why this engine for months on court 1. Other engines have more features an long continue with their development.
The Prise is to mutch vor this Product. Other products have better price performance ratio. |
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Torque Game EnginePosted by:
dudMan
at Dec 4, 2007 |
Torque Engine is a great engine. why? Well, for a number of reasons!
First off, torque has ACTUALLY been used to make multiple commercial games. Other engines are really great, but 90% through the project, you realise it's missing a certain feature and give up. look at the products list for proof!
Torque has horrible support. i just have to say this from the start. the documentation is fairly incomplete, but the Torque Developer Network has a bit of documentation about getting started with AI, the mission editor, etc. also, there are many books written about torque. so, between the TDN and Books, you can patch together a basic knowlage of torque. also, just reading the example code should give you an idea about using torque. codesampler.com and tork.beffy.de both have good torque totorials, also.
Features. Torque has AI, Networking, Graphics, Physics(to some degree). The AI doesn't seem to be there for a bit, until you look at the TDN and it has a tutorial on setting up some ai players, and shooting for each player. The physics are sort of simple, but still usable. And the networking is SO robust, that your entire game must be based around it. a bit annoying, but you'll appriciate it at the last second when you want to add multiplayer.
Should YOU get torque? Well, download the demo and try it out. The demo is ACTUALLY just a pre-compiled version of torque, you're free to script it, and even create your own game. You just can't show it to anyone.
And if you want to buy it, it's only $150! You can't argue with that! |
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| The Good The Bad The Ugly |
The Good: Thriving community, great features and a long list of improvements to the current version 1.5.2
I read books about this engine for about a year till I understood it amidst my Graduate studies. Once you take time with it you will begin to understand how it flows.
The Bad: The community offers support but since they are mostly programmers and not teachers they tend to talk over the heads of those who don't understand and only want a simplified answer. I am a C# and .Net programmer but I have not made changes to the .cc files however there are many tutorials on the site that tell you how. "You will have to read them"
The Ugly: None but I like continuity in my writings :0)
In Closing for the features the engine offers at the price you cannot beat it. I admit the art pipeline sucks a bit, but once you learn it like anything else it becomes second nature. I am making a school project with just scripting and it's working wonderfully.
Learn the Torque tree main files and you will be on your way. |
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| Good place to start, but that's about it. |
If you're looking to license TGE for making games, don't. Get Torque Advanced instead. The reason I say this is that while Torque is a great learner's engine, the technology is out of date (hence the low Features rating), and documentation and support is quite lacking, since GG decided to stop shipping documentation with the 1.5 branch (or possibly earlier). The only good source of information remaining is the online community of licensees.
On the other hand, Torque is a highly stable, easy to use engine -- again, great for someone wanting to learn game development. The scripting language, while odd in some ways, quickly becomes second nature to read and write, and with many years of development behind it, Torque is a hard engine to crash or otherwise bring down. It'll take a lot of abuse from a newbie before kicking the can. |
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Outdated, Undocumented, and Poorly MadePosted by:
Kaanin
at Jan 9, 2008 |
Poorly Made...
Everything about Torque is outdated or poorly made. The games it can make would be acceptable in 1995, but no longer.
Many of the elite Torque Guru's have created useful addons, patches, and resources to help keep Torque from falling into the dark ages, and to help cover all the features Torque lacks, but unfortunately its not enough.
These slapped together addons, and patches, are often difficult to implement, buggy, or outdated. Leaving you high and dry when you need any feature Torque does not natively support.
Outdated and Undocumented...
Nearly all the documentation is outdated and useless, serving nothing more then to completely bury any useful documentation out there.
I cant recall the countless hours I've spent trying to follow tutorials and digging through resources only to find I just spent hours on something that no longer works with the current engine build.
The forums are cluttered with thousands of posts dating back to 2002-2005, all useless with current engine build.
The resource archives suffer the same clutter and outdated content...
If you are a very advanced programmer, patient, and willing to highly modify the engine to get what you want out of it, then torque could be useful.
The rest of us are left to sift through massive amounts of mostly outdated documents, patches, addons, in a very painful attempt to get the job done. |
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| Check the EULA before purchase... |
Have owned this and the other Torque engines for a few years. Aside from the feature (or non-feature) set that has been mentioned in other reviews, I wanted to note the new EULA and licensing agreements GarageGames has just put in place for all products.
The new EULA is so restrictive, generic, and open-ended that you may want to look closely at it before purchase. Even if you purchase the "Commercial" license, which I have, there are many apparent loopholes in the licensing. I've been told by GG employees that they are flexible with the licensing, but what the EULA says is what it says.
For instance you cannot make (or at least market or give away) educational software, simulations, virtual worlds, and others without permission and additional licensing fees. Even in the Commercial versions you must use their splash screens and provide links to GarageGames within your game. Unless of course you purchase yet more special licensing.
I would call this a huge disadvantage to using this engine, and have said so on the GarageGames forums. I'm not saying this warrants not buying the engine, I'm simply saying you should specifically check the new EULA for your own benefit before purchase. |
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| Not all that was expected... |
I have a few engines, and this is one of them.
I find a nice part is that it has many features, which is good, and the features can be modified if necessary.
Many say that this is an easy engine, but it is not as easy as many would think. like most commercial engines it comes with the source, which is good if you want to add on to it, but not good if you are looking for absolute ease.
The price is good, and as it is said a lot, this engine is good for the price, but take another look at the price.
It is relatively stable, but i have noticed odd crashes at times, and while it supports Mac systems, it is not at all a Mac engine, and there are much better choices if you are developing a multi platform game.
The community is huge, and the support is good, there is plenty of documentation, even though it is relatively scattered around, can be helpful. This engine has one of the best communities around.
I would not say that the source is an advantage, because most other engines do come with the source. An advantage is the multi platform support, although the stability is questionnable on other platforms than windows, is good.
A disadvantage is the general engine and its tools are relatively outdated. Compared to modern engines of the same price, and even free modern engines, the tools are very low-tech. Also, the particle technology, although good, is relatively old too, and the lack of shaders is a definite minus.
Note that shaders can be added through modernization kits, but i don't know how stable those are.
If you are a intermediate developer or a hobbyist i would recommend this engine, especially if you are low funded. If you are a professional and have very high funding, i would strongly recommend considering a larger more powerful engine, or if you have low funding, i would recommend considering one of the GPL more advanced engines such as Quake 3 and soon id tech 4, although they may be old.
If you insist on using torque for a windows project, i would recommend TGEA over TGE. |
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| Not a game engine |
Torque is not so much a game engine as it is a horribly written Quake clone game with some scripting ability, especially considering the hefty pricetag you have to pay -- per programmer cost of more than $200, when you can't even program it...
The forums for support are neer accessible, and I have never been able to get support to fix the forums, let alone the engine's bugs. |
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| 6 months of pain |
I am finishing a commercial game with TSE (Torque Shader Engine) and this really was the worst 6 months of development in my life. Too bad I joined the team after the choice of Torque was maid, because even open source game engines I know like Irrlicht or Panda are far better, IMO.
It's not the lack of features that made me angry. It's just that Torque source is a bloody messy piece of shit.
Actually, Torque misses a complete cleaning and refactoring. No comments (or outdated), obscure terms and class names, ex : what you would call "World" or "Level" or "Scene" is called "Mission".
Torque is not a game engine, it is rather an old ugly designed game, hacked here and there to make it look like an engine.
When you know well designed engines like Ogre, programming with Torque look like hacking. And hacking is fun when it's a hobby, not when you want to finish a commercial project with deadlines.
Oh yeah, and the tools are buggy, and they crash a lot. Torsion too, crashes a lot.
Oh, and STL is not supported.
For our next game, we will buy a real engine, or use Irrlicht, which is cheaper and better. |
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| Funny EULA License |
Attention: Even,if you buy the Commercial License, you can't sell simulation & training games, or simple 3D virtual Worlds,Screen Savers... You must buy for this a seperate license!!!! And showing the splash screen of garagegames is even in commercial license a must.
With so a funny EULA, it's not longer possible for me to continue the working with Torque.
Read the EULA before you buy it. It exist very good other Engines with better conditions. |
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| I wouldn't recommend Torque. |
After investing in the TGEA early adopter in 2006,and although the engine had its downside as it was in development etc,the long awaited finished game development platform is released....as Torque 3D,
They wanted another $600 for something I already paid for in my opinion.
Sooo...I have an account with roughly $600-700 of engines,(TGE 1.42,the TGEA),and heaps of 3rd party addons all sitting there wasted.what a complete and utter waste of time,money and effort. |
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| Messy |
| Nothing about this engine makes sense to me as a programmer. There are scripts everywhere with no explanation as to what they are for or do. You ask for help anywhere in the forums and someone will chime in with an excuse for why it doesn't work or they'll refer to some old documentation that is horribly written. Never straight answers for anything unless you pay them. if anyone has the demo version and they ask for help, they get told they will need to buy the engine just for a tutorial. the guy in charge of the documentation is always announcing new plans for the docs but always has something else to do instead of his original plan. very annoying and unprofessional. If we had just a COUPLE simple tutorials for creating a new weapon from scratch and making it shoot or something along those lines it'd be a lot easier. instead it's always news about some new feature they are "about" to be adding which will cost $100. FINISH ONE THING AT A TIME |
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| Torque 3d - new version is amazing!!!!! |
Amazing - all I can say!
I bought in early and have been beta testing -
the rendering engine, water fx, etc. are amazing - especially Normals mapping on terrain system!
Ease of use has been greatly improved -Data Block editor makes development way easier
really as good or better than anyhting I've seen
Thier scripting in general is slightly bizarre |
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| torque shit |
Who will pay for the license for a single project for one developer for such a hopeless engine.
You can not even download a version for tests. Documentation is shit and tools as well.
Again, I do not recommend heartily. Thank you for your attention and good night to the state.
PS. this engine should not be in this list |
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Hi,
I will post this review with the least amount of bias and only post what I have found with my experience with a 2 month review (looking at the forums, how the developers handle situations like what they say then what they actually do, the released titles of torque, then downloading and testing the demo). Note that I have had prior experience with the last Torque engine.
I have had no access to their latest source code, but I have seen their prior work (will comment on that later).
Features :: The website is gorgeous. This alone made me want to purchase the engine (not objective at all, I know) since the amount of effort put into the website means that their engine would have to be just as good, right? Not really. It's very true, and let me push this, that I am very impressed at the venue provided by this engine. Being able to ship to the Iphone and other portable devices is a wondrous thing, and GG was smart ot pursue this market.
The reason why I gave features such a terrible score was primarily because the new features expressed in the marketing are "There" but, to be completely honest, are worthless. I have a few pictures to prove that the graphics engine, at maximum settings, is broken and littered with graphic bugs and performance was, well . . .
A selling point of the engine is that is runs on lower spec machines -- yes I know, you shouldn't run a lower spec machine on the highest settings, and I agree that Torque's rendering engine designed around 1999 technology runs fine (we are 10 years from that now, a decade away), but let the pictures do the talking...
I will provide a basic analysis of what we see.
http://img21.imageshack.us/i/graphicsglitch.jpg/
Ok, first. A selling point was soft shadows. Ummm, those are not soft, and they don't even look like shadows. These are not a graphics driver glitch, as you can see this even on your own machine if the GPU supports this. The shadows look terrible, slow down rendering by a large portion, and are completely physically incorrect.
Let's also focus on why the ground outside of the hut I was in looks so bright (infact, completely whited out). That is "HDR" done completely wrong. It appears that it's over emphasized as a selling point for unexperienced people to go "Oooo, shiney!". Do you see the lines on the ground? That are to show proportions and distance -- when have you been outside and the sun completely whites out a similar surface? Never. It's wrong.
The GUI looks nice! :)
Next please!
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/9783/graphicsglitch2.jpg
This image showcases off Torques "Screen Space Ambient Occlusion". It's also, completely incorrect and slows down rendering by a large portion. What is even going on? It's clear they tried to copy CryEngine 2's tech to bum off sales from the hype that generated. That doesn't even look remotely interesting. Just bad. The HDR bug is also just as present.
Did I mention that for all of this, you have to pay $1,000?
If you turn all of these features off, you're best sticking to the older versions of the engine (which if I understand correctly, have already been discontinued). May these things be patched and improved in the future, and if that happens, I will most definitely increase my rating and make a note of that.
There are a lot of tools in the engine, like building roads, water (which the entire demo is just like Crysis, to bum off sales no doubt), which are cool, but not all games need roads or that particular water tool (though useful!!). I'd rather the developers wisely choose what is a global feature everyone can use (water, sure). The editor seemed nice and intuitive, but the overwhelming graphics didn't help.
Ease of use -- This comes from a host of different sources, but mainly from hearsay. When you want to get past the basic indie 2D stuff and venture into complex 3D games, it's nearly impossible. Look at the released games title -- how many are remotely complex? Just the demo, maybe? Where they're are complex ones, I'm sure they have had to re-write many portions of the engine itself. I've witnessed that happening quite a lot from a title I personally worked on in the past using the previous Torque. The engine is code spaghetti.
Stability and performance :: it never crashed on me really, but the performance using advanced features was just downright terrible. Not worth $1,000 at all, seeing that C4 is only $350 and runs great with comparable features. Using decade old technology and you're OK.
Support :: The forums do look very helpful and an active community. Good work there. It's fun to see such an active group of developers try to help one another out. Hopefully this continues!
On my Core 2 Duo T8100 @ 2.1ghz and 965 intel (4 gigs of ram on Windows 7 64bit), the FPS at 620x480 was 5FPS using the highest settings.
There were about 50 objects (most games have thousands of objects in a level) and nothing was textured (in most games, objects have anywhere from 3-5 textures on them).
Ouch.
After every prompt, they wanted me to buy the engine.
This is a marketing engine, not a game engine. |
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| Torque is good.... NOT!!! |
This engine's docs is.... Oh man you can't understand a word in it, the community is just a bunch of mean dorks, and it's just on the top ten because GarageGames owns this website.
Advice: Don't even think of getting this stupid engine. |
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| Let down by documentation |
| It is possible to have access to the source code to this engine which is a big plus but the documentation is really, really poor. It feels that you are fighting the engine rather than working with it. |
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