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Torque 3D To Be Released On Github Under the MIT License
New submitter iamnothing writes "Eric Preisz, CEO of GarageGames, announces, 'Eleven years ago, The GarageGames founders did an incredibly innovative thing when they sold a full source game engine for $100. We are excited to continue in their footsteps by announcing that we will be releasing Torque 3D as the best open source game technology in the world. Once again, GarageGames will be changing game development.'"
Interesting, guess unity and such ate into too much of their market for it to remain profitable?
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"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Hope the engine code is better than their website code, seems the site's down, and the proper slashdotting hasn't even started yet...
(yes I'm being sarcastic, relax...)
There is no sig...
If Torque wasn't kind of a crappy game engine... I mean, I've worked in Torque, and it was pretty rinky dink by comparable standards.
We forgot to cluster the webserver
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"Several notable commercial titles developed using the Torque engine include Blockland, Marble Blast Gold, Minions of Mirth, TubeTwist, Ultimate Duck Hunting, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, ThinkTanks, The Destiny of Zorro, Penny Arcade Adventures and most recently, indie video games S.P.A.Z. and Frozen Synapse."
Sorry, but apart from the last two (who don't exactly excel in their fields, though FS is a good enough turn-based shooter to be fun in multiplayer), that's not a good advertisement.
And a game engine is a game engine. It just takes work away from programmers who already know how to write one, if they could be bothered, so they can focus on the game itself rather than trivialities (and lots of indie studios make their own engines because it's just that much easier if you keep it all in-house and know what every line does). It's a time-saving device, not a miracle of engineering.
To say the article summary has some hyperbole is to understate it dramatically.
Nothing made public on there yet but presumably this is where it will be:-
GarageGames GitHub Respositories
I learned a lot tinkering with one of the older Torque engines when I was young. The community was very helpful and accepting of those with little to no programming experience. This should be a great addition to open resources.
Sigh...
esque
I'm assuming you meant to write "askew". How the hell did you fuck it up so badly?
No matter how a person might feel about the games using the engine or the engine itself, this is a good thing. If it does something wonderful for open source gaming, however, it will be through a more competent content creation pipeline. There are loads of excellent open source engines out there but getting your content into them can be a serious challenge. If it isn't released with solid import options and content creation tools it will just be another engine choice in a growing pool of already competent engines. Again, that's not a bad thing at all, it just isn't anything new.
Forgetting commercial titles for a moment, does this mean that Revenge of the Cats could be completely Free soon? Is this the torque engine it uses?
http://ethernet.wasted.ch//index.php?page=license
No source code with Unity. Not free to publish, only to tinker. If your happy with just scripting, knock yourself out.
T3D is open source (MIT at that).
That's about all it's worth. It was the first engine I ever used in-depth nearly a decade ago. I then found Unity 3d several years ago and that was a true game changer. I will take a look at it again since it is being open sourced but I can't imagine ever using it for more than the educational value of knowing how they did certain things.
As someone who paid full price for Torque 3D, and also ShiVa, I can say without a doubt that I am very pleased to have gone on and purchased Unity3D for over five times the price of Torque. It was a lesson in where the minimum bar is for a competent product platform. Even more so since with Unity 4 my app should be portable to support Linux with only a bit of work. So if you're doing any serious development, understand that free is too expensive.
At the end of the day, it is the best open source game engine available today. That isn't saying much for open source game engines, but can anyone honestly name one that is better. Them going with MIT is a big plus too. My question is whether it will get ongoing support from GarageGames to keep it a viable open source project, or if it will just wither and die. One of T3Ds biggest failings is documentation. You can see from their own demos that they can do some pretty cool stuff with it (check out the ocean waves and vegetation in Pacific), but hopefully with a bigger open source audience, docs and tutorials will sprout up so that mere mortals can use it. Also, rendering on the Mac is limited and buggy. I'd like to see that get dealt with once and for all - a perfect fit for open source community.
I would just like to point out the OGRE - Open Source 3D Graphics Engine which is MIT licensed and has been around since 2001. OGRE is a better built system and the games in the gallery show this off.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
...that most torque users jumped ship to unity a long time ago, because torque sucked. And there's no reason to go back.
I am a longtime Torque user (see my free game http://www.singularityfps.com) and I must say it is the best prototyping tool out there, at minimum. But in recent years the inexpensive licenses did not include source, which is essential if you're really serious about making a game.
And that was a big deal because the community on the GG forums are one of the biggest benefits to using the engine.
I am well pleased by this move.
expandfairuse.org
Correct that there is no source code with unity (I'm not sure why you'd need it unless you're doing something really out there)
It IS most definitely free to publish (unless you make more than $100k/year, and then you can probably afford the $1500 license)
Unity is one of those things for people who actually care more about making games rather than dicking around in code. Yeah, you can't do everything that you can in OpenGL. But that's not what game design is about. If you have a multi-million dollar budget, sure, roll your own (nobody with this much money does.. they use UDK or CryEngine), but if you don't have that kind of capital, Unity lets you focus on the meaningful bits (making the game fun) for little or no money.
I never said that Unity3d was open source (though you do get a source licence with the pro licence, I said that Unity3d was far supurior BEFORE it was open source. Its like saying, "but Star office is open source," the DAY it goes open source.
Please, BLENDER 3D is better than this crap! All you need is the blender starter kit BGhelper , (something that needs to be better advertised) thanks Solar Lune. Its in a decent scripting language (python) it has a 3d world editor where everything stays put! All this for beginners, if you want more, you can learn about shaders, extend it in python OR C++, AND it's open source! GPLv2 (licence arguments aside) but your games can be any licence unlike tourque (pre open source) OR Unity. Besides, its like saying, "but Star office is open source," the DAY it goes open source
thanks, i deserve that lol.
You do not get a source license with Pro. You get SDK access to the binary engine, similar to what UDK has out of the box. A source license costs a lot of money (just like UDK).
Folks on here slating T3D and claiming Unity is better don't really know what they are talking about. I suspect that most of them are just script kiddies.
Unity IS easier to use, but it is NOT better graphically. Most of the time, what people think is a better engine in terms of graphics just comes down to better art. But go look at some of T3D's demos and you can see it clearly matches or exceeds Unity - just look at the T3D Pacific demo, or China Town.
Its very simple. Both engines are roughly equal, but Unity is much much much easier to use. In certain areas Torque is far superior, like it's networking layer.
The problem with T3D is that it is harder to use. It's poorly documented. It's scripting layer is outdated and weak compared to Unity. But the actual performance and capabilities of the engine are just as good as Unity, and in many cases better. If you are a scripter, Unity is your only choice. You pretty much have to be a C++ programer to really use T3D. I think this makes it a great candidate for open source. I applaud Garage Games for ripping off the band aid and going full open source with MIT. Who knows, maybe someone will add support for a standard scripting language. Hopefully a larger open source audience will lead to more tutorials and better documentation. It's not inconceivable that T3D could even surpass Unity. I'd love to see that happen. It would be a huge win for the open source community.
For me personally, I'll probably still prototype in Unity, but T3D is definitely worth a look and this is great news for all indies.