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.'"

Comments

That would change gaming...

[eagee]

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're so excited...

[sl4shd0rk]

We forgot to cluster the webserver

Re:First

[mehemiah]

agreed. Also, I HATE that engine, Have you ever used it? Imagine if Powerpoint or flash moved all your elements slightly esque every time you pushed the play button!

Eh?

[ledow]

"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.

Re:Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine also powered Tribes and Tribes 2 but in earlier stages (technically the engine that was used for Tribes 1 was called Darkstar I think...but from what I understand that basically evolved into the v12 engine which powered Tribes2...which was then renamed Torque when it was released for $100. I think at the time GarageGames actually wanted to open source it, but due to some issues with Sierra/VUG, they had to charge $100 for it)

Re:Eh?

[X0563511]

That's a direct quote from the wikipedia article on the engine and is not in the summary. If you don't like it, feel free to edit it or discuss it on the talk page.

Re:Eh?

[Hatta]

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.

If you can make a complete game in it, it's a good game engine. If the game sucks, that's the designers fault, not the engine's.

Re:Eh?

[taktoa]

Open source Tribes 2 would be freaking awesome. That game was fantastic... it had a mod called Construction Mod that effectively mimicked Minecraft / Garry's Mod (albeit with somewhat different mechanics), except it was released in 2003 (GMod was 2006, Minecraft was 2009). I played that mod extensively - it was very fun. Even vanilla Tribes 2 was great - IMO Tribes 2 and Battlefield 2 were some of the most groundbreaking multiplayer FPS's.

Re:Eh?

[Ignacio]

Sure, but there's a difference between making a great game in 1 year with a great engine, and making a great game in 3 years with a poor engine.

Awesome

[Georules]

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.

Re:Awesome

[Georules]

From what I remember, I compiled the engine and then tried to tinker with it. I wanted to try to do things, like add a weapon bar or ammo counter, so I would search the forums and community resources http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources to find tutorials about how to modify the code. Most people on the forums were happy to chat about adding features and many of the resource tutorial developers would provide help with the code they provided.

Content creation pipeline?

[Seriman]

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.

Re: Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Torqued Off

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A better open source engine

[Da_Slayer]

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.

Re:GitHub link

[iamnothing]

Yup. That's where we're going to house it. We're still cleaning up the repos some. We had to make sure to pull anything that was proprietary. We're most of the way through our code review now. It will be live as soon as it and the site problems everyone has noticed are taken care of.