Slashdot Mirror
Torque3D Engine Goes Open-Source
New submitter DangerOnTheRanger writes "Torque3D, the game engine behind games such as Blockland and Tribes 2, has gone open-source. The engine itself — in addition to four game templates — are all included in a Git repository hosted on GitHub. Documentation is available in a separate repository. Quite the exciting time in the world of game development!"
I think I saw this article a few days ago
Or, when will it run on GNU/Linux?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Well how nice...i'm gonna need a 3D engine soon...right after i get the cluster put together...:D
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
Actually Tribes 2 used the V12 engine. This later became the Torque Game Engine, then Torque Game Engine Advanced, then Torque3D if memory serves me. The V12 engine was also an improvement over the Darkstar engine used for the original Tribes. Before that I have no idea, but this engine has been getting updates for at least 15 years.
It's not exactly the best engine in the world, but open sourcing code is never bad. So thanks GarageGames!
Because not everyone needs or even wants a top tier 3D engine to make a game? Torque was designed to be extremely easy to use and newbie friendly, while still powerful. id Tech 3/4 is most assuredly not.
Also, I know people hate on commercial software but the GPL version of id Tech 3 is just that. GPL. You can't make commercial closed-source games (spare the "why would you want to do that" comments please) with it unless you buy a commercial license.
The real question is if this could be simply used to make an updated version of the tribes 2 linux client.. assuming that was even built on the same engine.
Torque3D has one advantage: its name won't be easily confused with that of the "Fisher-Price" style desktop environment that recent Ubuntu releases have adopted.
I am not a 3d programmer, so I ask... Of course you cannot make a closed 3d engine based on Troque3D, but a game that uses that engine will be too GPL'd? Seriusly asked.
-no sig today-
I think there's some confusion. The id tech engines are under the GPL, so all games/tools/etc created from it must have their source released.
Torque 3D is under the MIT license, so no one has to release their source regardless of the type of project.
I think there's some confusion. The id tech engines are under the GPL, so all games/tools/etc created from it must have their source released.
Torque 3D is under the MIT license, so no one has to release their source regardless of the type of project.
And as a bonus, the good bits could be imported into a GPL project.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
And it doesn't even burn diesel. How relevant is that?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Good point. Because the source code is available, Torque3D can be ported to both iOS and Android. And to any other platform anybody cares about. Thankyou for illustrating the power of open source.
Ported to isn't the same as supports. I believe that you can compile code using unity for multiple platforms. Who cares if torque gets ported to all sorts of esoteric *nix flavors? I want write games on one platform and compile for multiple platforms. That could be done, but I am not holding my breath.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
At least, once people like the ones that upgraded the Freespace engine to more modern standards get ahold of ths one.
The problem I always found with Torque is that they'd promise features in x number of months, and they'd simply never arrive. Some engines such as Torque X they gave up on completely without the slightest hint of a refund to customers whom they'd promised all sorts of things to.
I never really thought Torque was particularly friendly too, it seemed like a poorly designed mess and TorqueScript was horrible. In terms of ease of understanding of the engine I always found the likes of the C4 engine better, it was worlds apart from Torque in terms of ease of use, quality of design, code, and tools.
I dunno, I just always found with GarageGames that you lost a lot of time waiting on promises that were eventually broken or trying to fix the engine to do something you'd been promised by the devs yourself such that ultimately it was better to just go with one of the competitors, or if you were targetting something like XNA, then to just start from scratch.
GarageGame's goals were noble, but their implementation was morally bankrupt, they fucked a lot of customers over with a lot of products, all the way back to the RTS kit, through to TGA getting effectively ditched and promises broken, to u-turns on promised features for T3D after people had already paid, to TorqueX just outright getting abandoned before it became usable - again, with no refund.
It's good to see they've done this, but if they're hoping to use it as a gateway to selling more of their still commercial products like content packs etc. I'd urge people to heed a buyer beware warning - what they say you'll get, and what you actually get may be very different things, and don't expect any kind of refund if you find you actually got screwed.
There is little indication that they are still licensing their older engines to new clients since they have removed their technology licensing page after the announcement that id tech 5 will not be licensed outside of ZeniMax.