Not really surprising.
They are currently shopping around for buyers. Engine kept improving, but way too slow.
Employees were all let go.
You can read more here:
http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blogs/view/20495
There were some really amazing developers working on it. I hope all those effected find work.
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I thought it had great potential, but was ran very poorly.
Edit: Ok, I posted before reading the article. This explains why they sold the rights to Tribes, the other week.
Sounds like they are basically shutting down altogether.
No developers = no development.
For the time being at least.
Unity's just so damn nice in comparison...
+1
And when Torque 3D came out. You needed an entire new license versus the previous. Unity and Unreal going indie killed them.
I think that was it... to be honest, I had already dropped from the project at that point. I just recall seeing people complaining about it, then seeing the posts at GG, about how they weren't going to replace it for the latest code.
I remember having to use QUARK to get any of my models to work in that thing.
Sucks about the layoffs though. Never want to hear about that.
Torque was always an adventure to work with, but at the time was the only option in the indie space. I remember joining in the Game in a Day's and having to spend at least 50% of our time hacking around the engine's problems. We had a 10 hour issue with importing a simple model one time.. Not fun. And this isn't amateur stuff, we were very experienced with the engine. I can't imagine what first timers had to go through.
Constantly scrapping half-finished engines only to replace them with new products seemingly every year didn't help instill confidence in the customer either.
Their niche was overrun with too many solid alternatives. Unity, which I'm a big fan of, is really picking up steam, and with UDK fitting into the same category by being free (unless you make a bunch of money of course) there was no way Torque could stay afloat without some radical changes.
With that being said, I'm not suprised this happened, but I still feel bad for the people who lost jobs out of this
Hope they find a new (and better) home!
Maybe the developers can create their own Indie projects now
Edit: Looks like Leadwerks is doing the same.
IndieZen.
http://www.indiezen.org/
(And yes its Roadmap is behind. They always can use more help if any of your programmers want to chip in.)
You could do things with Torque, but you could do them faster and easier in almost anything else. I even gave the Torque3d demo a go, and found that while it was prettier, and finally had an acceptable art pipeline, the overall user experience was still annoying as hell.
@Turbosmooth Operator: See where as you had a 10 hour problem, I once had a month long model import issue, albeit a month of freetime, but I wasn't a noob to working with game art then either, just new to torque.
Plus the overall mentality behind how the code worked seemed so broken and special purpose, very non general.
I wonder if this is the entire instant action company.. Looks like torque and its games are still available...
Well, I suppose this makes the Instant Action t-shirt I got at GDC 2 years ago a collectible. sorta.
Yes, this is the entire company.