Torque 3d Goes Open Source
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Hey,
This might be of interest to the Polycount crowd. Torque 3d is open source, under MIT -> http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21886
I've been using Cryengine lately but have been thinking about switching to Torque for my indie FPS project, however people keep telling me it's crap without really giving any reason why. I was wondering if anyone else on Polycount knew (in detail) why Torque isn't worth using, or is, for that matter.
This might be of interest to the Polycount crowd. Torque 3d is open source, under MIT -> http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21886
I've been using Cryengine lately but have been thinking about switching to Torque for my indie FPS project, however people keep telling me it's crap without really giving any reason why. I was wondering if anyone else on Polycount knew (in detail) why Torque isn't worth using, or is, for that matter.
Replies
in my personal experience stay away! stick with cryengine or udk.
in uni our lecturer bought a license for this and got heavily invested in it, when you compare it to udk its light years behind. if you're a good programmer then by all means give it a shot but its highly unstable. if you've been using cryengine it'll be like stepping back in time.
by 2015.
I hear this a lot, but nobody can tell me exactly how it's limited. Is it graphics, code, scripting? I'm trying to make a multiplayer only, Indie FPS game, which it seems well suited for. I'd rather it be cross platform too, so the MIT license will probably help in this. I'm assuming a lot of its most glaring flaws will be fixed in 6 months or so now that it's open source.
It's limited in what you can do with out of the box, if you're a programmer, then yes, you could bring the engine up to par, but ask yourself if that time wouldn't have been better spent on something else?
Also, that's rather optimistic that something can be fixed in 6 months, most Open Source stuff I have seen either get a complete ground up work that takes several years or go the way of the Sabertooth tiger.
It lacks a lot of basic features that you have to put in yourself. Things like platform jumping, it doesn't give you much control over game mechanics without delving into the source code. Its material system is lacking. The animation editor doesn't even work right. Melee is pretty much impossible to implement without a full source code modification. Controller mapping is a nightmare. Their code is full of hacks instead of taking the time to do it right, so it's unstable most of the time.
That's more like it, thanks. None of those problems are applicable to my use case, I think that might make me one of the only people T3D is ok for. I hear what you say about the material editor, I'd like to see a good vertex color based texture blending shader, but that may not come about.
why would you have to do that? Just because it supports bsp doesn't make it a requirement.
When I tried Torque it was pretty lacking in tools and capabilities compared to idtech but that was years ago, maybe it's improved.
Not even Darkradiant, which is the most advanced Radiant fork, even has a material editor. There's also no particle editor or animation editor. I love idtech but their tools are in the stone age. Also any models you put into an idtech3 engine get turned into BSP, which has caused me no end of problems.
One of the biggest advantages of the Torque engine was always its handling of vast, open spaces. This is a callback to the days when it powered the Tribes games. These days, its feature-set and flexibility are considerably less robust.
If you want an open-source foundation for a new 3D game similar to Tribes, then this might be a good engine to use. If you are in almost any other scenario, I wouldn't recommend it. There are just too many other, more appropriate options these days.