Just wondering, if anyone has taken the plunge to see? Going to bug my programmer to see if I can get him to at least try it before ripping it a new one.
I have and its relatively impressive I have been beta testing it for work. My jaw hit the floor when I used the art pipeline. I made a button in maya to export my model via collada. I just have to hit it once then alt tab to torque and I see my art in instantly. ITS AMAZING!
Dynamic shadows look awesome, but still cause the system to lag. There is a light mapping solution similar to epics BEAST that they are going to offer via a plug in (its 3rd party).
Keep in mind ONLY beta 1 is out beta 2 will introduce new features including more UV sets per model and the light mapping I referenced.
Considering the price Torque 3D is kicking some major ass IMO, if its stable when it comes out of beta it will be a force to be recond with.
Oh and just a little background in case anyone wanted to know the REASON Torque3D is so much better than past garagegames endeavors is that they finally got some money to back it.
GarageGames was bought out by IAC (a huge company, that owns many popular sites online), after the by out garage games started instant action and proceed to revamp all their products.
Jeff Tunnel (founder of GG) having met his goals at Garage Games left with Ben Garney, Tim Aste (who frequents PC btw) and some others to start push button labs.
Now GarageGames is in a much better place and are producing a much better engine. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Id be interested in some feedback from someone who has used both this engine and Unity as they are in the same price range for indie producers. jocose, you havent used unity at all have you? do you know any major dividing factors between the two engines at this point?
I have used unity. However, I have not built a project on it so I am be no means an expert, but I am familiar enough with its features to know a few pros and cons.
Despite my excitement for what Torque 3D may become it is still very much in Beta. So if you need to build a project (with an engine you know will work) I would use Unity.
As far as features go Torque 3D offers full source code, a lightmap solution, dynamic shadows, physX, A great looking water block, some of the best net code out there (torque was originally tribes 2 engine), a river system (water flows and has dynamic physics so things float down stream), and a road building system. Both the road building system and the river system use 3D curves to which you can add points so you can make them as precise as you want.
Unity offers a very stable proven platform, lots of shaders already built in, a great art pipeline, no dynamic shadows (unless you pay lots extra compared to torque), great documentation, and a fantastic level editor, several playable game examples, a good collection of shaders, PhysX support, terrain & water, and more...
I didn't hit all the points for either engine, but you can go on garage game's and unity's sites to compare feature lists.
Overall Torque 3D isn't well documented, it's buggy, and it has a steeper learning curve than Unity. If you want to make small casual games that are quick to develop then Torque 3D isn't right for you. If you want to make a shooter, or take on some more ambitious project and have experience, time, and resources behind you then torque 3D offers a tremendous bang for your buck.
However, its still in Beta, so we don't yet know how far its going to go. GarageGames has never in its history devlivered something this featured packed this fast so its obvious this is a different ball game. You will have to wait and see if it can compete with Unity but from the looks of things that's what they are going for, but its not there yet.
They're also looking at increasing the licensing cost to something more in-line with professional apps. I wouldn't be surprised if Torque3D comes out in the $1,500 range, with minimal subsidization for current license holders.
Keep in mind though that depending on how stable it is, and the final feature set, it might offer much more in value to many users than Unity does. Also that would just be the highest price, there are already much lower pricing schemes that have been yet to be finalized so who knows how the actual details will pan out.
The point is though that even if the highest price is 1500 it may still be a very good deal if your looking for full source (provided its stable lol)
Jeff Tunnel (founder of GG) having met his goals at Garage Games left with Ben Garney, Tim Aste (who frequents PC btw) and some others to start push button labs.
Now GarageGames is in a much better place and are producing a much better engine. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Hah, I can't tell if you mean it got better because we left.
Actually, haven't used Torque 3D, been making 2D games since I left more or less.
NOOO, I wasn't trying to imply that at all GAWD TIM, lol.
I was jut talking about the money! Why did you leave by the way, care to comment lol? Only thing I read was that it was "time to move on" (or something to that extent).
(I fixed that post all is well now)
By the way push button labs looks awesome, i'm a big fan
I thought this might happen torque just makes everyone so angry. I was just trying to provide some information here, I fully recognize it could suck and I already recommended Unity. Please don't kick me in the nuts
jocose: questions at hand but first some background.
1: I've worked with both torque 1.4-1.5 and own TGEA.
2: I feel rather burned on those purchases primarily due to:
A: Art pipeline quirks and general annoyance
B: Poorly written/implemented occlusion of scenes and things in them
I saw Torque 3d at GDC this year and it looked like a decent improvement, especially in the art pipeline realm.
So question becomes: What kinda framerates are you getting in a reasonably complex scene of say at least half a million tris counting environment?
Can this engine take what is thrown at it, or does it look good only in tech demos?
I keep waffling on picking it up for 500$ but it would have to be worth the investment. As it stands to fix what I want to fix in TGEA etc would amount to me writing my own engine anyway.
Yeah, I should be clearer on my post. The earlier TGE we were using had very crappy lighting effects. The problem with the new system is, they are no longer supporting the old map building package. So the group I'm part of is try to decide if they should move to the new engine, which fixed many bugs, or keep the old engine, and have the nicer map editor.
Keep in mind, I'm only commenting on what I've read. I haven't touched the engine for a while now. I think, like Vailias, many people got ripped off with the previous engine.
NOOO, I wasn't trying to imply that at all GAWD TIM, lol.
I was jut talking about the money! Why did you leave by the way, care to comment lol? Only thing I read was that it was "time to move on" (or something to that extent).
(I fixed that post all is well now)
By the way push button labs looks awesome, i'm a big fan
Heh just joking around man, no worries.
RE: Why I decided to leave - Mostly, I had been working there for 5 years already and was feeling a bit bored and interested to try new things that necessarily weren't in the future path of the company. Jeff and Rick came to me with a great opportunity I couldn't pass on, so I took the pay hit and risked going startup/indie again. Some of my best experiences were as a startup/indie so I am pretty spoiled and wanted to get back to that lifestyle. The big studio thing was ok, just not my ideal situation. It's been nice to have both flexibility and accountabilty in what I do. It's harder work actually, but more rewarding in the end. It's funny having that sort of day to day decision making power back, we've turned down some pretty big-time work opportunities (cough major franchises cough) to just focus on little stuff and not have to grow to a huge staff yada yada yada. One thing I don't necessarily want to get back to again having to manage groups of people or playing at Producer, as it doesn't leave a lot of room for art or self-improvement, etc. Art is what I like to do most. Even cooler, somehow we are staying in business! Woo!
Back to the thread though, wish I could comment more on T3D, but truthfully other than what I've seen from friends and the public I don't know much about it. From my outside perspective it looks like they iterated some of the new rendering tech / prototype stuff developed by the game studio and then wrote a bunch of new stuff internally at the GarageGames studio on top of that.
I know Sickhead Games has been contracting a bunch on the engine and they do some great work.
It's a great day to be an indie developer however really when you think about it. There are several great low-cost alternatives from open source to Torque to Unity (heck even Source now). They are all improving, and driving competition with each other as well, which means they will improve even more. 5 years ago that wasn't a great situation. I can be non-partisan, and I like a lot of different engines.
I have yet to try the beta for T3D (mostly because I've been busy working on PushButton Engine(Flash) and our internal game projects). PBL is sitting on some pretty big announcements regarding games, but don't want to give it away and piss anyone off here. That will be a fun day when that goes out!
I have yet to try the beta for T3D (mostly because I've been busy working on PushButton Engine(Flash) and our internal game projects).
Hoooleeeee Crap! I hadn't heard anything about this PushButton Engine thing! I know what my next engine experiment is going to be. It almost makes me wish I didn't have to attend a wedding this weekend. Sunday afternoon I'm all over this PushButton Engine. Can't wait to take it for a spin.
Hoooleeeee Crap! I hadn't heard anything about this PushButton Engine thing! I know what my next engine experiment is going to be. It almost makes me wish I didn't have to attend a wedding this weekend. Sunday afternoon I'm all over this PushButton Engine. Can't wait to take it for a spin.
Cool, that rocks! It's still really early and beta so we haven't talked much about it at all really (unless you count the New York Times / GigaOM article which was random chance from GDC this year)
Open source so at least it's free, and the Flash networking stuff is pretty decent. We'll working on getting some demos and stuff going here soon as well as doing better and more documentation and tutorials, etc. Lots of fun making Flash stuff lately.
jocose: questions at hand but first some background.
1: I've worked with both torque 1.4-1.5 and own TGEA.
2: I feel rather burned on those purchases primarily due to:
A: Art pipeline quirks and general annoyance
B: Poorly written/implemented occlusion of scenes and things in them
I saw Torque 3d at GDC this year and it looked like a decent improvement, especially in the art pipeline realm.
So question becomes: What kinda framerates are you getting in a reasonably complex scene of say at least half a million tris counting environment?
Can this engine take what is thrown at it, or does it look good only in tech demos?
I keep waffling on picking it up for 500$ but it would have to be worth the investment. As it stands to fix what I want to fix in TGEA etc would amount to me writing my own engine anyway.
Hey sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I had to move on to some other tasks at work and didn't get a chance to mess around with T3D more until reacently.
I just ran a benchmark with the engine on my laptop comparing TGEA with T3D Beta 2.
It was a scene with 200 objects totaling 400,000 triangles, if I turn off the fancy lighting (with shadows and stuff which are buggy and cause a big performance hit atm) I get 180 FPS.
With the same scene in TGEA I get 30fps. I would say that's a pretty huge difference, but this really all remains to be seen. Garage Games just made a big post about how they are focusing on performance this time around, and so far they have been delivering on all their promises on time, if that continues we should see things only get better from here.
Oh and BTW I feel your pain on getting burned on TGEA. Garage Games did break promises, and also arguably did a poor job representing their product. However, that appears to be a lesson learned at the expense of a lot of developers, and while that is incredibly unfortunate we now have a new engine and a new situation at Garage Games and I am willing to look at it objectivly.
I simply have cautious optimisim and hope none of the mistakes that occurred before get repeated and so far they havn't.
Replies
Dynamic shadows look awesome, but still cause the system to lag. There is a light mapping solution similar to epics BEAST that they are going to offer via a plug in (its 3rd party).
Keep in mind ONLY beta 1 is out beta 2 will introduce new features including more UV sets per model and the light mapping I referenced.
Considering the price Torque 3D is kicking some major ass IMO, if its stable when it comes out of beta it will be a force to be recond with.
Oh and just a little background in case anyone wanted to know the REASON Torque3D is so much better than past garagegames endeavors is that they finally got some money to back it.
GarageGames was bought out by IAC (a huge company, that owns many popular sites online), after the by out garage games started instant action and proceed to revamp all their products.
Jeff Tunnel (founder of GG) having met his goals at Garage Games left with Ben Garney, Tim Aste (who frequents PC btw) and some others to start push button labs.
Now GarageGames is in a much better place and are producing a much better engine. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Edit: Tim Aste Rocks (just sayin)
Despite my excitement for what Torque 3D may become it is still very much in Beta. So if you need to build a project (with an engine you know will work) I would use Unity.
As far as features go Torque 3D offers full source code, a lightmap solution, dynamic shadows, physX, A great looking water block, some of the best net code out there (torque was originally tribes 2 engine), a river system (water flows and has dynamic physics so things float down stream), and a road building system. Both the road building system and the river system use 3D curves to which you can add points so you can make them as precise as you want.
Unity offers a very stable proven platform, lots of shaders already built in, a great art pipeline, no dynamic shadows (unless you pay lots extra compared to torque), great documentation, and a fantastic level editor, several playable game examples, a good collection of shaders, PhysX support, terrain & water, and more...
I didn't hit all the points for either engine, but you can go on garage game's and unity's sites to compare feature lists.
Overall Torque 3D isn't well documented, it's buggy, and it has a steeper learning curve than Unity. If you want to make small casual games that are quick to develop then Torque 3D isn't right for you. If you want to make a shooter, or take on some more ambitious project and have experience, time, and resources behind you then torque 3D offers a tremendous bang for your buck.
However, its still in Beta, so we don't yet know how far its going to go. GarageGames has never in its history devlivered something this featured packed this fast so its obvious this is a different ball game. You will have to wait and see if it can compete with Unity but from the looks of things that's what they are going for, but its not there yet.
The point is though that even if the highest price is 1500 it may still be a very good deal if your looking for full source (provided its stable lol)
Hah, I can't tell if you mean it got better because we left.
Actually, haven't used Torque 3D, been making 2D games since I left more or less.
I was jut talking about the money! Why did you leave by the way, care to comment lol? Only thing I read was that it was "time to move on" (or something to that extent).
(I fixed that post all is well now)
By the way push button labs looks awesome, i'm a big fan
*yawn*
We are possibly going with IndieZen. http://www.indiezen.org/
1: I've worked with both torque 1.4-1.5 and own TGEA.
2: I feel rather burned on those purchases primarily due to:
A: Art pipeline quirks and general annoyance
B: Poorly written/implemented occlusion of scenes and things in them
I saw Torque 3d at GDC this year and it looked like a decent improvement, especially in the art pipeline realm.
So question becomes: What kinda framerates are you getting in a reasonably complex scene of say at least half a million tris counting environment?
Can this engine take what is thrown at it, or does it look good only in tech demos?
I keep waffling on picking it up for 500$ but it would have to be worth the investment. As it stands to fix what I want to fix in TGEA etc would amount to me writing my own engine anyway.
Keep in mind, I'm only commenting on what I've read. I haven't touched the engine for a while now. I think, like Vailias, many people got ripped off with the previous engine.
Heh just joking around man, no worries.
RE: Why I decided to leave - Mostly, I had been working there for 5 years already and was feeling a bit bored and interested to try new things that necessarily weren't in the future path of the company. Jeff and Rick came to me with a great opportunity I couldn't pass on, so I took the pay hit and risked going startup/indie again. Some of my best experiences were as a startup/indie so I am pretty spoiled and wanted to get back to that lifestyle. The big studio thing was ok, just not my ideal situation. It's been nice to have both flexibility and accountabilty in what I do. It's harder work actually, but more rewarding in the end. It's funny having that sort of day to day decision making power back, we've turned down some pretty big-time work opportunities (cough major franchises cough) to just focus on little stuff and not have to grow to a huge staff yada yada yada. One thing I don't necessarily want to get back to again having to manage groups of people or playing at Producer, as it doesn't leave a lot of room for art or self-improvement, etc. Art is what I like to do most. Even cooler, somehow we are staying in business! Woo!
Back to the thread though, wish I could comment more on T3D, but truthfully other than what I've seen from friends and the public I don't know much about it. From my outside perspective it looks like they iterated some of the new rendering tech / prototype stuff developed by the game studio and then wrote a bunch of new stuff internally at the GarageGames studio on top of that.
I know Sickhead Games has been contracting a bunch on the engine and they do some great work.
It's a great day to be an indie developer however really when you think about it. There are several great low-cost alternatives from open source to Torque to Unity (heck even Source now). They are all improving, and driving competition with each other as well, which means they will improve even more. 5 years ago that wasn't a great situation. I can be non-partisan, and I like a lot of different engines.
I have yet to try the beta for T3D (mostly because I've been busy working on PushButton Engine(Flash) and our internal game projects). PBL is sitting on some pretty big announcements regarding games, but don't want to give it away and piss anyone off here. That will be a fun day when that goes out!
Hoooleeeee Crap! I hadn't heard anything about this PushButton Engine thing! I know what my next engine experiment is going to be. It almost makes me wish I didn't have to attend a wedding this weekend. Sunday afternoon I'm all over this PushButton Engine. Can't wait to take it for a spin.
Cool, that rocks! It's still really early and beta so we haven't talked much about it at all really (unless you count the New York Times / GigaOM article which was random chance from GDC this year)
Open source so at least it's free, and the Flash networking stuff is pretty decent. We'll working on getting some demos and stuff going here soon as well as doing better and more documentation and tutorials, etc. Lots of fun making Flash stuff lately.
Hey sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I had to move on to some other tasks at work and didn't get a chance to mess around with T3D more until reacently.
I just ran a benchmark with the engine on my laptop comparing TGEA with T3D Beta 2.
It was a scene with 200 objects totaling 400,000 triangles, if I turn off the fancy lighting (with shadows and stuff which are buggy and cause a big performance hit atm) I get 180 FPS.
With the same scene in TGEA I get 30fps. I would say that's a pretty huge difference, but this really all remains to be seen. Garage Games just made a big post about how they are focusing on performance this time around, and so far they have been delivering on all their promises on time, if that continues we should see things only get better from here.
Oh and BTW I feel your pain on getting burned on TGEA. Garage Games did break promises, and also arguably did a poor job representing their product. However, that appears to be a lesson learned at the expense of a lot of developers, and while that is incredibly unfortunate we now have a new engine and a new situation at Garage Games and I am willing to look at it objectivly.
I simply have cautious optimisim and hope none of the mistakes that occurred before get repeated and so far they havn't.