Torque Game Engine

The Torque Game Engine, or TGE, is a modified version of a 3D computer game engine originally developed by Dynamix for the 2001 FPS Tribes 2. The Torque engine has since been available for license from GarageGames to independent and professional game developers.

History

Shortly after the release of Tribes 2, many members of the Dynamix team left to create their own company, GarageGames. They negotiated a deal with Vivendi Universal to buy the Tribes 2 game engine. After extensive modification, the Torque Game Engine was created, though it was initially called the V12 Engine until a Canadian software company threatened GarageGames with a trademark infringement lawsuit.

Features

As well as being a 3D graphics engine, TGE provides robust networking code, scripting, in-engine world editing and GUI creation. The source code can be compiled on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

Torque Game Engine's most acclaimed feature is its ability to interface with other programs over the internet. It is considered to be especially low-latency on the whole and is able to, in most cases, hold relatively lag free games amongst fairly large groups of players who are using 56k modems.

The game features a terrain engine which automatically creates LODs of the ground so that it renders the least polygons necessary at any given time. The terrain is automatically lit and textures applied to the terrain can be blended together seamlessly.

The model supports loading of 3D models in the .DTS file format and the .DIF file format.

The .DTS models can be animated using either skeletal animation or morph target animation. It is also possible to blend multiple skeletal animations together by playing them simultaneously or automatically tweening between the different positions of bones in the skeleton. .DTS models are typically used for characters and vehicles though occasionally, they are used for buildings and interiors.

.DIF models have pre-calculated lighting and as such are ill-suited for animation. Instead, they are used for buildings and interiors. They automatically have bounding boxes that perfectly match the visible geometry. This is so that it isn't made overly difficult for a player in a Torque Game Engine game to move or fire weapons around them.

The game's rendering engine features environment mapping, gouraud shading, volumetric fog, and other effects such as decals which allow for textures to be projected onto interiors in real time. (For example, a player in a Torque Game Engine Game might fire a weapon that leaves a bullet hole in the wall. The bullet hole would be a decal.)

Limitations

Torque's poor documentation is often cited as one of its weak points. While there is a large amount of documentation avaiable, TGE has several oddities and idiosyncrasies that are unintuitive and poorly explained. This shortcoming is mitigated somewhat by an active development community and the Torque Developer Network, a wiki used to expand Torque's documentation.

The audio support in TGE is significantly less robust than that found in Tribes 2. Tribes 2 was written using the FMOD proprietary audio library. In order for Garage Games to maintain TGE's low price, Garage Games had to port the audio code to the only cross platform audio library available, OpenAL. The two libraries have significant underlying differences, and as a result certain features such as Tribes 2's voice chat are noticably absent from TGE.

Derivatives

Over time, Torque Game Engine has been expanded on with the creation of derivative engines. Notably, some are sold on the GarageGames website.

Torque Shader Engine

Torque Shader Engine is an expanded version of Torque Game Engine made to support shaders and other graphical features such as per-pixel lighting.. This version of the engine has been ported to Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems. Several Xbox Live Arcade games have been released using the Torque engine, most notably Marble Blast Ultra.

Torque Game Builder

Some time after the release of Torque Shader Engine, the company went on to create Torque 2D. Torque 2D was a game engine designed for 2D games based off of the Torque Game Engine. The name was eventually changed to the Torque Game Builder because apparently the ultimate goal is to make Torque Game Builder a game-making suite.

Torque Lighting Kit

Torque Lighting Kit is a sort of expansion pack to the Torque Game Engine developed by John Kabus. It adds a variety of enhanced lighting features to the Torque Game Engine. In the latest release features such as dynamic lighting and shadowing were added. Also, an optional resource [http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1178 was created for the new version of Torque Lighting Kit which features something similar to high dynamic range rendering.

Licensing

The Torque Indie License allows the engine to be used by independent game developers for USD $100.00 per programmer, provided the programmer is not employed by a company with an annual revenue of greater than $250,000. The alternate commercial license is available for $495 per seat. The licensing model is heralded by low-budget teams as it saves them the time and effort of programming their own game engine without requiring a large amount of money to license. (Compare the $100 price to the $350,000 for Unreal Engine 2. ^*)

There are, of course, other requirements to the license such as a requirement to show the GarageGames logo before the game starts up (in the case of an indie license, commercial licenses do not require this) in all released games. ^*

External links

Torque Engine product page
Torque Indie License
Torque Commercial License
Torque Engine detail and reviews by users
Roar of the Indy - article in Business Week on the Torque Game Engine

Tools

Codeweaver (formerly TorqueDev) - A free integrated development environment for TorqueScript
Torsion - A commercial integrated development environment for TorqueScript. Currently in beta.

Game engines | Portable Application