
Torque 3D to be Released on Github under the MIT license - Zolomon
http://garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876
======
potatolicious
This is great.

For those who haven't followed for 11 years, Garage Games started off selling
the Torque engine for $100 - full stop, no tiered licensing schemes, making
them at the time _the_ cheapest game engine on the market.

The engine itself came from that venerable and dated Tribes 2, which was a
commercial flop, and when the studio went under the tech rights when to GG.
I'm not sure if GG was a third-party or more of an ex-employee spinoff.

In any case, I've been doing amateur game dev since around that time, and
Torque has always struck me as a highly troubled product. They were offering
$100 licenses to a 100% C++ codebase, which attracted all kinds of dreamers
who really had no realistic hope of hacking on a C++ engine. I imagine their
support load was immense.

I'm surprised they've survived this long - at $100 a pop you wouldn't expect
the cash flow to be great. But kudos to them for open sourcing this.

~~~
borlak
Tribes 2 was not a commercial flop, it did extremely well for a 2001 game.

The studio (Dynamix) did not "go under", they were closed by Sierra/Vivendi
for "restructuring", which was a shock considering the success of Tribes 2. In
fact, the next game (Tribes: Vengeance) was green-lighted due to in large part
the success of Tribes 2.

GarageGames was partly made up of some ex-Dynamix employees.

~~~
bitwize
And that's all too frequently how successful studios are rewarded in the
post-2000s mega-conglomo AAA game industry: shuttered up and their "resources"
(programmers, designers, etc.) distributed to polish turds on the parent
company's other big projects.

------
orta
I remember that it used to be a choice between Unity and Torque 3D if you
wanted a solid 3D engine + integrated toolset. My guess ( I've been out of the
loop in making games for a while ) is that this is related to pressure from
the success of Unity. In which case I say good luck, the more open source
engines out there the more code for people to learn from.

------
programminggeek
Torque is awesome. It was really quite unnerving when GarageGames was shutting
down for a short time before I believe they were purchased by a different
company.

Torque2D and the iOS version are both fantastic for quickly and easily
building 2d games. However, with cocos2d and cocos2d-x, Torque2D has quickly
lost it's appeal outside of the fantastic scene builder.

------
kayoone
In todays market with Unity3D, UDK, CryEngine all offering free versions this
doesnt really stand a chance. But its free and for hackers who want to dive
deep into C++ Game Engine code its a cool thing to hack with!

~~~
qznc
Well, i wish there would by something like that for Linux. Some of them can
compile the games for Linux, but the tools are Win-only.

~~~
cykod
Torque did build and run (In-game editor an all) on Linux back in the day,
although support was always iffy (not sure if that's pre-Torque3D or not) -
maybe open-sourcing will bring out some Linux hackers to shore that back up.

------
TillE
This seems to be a good example of how _not_ to do a product announcement. No
release date, no "email me when it's ready" form, just wait and hope that
you'll become aware when it's out. Frustrating.

I'd like to hope that this will become an open source alternative to Unity,
but I'm skeptical. It's from an era where every game engine inexplicably felt
the need to create its own mediocre scripting language rather than using a
real language. Replace TorqueScript with C# or Python or Lua, and then it
starts to get interesting.

~~~
angersock

      It's from an era where every game engine inexplicably felt the need to create its own mediocre scripting language rather than using a real language. 
    

I'm not sure that you're placing it correctly in its historical context. There
really weren't (as far as I recall) really suitable implementations of
scripting languages for games at the time and there were certainly poorer
amenities for people wanting to use them.

Would you consider UnrealScript one of these toy languages (it is) or QuakeC,
or the goofy approach of Out Of This World? A problem needed solving, and
these devs found something that worked well for their purposes.

~~~
ayuvar
This is the first time I've heard anything about Out Of This World's scripting
- can you provide any more info on it?

I always just assumed it was hardcoded.

~~~
druidsbane
'Out of this World' had its own virtual machine! Source review below:

<http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php>

~~~
voltagex_
All of his code reviews are excellent. Highly recommend the Quake ones.

------
jamesu
Torque pretty much started my development career, so this is great news to me.
Its suffered a bit over the years, especially after InstantAction folded. Even
so there is a sizeable group of indies who use it. I myself have been involved
with in quite a few Torque projects, and even contributed to the core engine
in the early years.

It's not perfect, but AFAIK its the only MIT licensed engine which is feature-
complete out of the box. I think opening the code is a great step forward and
provided GarageGames handle it right we could see some great improvements in
the engine from contributors.

------
Irfaan
Getting a database error. But thankfully Google's got it cached:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:idAZix5...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:idAZix5Pyg8J:garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876+http://garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
kimmel
<a href="[http://www.ogre3d.org/>OGRE](http://www.ogre3d.org/>OGRE) 3D</a> a
MIT licensed game engine that has been around since 2001. I think some of the
games in the OGRE gallery are far superior to most Torque engine games.

~~~
puivert
Strictly speaking Ogre is just a 3d engine. But yes, would be nice to hear how
people see this comparing against ogre + pile of open source libs + custom
game logic core.

------
sjwright
To launch something on github, doesn't github to be working?

------
jiggy2011
One thing I've always wondered about these game engines that are marketed
towards Indie developers is that I don't tend to see many very successful
games developed using them.

For example the list of Unity3d games here: <http://unity3d.com/gallery/made-
with-unity/game-list>

There's only a handful there that I've heard of.

Most of the Indie games that have been hugely successful (braid, super meat
boy, minecraft etc) all seem to use a minimal but fairly custom engine rather
than a monolithic solution.

I wonder if this is partly because these engines are usually designed to offer
features that are as close to stuff available in AAA games as possible meaning
that they are better for producing "me too" type games rather than something
unique. Whenever you start using large amounts of someone elses code inside
your product you are always going to take on some limitations in terms of what
that code was designed to do and which edge cases were thought out in advance.

One example of this might be in Braid where you have the ability to rewind
time. I'm assuming that the game does this by keeping a list of all the
previous states of the scene graph in memory and having flags set on objects
which do not rewind when everything else does. In this case it is important
for the programmer to try and keep the memory footprint of the scene as small
as possible so that a large number of states can be kept in a machine with low
memory.

If you were trying to develop this using a monolithic engine that was built
under the assumption that time flows forwards and old states can be thrown
away it might be such a hassle to implement this that you either throw the
idea out or curtail it to the point where it affects how good the game is.

Edit: Further to this I often get the same dilemma when choosing things like
web frameworks. A lot of these provide built in functionality for stuff like
authentication and internationalisation. However I often find that the built
in solutions to these things don't quite meet the requirements for what I'm
trying to build. So the solution tends to be to not use the built in
functionality and implement these things myself but then I run up against
other parts of the built in functionality or third party plugins which assume
that I'm using the "out of the box" solution.

This is where Java with it's Factories and Interfaces, or functional languages
which allow me to pass implementation around can be very useful. On the other
hand I'm not always sure it merits the extra complexity so I prefer to use
loosely coupled libraries. If that means that I sometimes have to write
boilerplate that converts between object types etc then so be it.

~~~
acgourley
I know for a fact Unity powers some of the largest mobile releases out there,
so that list is probably incomplete. I've also seen it be the default choice
for 3D mobile development at at least two more top studios I've been talking
to.

~~~
commandar
That list is definitely incomplete.

Kerbal Space Program is Unity-based and has been fairly successful, but
appears nowhere on that page, for example.

~~~
jiggy2011
I guess the key phrase there is "fairly successful". I'm struggling to think
of a game that has been an outright hit that has been built on top of unity.

~~~
commandar
Depends on how you define successful. Unity games tend to be built by smaller
teams and therefore don't need to sell millions of copies to be a financial
success like big studio games do.

~~~
jiggy2011
I mean Indie games specifically. The most successful indie games I can think
of (e.g minecraft / braid) didn't use any particular monolithic engine.

What I'm wondering is whether this is simply a co-incidence or whether it's
that the most successful Indie titles are ones that take big risks in terms of
introducing wildly different gameplay and perhaps using a monolithic engine
like Unity makes building such a game more difficult because the engine itself
will be inherently opinionated.

In other words, if you make a decision on which technology to use before you
have a complete game design are you in fact reducing your risk/reward without
necessarily realising it?

~~~
chipsy
It depends on how you formulate your risk model.

The industry titans can afford to develop "any" amount of custom tech, subject
to schedule constraints, since the art and marketing budgets tend to vastly
outweigh the engineering now. But in the last decade, they've tended to shy
away from really ambitious tech projects, favoring incremental improvements to
a general world-simulation model that applies across all the typical AAA
genres. In their risk assessments, they've decided what kind of product and
technology is being made early on, so that the bigger expenses aren't in
danger. As well, sticking with the same toolset allows it to be further
refined.

Indies, on the other hand, have a lot to gain by taking on ambitious
technology and de-emphasizing the costly assets - and usually, the technology
itself isn't risky, so much as it is just an "unknown engineering challenge" -
something that could be a few days or a few months. Something like Braid or
Minecraft can be achieved by experimenting and chipping away at the concept
over a few iterations. Minecraft's earliest versions didn't have a lot the
"big features" that are in the game now.

But it's also incredibly scary to take on those projects all alone, so the
majority of indies aren't even going to consider it. Indies are looking for
"easy" too, even if it's bad for them from a business standpoint.

I do think that engines like Unity have a lot of value and can even be
extended to include some new technology. (I started working on something that
builds on Unity's physics system recently - and it shows some promise to be a
unique product) But the people who are taking on the unknowns just tend,
statistically speaking, to be the people confident enough to write everything
themselves too.

