Hello developers,

Today I want to talk about Torque engines, because I used them for a lot of our games. Torque engines are game engines made by GarageGames. There are 3 main types of the engines:

Torque Game Builder (TGB) - 2D engine for Windows/Mac
Torque Game Engine (TGE) - 3D engine for Windows/Mac
Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) - 3D engine based on TGE, but with a support of new technologies like shaders, it is only for Windows

There are other versions of their engines too:

Torque X - something between TGB and TGE for XNA
Torque 360 - TGEA for XBox
Torque for Wii - version for Wii
iTGB and iTGE - versions for iPhone

I’m very often asked how good the engines are. Here is a small list of good and bad sides of the engines:

GOOD:

• if you know the bugs of these engines and how to avoid or fix them, the game developing is extremely fast
• low price (but only for basic versions)
• easy porting for Mac OS X (I usually created any port of our games in 1-4 hours)
• use of Torque script - so you don’t need to be good programmer to create simple game
• networking (but only in 3D engines)
• usable GUI system (but usually only for simple projects)

BAD:

• the engines are slow (20.000 triangles in TGE means 30fps on Nvidia 8800 cards, TGB is able to show 5 times less sprites with the same FPS than our RakeX engine used in Jets’n'Guns)
• a lot of bugs
• bad documentation
• no support (the main support channel is forum. It is good for basic questions. For example, I posted there about 50 questions on advanced/expert problems and I got reasonable answer for only 2-5 of them)
• the engine core is botched, it looks like they took the original TGE created a few years ago and then they turned it into all the other engines, but this is not the best way

So why do I use the engines? Games like Phantasia, Trickball or Archmage are simple, so the creation of the games was very fast and didn’t need complicated technology. On the other hand, we had a lot of problems with bigger games like Larva Mortus or KingMania (too low FPS was always one of them). I can recommend to use the engines for simple games or fast creation of prototypes. But in case you want to start with a really professional looking game, I recommend to use something different. Engine tailor-made for your project should be the best solution!

Tovy..