Torque 3D to be Released on Github under the MIT license
garagegames.com
garagegames.com
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.
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.
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.
Guess it's time to start wearing my old GarageGames t-shirt again. Unfortunately, college was a few years and a few pounds ago...
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.
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.
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.
I always just assumed it was hardcoded.
http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php
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.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:idAZix5...
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.
Kerbal Space Program is Unity-based and has been fairly successful, but appears nowhere on that page, for example.
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?
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.
KSP is actually a good example of this as well. They've had to make a few design decisions because of engine limitations. But it's also let them get a game that's quite good that's developed a dedicated following fairly quickly.
Wasteland 2 would also be a project to watch. They're one of the highest profile projects to go with the engine.
This brings up an interesting point though. For those starting a carer in "Indie Gaming" should they migrate to Unity or it they can learn OpenGL they should do that?
Unity comes with a hefty price tag though, I think $1500.