Port Torque 3D to Linux | Hacker News Reader

Port Torque 3D to Linux

indiegogo.com

53 pointsklaussilveira14 comments

As one of the early Torque licensees (great way to spend $150 for a teenager), I have a soft spot in my heart for Torque.

I somehow completely missed the announcement that it was MIT licensed now!

For people wondering what Torque's 'special sauce' is - Torque has a world-class multiplayer/networking layer, one which was pretty amazing even when it cost money (considering its competition). It handles 100+ players on the same server, together with vehicles, etc. It also has/had really great heightmap/world editing built in, but plenty of other engines have this now, and better.

Its achilles heel was always the content pipeline for non-terrain geometry - I haven't heard much recently so I don't know if that's changed? (Ie, so much of the worlds we interact with in 3d games nowadays are built with the same tools as player models are; while the hills may be heightfields, the rock outcroppings and cliffs and other things are often 3d models. Last I remember, Torque still needed its non-terrain geometry to be built with the kinds of BSP/subtraction-based editors we all used in the Quake 3 days.

AFAIK (and it's been a few years since I've looked), most people still block out interiors with the DIF (bsp-style) editor, but do most of the details and decorations with a bunch of static DTS shapes (very similar to your heightfield/rocks example). And there is now a pretty nice native DIF editor and you no longer have to use Hammer and weird converters or something wonky like that. Mostly due to hardware getting faster, the engine handles a lot more DTS's than it used to.

I'd say the content pipeline is pretty good these days. There's exporters for practically every 3d package.

It's certainly still designed like a "last-gen" engine, but that's not a terrible thing since those techniques are well-known and refined by now, and a lot of that makes it a better fit for mobile than a more "modern" engine.

I also missed that it was under the MIT license as well but it has been quite a while since i've used it.

Will have to check it out and see what's new in it.

As of a few years ago, the content pipeline had gotten quite good. I mean, not like Unreal or even Unity... but nice, and miles ahead of where Torque was in the early days.

To me, the big problems with Torque outside pipeline were: 1) Tooling (only the 2D engine and old 3d terrain builder had really nice WYSIWG tools 2) The damn scripting language... wish they'd moved to first class support for external bindings or an internal framework with standard 3rd party languages 3) Super old school, nasty game class structure (eg their "Player" class)... tons of inheritence and megaclasses that are just gross.

I think they were working on lots of that stuff before they sold the company, in addition to modernizing the graphics, etc. Don't know how far any of it got, but hopefully it is cleaner now.

Remember the engine was built in the late 90s and wasn't rearchitected for years, so it was what it was. Might be way better now, I don't know.

Anyone know if the plan is to fix up WINE where it doesn't work, or is the plan to write a Linux abstraction layer for their tools?

Either way is good, but fixing up WINE would have benefits even for non-gamers (such as myself).

They are porting the engine to Linux. One of the main advantages is that this allows Linux developers to develop natively and use Linux libraries and toolchains.

Didnt they succeeded a kickstarter campain lately? why are they doing indiegogo too?

I couldn't find any information on this. Maybe you are thinking of this game that uses the Torque 3D engine?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/70755535/dead-state-the-...

Huh. I've been using the older Torque (still 3d, but no shaders) on Linux for years. Anyone know how different these are?

As one of the early Torque licensees...

I wish that it rot in hell, and I don't suggest it to anyone ever, not even my enemies.

Really? I was also one of the initial licensees and I feel like it's the most value over the years I've received for $100 ever. Even though I've never released a game with it, having a "real" game engine (warts and all) to play around in and try out ideas in code, and learning how to get stuff from a DCC tool into a real engine was hugely valuable. Also the fantastic support and community around the engine is unmatched (at the time, I don't know what it's like these days).

It's certainly not a "make game for dummies", it's hard work to get something built with any engine, but unlike a lot of "easy to use" engines, Torque ships games.

The Torque code base is really awful. One of the most broken pieces of code I've ever seen.

Exactly...

When I used torque I was already doing some professional game development, the only thing worse than torque was gamestudio a7

If you guys looked at several years ago, you should probably say "was" awful, as opposed to "is".

I haven't followed for years... but even circa 2007 and 2008 it had undergone huge rewrites from the old 90s and early 2000s nastiness with their simulation layer, scripting hooks, and high level classes. Was moving to a much cleaner componentized system with much better patterns throughout.

Or, maybe the codebase has actually gotten worse since 2006+, when it was shaping up pretty nicely. That could well be, I don't know. But such comments would be higher value if you at least reference approximate timeframe, as this product has been around in various forms for 10+ years, if I recall correctly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com