Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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