Torque3D is now on GitHub, MIT licensed | Hacker News Reader

Torque3D is now on GitHub, MIT licensed

github.com

79 pointseugeniodepalo23 comments

It seems they haven't reached their Linux client goal yet, with only 6 days to go:

http://www.indiegogo.com/torque3d-for-linux

They are only at $9,144. Maybe with a little visibility on the front page of HN they'll get a pop? I don't have much use for the app, but I'd pay $10 to see it ported to Linux. Signing up...

Don't inflict that on poor Linux users. Now you will cooperate to them get flooded with suit games that make your machine slow.

We tried: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026882

Apparently Torque3D has been on Github since September 2012. Here’s the blog post where they announced it: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21886. And here’s the most recent blog post about it: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22106.

The blog post http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/21876 notes that they are open sourcing only Torque3D for now, to see how it works out. Their other engine Torque2D is still closed-source.

I read somewhere (Can't remember) but a Torque developer said that they are looking to open-source Torque2D.

Indeed they are:

The Future of Torque 2D is Open Source - http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22065

I wonder how this compares in terms of features to http://www.ogre3d.org/ which is also MIT licensed and has a decent level of cross platform support. It seems to be a more complete game engine solution compared to Ogre which is only a graphics engine.

O_o have you ever tried programming something for torque 3d?

It's not fun.

Do you have something more substantive to say on this subject? I haven't tried programming for it and am curious to know why it's "not fun".

I tried.

On fixed pipeline the thing is ugly. On shaders it is horribly slow.

Then it is buggy, the physics are horribly broken, and some default stuff are way beyond broken.

Back then, torque was kinda expensive, they used source access as selling point, but there was a internal joke in the community that the source was available because without it was impossible to do anything. You just plainly needed the source to do even things seen in official samples.

Also when I used it the documentation was so bad that you did better by not reading it and going by trial and error.

By the way: Ogre is not much better.

For pure graphics I used to recommend Horde3D

It's been a few years but I always enjoyed using Ogre's API. It was nice.

That said, Ogre has always been clear about it only being a 3D engine and not a game engine (which add network, sound, input, etc. capabilities).

That's great. The Torque engine code improved tremendously over the years. In the early days, the code was rough, as it was inherited from a game studio that built it in a rush to ship a game and carried over from ~2001. It got better and better over time though and by 2006-2008, it was solid. Great performance, good features. Lots of the interdependencies at the system level were refactored and lots of the ugly bits of code (long inheritance chains, massive classes, etc) had been removed or deprecated.

Not sure how it continued to evolve later, or if they ever got rid of that scripting language... but it was on a good trajectory 5 years ago.

Glad to see it go open source, in any case. Lots of good memories with this engine and the smart, indie game community around it.

I wish people paid more attention to Cube2 instead... That is a awesome engine.

Don't know what your experience was like but I found eihrul et al utterly inhospitable to tinkerers/new contributors, and it always seemed like Cube2 was not intended as a generalist engine. I'm not really surprised that the projects that use the engine are all controlled by that core group.

That's because it's a lab experiment, not an actual platform for game dev on Linux.

eihrul used to be very kind to me...

Also you can just go and fork it, like Hirato did (and created Sandbox) or the guys from Bloodfrontier.

In both cases they created the fork without eihrul wanting it, and after a while eihrul recognized their work and started helping them too.

Cube 2 is only suitable for indoor scenery, just like the old Quake engines. You can't have good outdoor scenes without too much work and too much wasted FPS.

Here's a cool T3D physics demo released yesterday. http://www.beamng.com/entries/25-BeamNG-and-Torque3D

Very nice. Though where's the iOS port that they use to offer for sale? Was the code for that not released?

Can someone whose used both compare this to Unity3D for me? I know Unity is closed source, but it's the one I've used in the past (and found it really nice.)

How much harder is Torque3D to develop for (or is it easier?)

Well, Unity was always easier to use. They focused on slick editors and tools early on.

It used to be that Torque had higher-end features, better performance and source access.. while Unity lacked many graphics and other high end features (they still don't have a great networking solution AFAIK), no source access but was way, way easier to pick up and use out of the box.

Now, with all the investment Unity has put in, I think it has most or all the capabilities you could want... and lots of other great stuff like first class cross platform support, including mobile. And it performs pretty well, at least as well as Torque by now, I imagine. Still no great networking, and still not even available source unless you pay huge (six figure+) fees.

Hard to argue that Torque should be the choice, at this point. Unless you want source access or a free solution. Unity has evolved into a pretty robust engine over the last 7 years, and its out of box experience and ease of use have always been pretty amazing (and fun!).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com