GarageGames announced the availability of an exporter tool that allows Blender, the Open Source 3D content creation suite, to be used with GarageGames’ flagship Torque Game Engine technology (the power behind Tribes2). The Blender exporter and Torque runs on the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows platforms. The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is a fully featured AAA game engine with a multi-player network code, seamless indoor/outdoor rendering engines, skeletal animation, DnD GUI creation, a built-in world editor, and a C-like scripting language. Unlike most commercial game engines, as part of the low cost license ($100), you receive all C++ source code to the multi-platform gaming engine.
Torque Turbo Gets Blender Support for Multiplatform Game Creation
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Seems like it’s becoming a more or less complete construction kit for making FPS games without any programming skills. Soon every l33t hax0R can create their own “i R0x0R u 5ucK5v FPS” with just some mouseclicks and some minor optional graphical talent.
Anyone remember those old construction kits for the C64: “Wargame construction kit” and “Shoot’em up construction kit”? Much fun was had with those.
As someone who has tried and (partially failed) to create a 3D terrain engine for a game I welcome this effort. I’d personally have nothing against licensing such a toolkit for 100$ if it’s as good as it seems to be. If there only was some other tool for modelling than Blender. It requires far too much effort for even the simplest things (like getting out of it without resorting to a remote login and killing it!).
this just means that quality instead of quantity will come into play
I have a license to Torque, which I’m using as a base for a game I’m designing. The engine is so easy to work with and so good at what it does that it’d be silly for somebody like me (a first time game developer) to use something else. There is also the option of modding another game, but then you don’t get source to an engine and you end up not learning what you seeked out to do in the fist place. Torque isn’t comparable to the Crytek (www.crytek.com) engine used in the upcoming FarCry game, but it’s an excellent engine.
I hope that more will follow this example… It would be awesome to have a free modelling tool which is available for Linux that could be used for modding. That would finally give me a reason to learn how to use this monster of an application.
Wings3d modeler ” as good as it gets “
Does anybody here have experience with both Torque and Nebula Device (http://nebuladevice.sourceforge.net/) ?
Are they comparable?
Tribes 1 and 2 are a testament to how good the Torque engine is. I’m really interested in their network code. A few years ago before I got broadband I was playing Tribes 1 on a 56K modem… in a session with 63 other players. I didn’t believe it at first, but I kept checking the player score list, and even tried doing a head count. Very impressive.
With all the features they listed, this engine isn’t limited to just FPS games. I can see this easily powering a RPG in the scale of Morrowind or Gothic 2.
Yes Wings 3D is the best that is out there. Blender is best used for the finishing touches on a model, UVW layout and animation and then finial export. I check out Think Tnaks , which is a game made with Graragegames and it is ok it alot like BZflag but with rolling hills, turrents that rotate and pivot up and down and a very cartoon flare.
…with Crystal Space?
I’m working on an open source driving simulator and we’re using OpenDE for physics, OGRE for our graphics engine and SDL for cross platform input handling. I really can’t imagine trying to create something like this from scratch. All of these free, high quality open source components are going to let open source games surpass the quality of commercial offerings within a couple of years IMO. BSD licensed code like ODE may even be a part of a lot of games though nobody but the developers know about it. Isn’t open source middleware inevitable?
http://forum.racesimcentral.com/forumdisplay.php?f=577
funny that today I was just thinking about what ‘game’ engine I should look into – and here is this note from Eugenia and a few nice links from others also. thanks all.
sorry to see so much anger here…
Blender is an awesome tool! And it is improving every day. The lastest version released, 2.32, now has the fantastic rendering power of Yafray integrated.
It does require a little bit of dedication to learn, but once you understand the basics, you’ll find out that Blender’s interface is one of the most productive and well thought of its kind.
And it is so small that people hardly believe that it is so capable.
Torque Turbo getting Blender support for game creation surely is a good thing. Kudos to both teams.
Heh, it does take quite a bit of dedication to learn how to use Blender. I guess they don’t believe in the 4-viewport layout for work, otherwise they’d make it a little easier to setup the 4-view layout. I can get myself in a lot of trouble when I start splitting the views.
Actually only Tribes2 is on the torque engine, Tribes1 runs on a Glide-based engine that I cannot recall the name of.
Nonetheless, they were both very impressive for their time, and I think Tribes2 is still able to hold its own today. It certainly doesnt look like Farcry, but you dont have 64 people running around at the same time in Farcry.
Tribes 1 ran on a completely different engine that was primarly designed for Glide or Software based rendering. It did have a Direct3D component but it really sucked performance wise. Eventually someone hacked in OpenGL support but even that was iffy at best. The great thing was that even on a AMD K6-3 450 with an original TNT card and a 56k modem you could play with over 32 players on massive maps and have one heck of a deathmatch. I still throw it in from time to time for some good, old fashioned fun.
Tribes 2 however well, its engine was ahead of its time and not really optimized that well. It took months before it would even run on most systems, let alone well. I’d really not like to try playing it on a 56k modem either. On Cable/DSL its laggy at times and I never got a ping rate lower than 100 where in CS I could get around 40.
Anyways, I love the fact that they license it for so cheap and include so much. It really is a great engine and while its not top of the line anymore, its still close. There’s also few engines out there than can match its openness, massive amount of players and still maintain decent framerates.
How does this package stack up against $300,000 software? ; )
I honestly need to know.
Sammitch Boi