The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop starts today
The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop starts today with Torque 3D. We will be revealing a new entrant to the list every day for the next two weeks, so keep checking back to see which other tech providers you should be looking at for your next project…
TORQUE 3D
Developer: GarageGames
Platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone, PS3, PSP
Browser support: Yes
Cost: PC/Mac/Web: $1,000 (indie, unlimited projects); $4k+ (studio licence, unlimited projects). iPhone: $500+ per seat. Console: undisclosed.
Published titles: Penny Arcade Adventures, Fallen Empire: Legions, Buccaneer, Dreamlords, Marble
Blast Ultra
Titles in development: Unannounced titles from EA, Bioware, Ubisoft and more
Middleware integrations: FMOD, PhysX, ODE, Pixomatic, pureLIGHT
The latest generation of GarageGames’ Torque engine, the slightly anachronistically-named Torque 3D, is gearing up to take back some of the market share that the firm – admittedly one of the very first companies to dual-target the indie/hobbyist and professional markets – has lost to competitors of late.
With a proven tech backbone that’s already available on multiple consoles – with PSP and PS3 set to join the crowd later this year – the focus for Torque 3D is the toolset. “It’s been completely overhauled, and we’ve focused particularly on the content pipeline for ease-of-use and iteration,” says the company’s Brett Seyler.
As such, as well as a robust COLLADA import pipeline, all assets are updated live in-engine from external tools, allowing for zero-second asset iteration. The world editor has also been completely rewritten, offering advanced editors for materials, decals and, most interestingly, rivers and roads.
That doesn’t mean that high-end graphical effects have been overlooked, though. The lighting model has been upgraded to a hybrid lighting model which it calls ‘light pre-pass rendering’ that the firm says is ‘similar to CryEngine’s’, supporting advanced effects such as screen-space ambient occlusion and light rays, soft particles and advanced wetness and precipitation shaders.
Although high-end features are a focal point for Torque 3D, the company is still putting as much focus as ever on low-end hardware, specifically netbooks, citing good performance on Intel 950 chipsets. The mass-market penetration is also targeted with the engine’s new Web Publishing features, based on technology GarageGames developed for its InstantAction web portal, which offers native performance through browsers.
Contact: 245 West 5th Ave. Eugene, OR 97401, United States
Phone: 541-345-3040
E-mail: licensing@garagegames.com
www.garagegames.com
Click here to read Develop’s new overview of the current state of the game engine development sector, which will be updated every day with links to all those that make the top 10.
This is the greatest game engine! Check out the available shader collection for Torque 3D at www.liman3d.com
Torque is a pile of trash. Just read the tons of bad reviews it has on it's own engine review site - devmaster.net
these are better:
www.abyssalengine.com
www.unity3d.com
"" Titles in development: Unannounced titles from EA, Bioware, Ubisoft and more ""
ahahah you must be dreaming. None of those companies would use Torque to develop games with.
torque is SHIT, unity all the way
unity 3d or life
Torque + Unity = Shit
Either design your own engine or use something like UDK/Cry the rest is just BS.
Jeff, Abyssal is worse then Torque! You should try and use them sometime before saying that.
Personally Unity is ok, Cry/UDK both ok.
If I had my choice I'd use Ogre 3d for rendering and write the backend of the engine myself. The point of these game engines is to save time how ever if you don't have millions (ok Unity source is like 40k) to get the source they won't conform to your every need.
torque is one of the most powerful engines, dont know why is 10th it have to be before blitz
Torque 3D is not a bad engine, i honestly don't know where all of this is comming from, yes, torque is hard to get into, for begginers to game dev and pros alike but im fairly sure that most people who post hate about torque are bias based in the fact that they havnt tryd to do in torque what the can in their primary engines, or atleas not in the newer versions (not TGE and TGEA). and as for "UDK and Cry engine is tonnes better than all the others" attitude. unless you can pull "i think its like 1 million us" out of your ear then comparing the two is rediculous.
@ Apr 10, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I retract my original claim regarding Torque 3d "I was wrong", it has come a long way since I last made my post. I am surprised if not blown away by what they have done with the new release, one year more and it might actually be comparable to AAA engines.
For those waiting to buy a copy my only advice buy it while it's still $99 after version 1.1 it will climb in cost. Unity has officially been blown out of the waters, there is just no comparison given that Torque comes with source code access.
Torque 3D now is free and opensource, Torque is a great game engine and now possibly be ported to Linux and then posibly for Mac, if this occur then we have AAA game engine for Windows, Linux and Mac for FREE.
Just an FYI since this article was published. T3D is now open source under the MIT release rules. Additionally, T2D will be released shortly under the same rules. I can only speak for T3D, since I am part of the dev team. We (the team) have already released version 2.0 on GitHub. This was a major bug fix and speed improvement. 3.0 is expected in March, and it will include a number of new features and fixes. T2D will release under MIT soon and I highly recommend checking it out. www.garagegames.com.
Ron
Full Disclosure: I am a part-time *unpaid* member of the T3D steering committee and it is our responsibility to ensure T3D is a viable and competitive game engine now and in the future.
