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Features
Rendering
Torque3D includes both a high-performance forward-rendering basic lighting engine, and a deferred-rendering advanced lighting mode so you can tailor your game to meet the needs of different customers. The modern rendering system includes per-pixel lighting, normal and parallax mapping, and materials generated by a high-level editor, or written from scratch in GLSL/HLSL. The engine comes with shaders for water, sky and sun, and many common material types.
The engine also has a powerful PostFX system allowing you to create custom post-processing effects. It ships with buit-in effects including:
- HDR/light adaptation
- Depth of field
- Lens flare and sun rays
- Screen-space ambient occlusion and FXAA
- Refraction, reflection and glow
Editors
Torque3D comes with everything you need to construct environments and levels from your assets. Shapes are imported in Collada DAE format and placed in the in-game editor. Switch to playing through your level with one press of a button.
- Powerful terrain editor that allows you to import terrains or sculpt them by hand.
- The shape editor provides tools for previewing and touching up your shapes after import.
- The road and river editor modes make it simple to place paths that become solid roads, flowing rivers or decal tracks across the terrain.
- A fully-featured material editor means you don't have to touch a line of shader code to create great-looking visuals.
- The GUI editor lets you place HUD and menu elements in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG environment.
- Torque3D will automatically reload assets that are changed outside the editing environment, enabling speedy development iteration.
- Editor modes are implemented as plugins, so you can add your own custom modes.
Networking
Since its inception as the engine behind the online shooter Tribes 2, Torque has consistently provided high performance, reliable networking for fast-paced online games. The engine has networking built into its core, allowing you to quickly get up and running with networked games.
Torque uses a server authoritative networking model that helps you to reduce cheating and exploitation. At the same time, the game state is predicted and interpolated locally so each client experiences a smooth view of the action. Time-invarying data is transferred via datablocks at client join time, reducing the amount of data that needs to be networked during gameplay.
Physics
Torque3D provides a plugin system for physics. There is a simple built-in implementation which can be easily swapped out for PhysX or Bullet libraries. They enable features like:
- Cloth dynamics
- Rigid body dynamics
- Destructible objects
- Destroyable joints
- Fluid buoyancy
Scripts and source code
When you get Torque, you get everything. The entire source code is yours to modify under the permissive MIT license. The codebase is mature and extensible with a plugin system, allowing you to easily add features of your own, or from other libraries, to each project.
If you're not the recompiling type, Torque provides a scripting engine using a custom C-like language called TorqueScript. You can create whole games without touching a line of C++. Check this out:
$minion = new AIPlayer(Fubar) { datablock = MinionData; }; $minion.setMoveDestination("50 0 0"); function Fubar::onReachDestination(%self) { echo("I made it! Says" SPC %self.name); }
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History
1998 Starsiege: Tribes
Developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra, Tribes was a landmark online shooter and the first incarnation of what would later become the Torque Game Engine, introducing the engine's signature large terrains, efficient fast-paced networking and bespoke scripting language.2001 Dynamix closed
Tribes 2, enhancing the original Tribes' gameplay and graphics, was to become one of the last games developed by Dynamix before their closure. Several Dynamix veterans went on to found GarageGames, licensing the Tribes 2 game engine which was released under the name Torque Game Engine.2007 Torque Game Engine Advanced
This incarnation of the engine focused on updating the rendering engine, including per-pixel shading and a new terrain system.2009 Torque3D
The next evolution in the Torque line introduced a modern deferred- rendering engine, an abstract physics layer with a PhysX implementation, and a COLLADA-based asset pipeline.2012 Torque3D MIT
As part of GarageGames' move towards being a service provider and consultancy, the Torque3D engine was released as free open-source software. The first Steering Committee was set up to manage community contributions to the engine, and has been going strong ever since.