Torques not that hard, just looks confusing at first because all the demo's have huge convoluted dir structures and its hard to find whats what.
One of the coolest things I've been messing with is the animation mixing and blending. The expoter is a bit complex,but for character animation you can mix several animation layers and blend them in realtime. Makes it pretty easy to cerate a large variety of character animations that look more dynamic.
So you can animate the arms torse and legs seperately and mix in you sword swing with your walk animation and your shot in the head recoil animations, if that makes sense.
You shouldn't be using TSE for mass market shareware anyway, its early adopters at the moment and a lot of things are being done on the CPU still, not the GPU. There's probably another year till release.
With TGE, our B3D loader even without any occlusion lor culling is as fast as blitz 3d maybe a little faster, and has no surface count limitations. And the opcode collisions it uses allows you to use arbitrary collision meshes the same way as you would in blitz, only the collision lib supports instanced collision so there is potential for a lot of optimizations we havent gotten around to yet.
Here's a couple of small screens from my GG profile that shows you the B3d loader (90% done as far as brushes go) in action, with 2UV's lightmaps, shinyness, 2X multiply blendmodes and stuff.
Will be adding shader support shortly using brush names to call HLSL shaders, with scriptable texture and UV handles.
THese shots are non shader TGE shots, using DX7 tech.
Cygnus, I'd just mess with the demo and the scripting language before you buy torque, get the book and see how you like it. For most games you would be using torquescript over 70% of the time, so if you don't like torquescript there's probably no point getting the engine really.
One of the coolest things I've been messing with is the animation mixing and blending. The expoter is a bit complex,but for character animation you can mix several animation layers and blend them in realtime. Makes it pretty easy to cerate a large variety of character animations that look more dynamic.
So you can animate the arms torse and legs seperately and mix in you sword swing with your walk animation and your shot in the head recoil animations, if that makes sense.
You shouldn't be using TSE for mass market shareware anyway, its early adopters at the moment and a lot of things are being done on the CPU still, not the GPU. There's probably another year till release.
With TGE, our B3D loader even without any occlusion lor culling is as fast as blitz 3d maybe a little faster, and has no surface count limitations. And the opcode collisions it uses allows you to use arbitrary collision meshes the same way as you would in blitz, only the collision lib supports instanced collision so there is potential for a lot of optimizations we havent gotten around to yet.
Here's a couple of small screens from my GG profile that shows you the B3d loader (90% done as far as brushes go) in action, with 2UV's lightmaps, shinyness, 2X multiply blendmodes and stuff.
Will be adding shader support shortly using brush names to call HLSL shaders, with scriptable texture and UV handles.
THese shots are non shader TGE shots, using DX7 tech.
Cygnus, I'd just mess with the demo and the scripting language before you buy torque, get the book and see how you like it. For most games you would be using torquescript over 70% of the time, so if you don't like torquescript there's probably no point getting the engine really.