Torque,
I always wanted to like it but just can't there are far to many cons. It's great that they are the first to jump on an opportunity and open doors for indies. But their tech is always dragging behind the more modern competition.
Their art pipeline tools are pretty poor, and they rely heavily on outdated BSP technology which is great for underlying structure in an engine, but not really for visuals.
They don't address really basic graphical features and art pipeline tools. only 1 UV for DTS even in the shader engine. No fixed function materials worth a damn in either engine in either TGE/TSE
Rumours of dropped support for linuz and soon the Mac in favour of windows and 360 is cause for concern. Not cross platform for TSE anytime soon except for 360.
No entity system, and a awkward scripting language. the tools for converting maps to torque ones is always buggy. Funnily enough the one map editor that got the most acurate results was WED for 3DGS. Last time I used torques Map2Dif there was rounding off of floats, so some things wouldn't line up properly or become non convex when exported from quark, hammer, or Radiant.
terrible art pipeline, with Max plugins having barely changed in over 5 years. Things have moved on and for the most part left torque behind. Allthough having said that, finished games are being released which puts it up to the top of the list for actualy shipping games. And its the only quick path to 360 at the moment.
I've made quite a nuisance of myself on their forums, bringing up the major issues with the art side of the engine on occasion. The response is usualy, you can do anything with torque, you have the source go fix it yourself.. OK!
For support you mostly have the community and the resources they create, many of which are out of date and simply don't work without a lot of prior knowledge and recoding. There are few high level functions avaliable even in script something like rotations is a real pain, often requiring you to understand a lot of tricky math to do even simple things that you take for granted with something like blitz3D.
I rate Torque 6/10 overall, and 4/10 for art pipeline.
I always wanted to like it but just can't there are far to many cons. It's great that they are the first to jump on an opportunity and open doors for indies. But their tech is always dragging behind the more modern competition.
Their art pipeline tools are pretty poor, and they rely heavily on outdated BSP technology which is great for underlying structure in an engine, but not really for visuals.
They don't address really basic graphical features and art pipeline tools. only 1 UV for DTS even in the shader engine. No fixed function materials worth a damn in either engine in either TGE/TSE
Rumours of dropped support for linuz and soon the Mac in favour of windows and 360 is cause for concern. Not cross platform for TSE anytime soon except for 360.
No entity system, and a awkward scripting language. the tools for converting maps to torque ones is always buggy. Funnily enough the one map editor that got the most acurate results was WED for 3DGS. Last time I used torques Map2Dif there was rounding off of floats, so some things wouldn't line up properly or become non convex when exported from quark, hammer, or Radiant.
terrible art pipeline, with Max plugins having barely changed in over 5 years. Things have moved on and for the most part left torque behind. Allthough having said that, finished games are being released which puts it up to the top of the list for actualy shipping games. And its the only quick path to 360 at the moment.
I've made quite a nuisance of myself on their forums, bringing up the major issues with the art side of the engine on occasion. The response is usualy, you can do anything with torque, you have the source go fix it yourself.. OK!
For support you mostly have the community and the resources they create, many of which are out of date and simply don't work without a lot of prior knowledge and recoding. There are few high level functions avaliable even in script something like rotations is a real pain, often requiring you to understand a lot of tricky math to do even simple things that you take for granted with something like blitz3D.
I rate Torque 6/10 overall, and 4/10 for art pipeline.