I never liked torque, being primarily an artist it's mostly the lack of effort in the art pipeline tools and missing features.
To my knowledge even TGEA still only does 1 UV channel. Unless they changed DTS in the last 6 months. Which is in my mind a terrible omission.
On the coding front, I know very few coders that like Torque enough to use it, mostly due to bloat and lack of documentation. I think they cleaned up the code now, Even TGEA used to have the old voodoo code referenced throughout and everything was a big mess.
From what I understand their underlying rendering hadn't really changed that much between the two engines. TGEA still has lousy shadows and lighting, and it's BSP nature favores older graphics hardware since it doesn't batch geometry into large chunks optimal for modern GPU's, but send thousands of small chunks that was favorable for old hardware. (like sending too many surfaces to the video card in B3D, only BSP prioritized the redering somewhat so you didn't get quite the same performance hit of B3D so long as you stick with very low poly chunks and simplest collision volumes. But complex geometry still isn't handled well in TGEA the way most modern engines do.
In many ways B3D still offers more freedom than torque in the rendering department simply because B3D has better fixed multitexturing with 2 UV's.
Torque has shaders but only 1 UV channel, so you can't export lightmaps, or AO maps, or other effects that use more than 1 uv channel. Which limits things even with the benefit of shaders.
The other thing is that Torque is kind of set in its ways and is only really well suited to FPS unless you are willing to spend a good year sifting through the bloat and rewriting large chunks of the engine to work how you want them to. There are a lot of community hacks and addons that try and address the engines shortcomings, but compatibility between different versions is poor. So a lot of debugging, tweaking and sometimes rewriting is needed to make them work. Especially when they don't state which verson of torque they were intended for.
Having said that, it's been a good 8 months since I last looked at torque. Garage games don't tend to address core problems with their engine quickly though. They seem to like throwing stuff at their engines that look cool on the surface, and making their engine compatible with as many platforms as possible to increase revenue with expensive per platform, per title licensing. And ignoring fundamental flaws in the core design of their engine.
Thats the message I get from the more experienced coders I know that have looked at it, and my own experience with art pipeline tools. Which are bad enough that I turn down paid work that comes my way from time to time.
I don't believe they actually support linux officially any longer. Their strong points are support for all consoles if you can afford the licensing, and great networking built in.
Prarie Games, one of the more successful torque developers ended up developing a hybrid engine that used Ogre for rendering. They recently (last couple of months) got bought out by Garage Games and the lead coder now works on the TGEA rendering portion of their engine.
To my knowledge even TGEA still only does 1 UV channel. Unless they changed DTS in the last 6 months. Which is in my mind a terrible omission.
On the coding front, I know very few coders that like Torque enough to use it, mostly due to bloat and lack of documentation. I think they cleaned up the code now, Even TGEA used to have the old voodoo code referenced throughout and everything was a big mess.
From what I understand their underlying rendering hadn't really changed that much between the two engines. TGEA still has lousy shadows and lighting, and it's BSP nature favores older graphics hardware since it doesn't batch geometry into large chunks optimal for modern GPU's, but send thousands of small chunks that was favorable for old hardware. (like sending too many surfaces to the video card in B3D, only BSP prioritized the redering somewhat so you didn't get quite the same performance hit of B3D so long as you stick with very low poly chunks and simplest collision volumes. But complex geometry still isn't handled well in TGEA the way most modern engines do.
In many ways B3D still offers more freedom than torque in the rendering department simply because B3D has better fixed multitexturing with 2 UV's.
Torque has shaders but only 1 UV channel, so you can't export lightmaps, or AO maps, or other effects that use more than 1 uv channel. Which limits things even with the benefit of shaders.
The other thing is that Torque is kind of set in its ways and is only really well suited to FPS unless you are willing to spend a good year sifting through the bloat and rewriting large chunks of the engine to work how you want them to. There are a lot of community hacks and addons that try and address the engines shortcomings, but compatibility between different versions is poor. So a lot of debugging, tweaking and sometimes rewriting is needed to make them work. Especially when they don't state which verson of torque they were intended for.
Having said that, it's been a good 8 months since I last looked at torque. Garage games don't tend to address core problems with their engine quickly though. They seem to like throwing stuff at their engines that look cool on the surface, and making their engine compatible with as many platforms as possible to increase revenue with expensive per platform, per title licensing. And ignoring fundamental flaws in the core design of their engine.
Thats the message I get from the more experienced coders I know that have looked at it, and my own experience with art pipeline tools. Which are bad enough that I turn down paid work that comes my way from time to time.
I don't believe they actually support linux officially any longer. Their strong points are support for all consoles if you can afford the licensing, and great networking built in.
Prarie Games, one of the more successful torque developers ended up developing a hybrid engine that used Ogre for rendering. They recently (last couple of months) got bought out by Garage Games and the lead coder now works on the TGEA rendering portion of their engine.