Torque Game Engine Advanced Open Beta

Did you say Open Beta?

I am happy to announce the release of the TGEA 1.7 Open Beta!

We, here at GarageGames, have decided to go out on a limb and allow all owners of the Torque Game Engine Advanced to get their hands on the TGEA 1.7 beta as we continue nail down the remaining issues.



Still early screenshots from our Oasis demo


Why is this a Beta?

At this point we consider TGEA 1.7 feature complete and of a quality and readiness that we trust TGEA owners to take a look and test things out with the understanding that it's...well...a beta :) There are still some known bugs. We'd *love* to get everyone's help identifying and squashing these and as many other bugs as we can. Early access to this, one of our biggest releases ever, will allow us to keep an open dialogue about the direction of our products and their features.

Michael Perry has done a ton of work on the Getting Started, Mission Editor, GUI Editor, Using Art Asset documents but we still have a ways to go on some other areas of the documentation. We will continue to work actively on this while TGEA is in beta and look forward to getting feedback as we add the final touches to make this a full release.

What will you get (for FREE!)

I covered a lot of things in my previous blog, so I will only hit the highlights:

• 1) Major code cleanup and refactor - The GG Game Studios team put nearly a year of work on the underlying engine code and their effort shows in the number of bugs fixed and how much simpler it is to work with the code.


• 2) MegaTerrains - As you may have seen in Josh Engebretson's recent blog, the legacy terrain system in Torque has been extended to allow for *much* larger and much more detailed terrains. These new MegaTerrains include all the amazing real-time terrain editing features of the original Terrain system. It should make getting the terrain you want for your game in place easier than ever.



Creating a MegaTerrain Video



• 3) Polysoup Collision - We've taken Ben Garney's OPCODE Polysoup Collision implementation and extended it to better integrate with the environment and lighting. The improvements are looking sharp! Quickly drop in your mesh objects and levels and get up and running with them in no time.



Using Polysoup Video



• 4) SFX Sound Layer - The new sound layer is getting a thorough testing over in the games on InstantAction and has already proven to be enormously easier to work with. Tom Spilman will continue to roll in cool new features and improvements over the course of the beta.


• 5) Getting Started - A primary focus of this new release is making sure that new users can get up and running on TGEA as quickly as possible. We are doing this by making sure that TGEA owners have top notch docs available to help them hit the ground running. We are also providing a great selection of game examples to show tried and tested implementations of the most common problems you will encounter when building your game.

Why TGEA 1.7?

Version numbers are a funny thing...What metric do you use to determine how big of a jump in version number you should make? The number of features? The amount of time spent on it? The amount of money?

By all these metrics, this release warrants a very big jump. The changes, though not all of them sexy, are together an enormous improvement over TGEA 1.0.3. Users digging into the code or really banging on the stability and performance of this new release will notice right away that, though this is a TGEA release, it's much different than any Torque engine ever released before. Some of you have heard us refer to "Juggernaut" as our internal repository of the latest and greatest tech. Well, in many ways that's true, but there's a lot work that has to go into a release like this one before it's really usable by Torque developers outside GG offices. That's the work I've been doing for the past few months. We're releasing this under the TGEA banner because it is the most advanced stuff we've got. It's been mentioned before, but Legions, ScrewJumper, Marble Blast Online, Buccaneer, and many other titles forthcoming have all been built on exactly this tech, so it's very battle-tested.

Some of you might be looking at our version number history in the past and saying "hmmm..." Well, if you look back over the development of TGE, it is fairly easy to see the snail's pace of version numbering next to a mountain of features and bug fixes between each version of the engine. Looking back over the last 7 years of TGE development, it is pretty obvious that we have easily more than doubled the functionality and usability of the engine (just ask some of the old timers ;). Taking the longview and looking at other new engines that have run through 3 full version numbers in one or two years before fading away, it makes us sometimes wonder why this release shouldn't be called Torque 2 or even Torque 3!

There are certainly people at GG who'd rather keep a release like this low key...maybe roll out with a small announcement as we have in the past of TGEA 1.1 etc. As a developer, I sometimes fight my own cautious nature in talking enthusiastically about my own work. I think most devs are the same. But TGEA deserves more of a splash than that. Or at least that's what the marketing dudes keep telling me. =P Ultimately, how did we settle the version number debates at GarageGames? With lively discussions and guerilla nerf battles!





Let's get cracking!

Grab your vey own license to TGEA, hop over to your account page to download the Beta from your TGEA download page, and start sending us feedback and bugs!

With your help, we can make this the best release of Torque yet!