Does torque support....

#1 Out of the box, I don't think the Torque Game Engine supports those, although you could add that yourself to the source code.

What you'll be wanting to look at is the Torque Shader Engine, has these feaures built in.

--Amr

#2 Note that Torque doesn't abstract rendering into a scene graph or rendering API. It just sort of... renders. By calling OpenGL. Directly inside the content objects. The way it "supports" D3D is by building a fake implementation of OpenGL on top of it.

So, in Ogre3D, your content object will detect when it changes renderable state, and poke that new state at the scene graph. The scene graph will then, when presenting, choose how to shuffle the object state to the graphics card, using an abstract rendering API. This gives you two levels of separation from the hardware, which used to be a Big Deal, but these days won't even register in VTune.

Meanwhile, in Torque, there is zero abstraction. The object doesn't even detect state changes, it re-derives what it should look like, each frame, and issues drawing commands directly. There are some helpers to help the object do this (like the DTShape stuff), however, the flow is still the same.

#3 I think you looking for this.
http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=6431

#4 You'll find that this is a good read. Some of the info here is out of date (TSE does have a very nice lighting system now, for example) but it's still a good overview of the limitations of TGE and TSE.

#5 I'm a big fan of Ogre, not only is it an exceptional render engine, its easy to extend and custom build a solid game engine with it, and it has amazing art pipeline tools with 3ds max that put most commercial engines to shame. The high level abstraction makes coding with it easy too, and there are many off the shelf addons to get you up and running fast.

#6 If you like building game engines, sure, Ogre is a great place to start building one :)

#7 It doesn't take any time at all for a competent coder to build an engine out of Ogre. Our C++ coder wrote one in 3 months that we are using for a couple of projects. And Even me, an Artist managed to code a pretty fun little Aerial antics demo over a weekend. Doesn't really show off Ogre3D all that well, but it was a fun beginner programming exercise for me.

s93153354.onlinehome.us/aa2.wmv

#8 Rendering isn't necisarily the most complex and hardest thing in a Game Engine. Personally the collision system and networking system are the two that I would least like coding from scratch. I guess thats why many people choose to start from one of Torque's engines.

#9 Collisions are there, you have a choice of several addons to support that. We are Newton, and ODE for different projects. There's also a AGEIA, and a couple of other libs that plug right in with no extra work. Or you can use the Gangsta wrapper thats a custom physics API for ogre that lets you use any of 5 interchangeable physics libs.

Theres also an OPCODE addon for straight collisions without physics, Raknet and TNL addons. SDL, or OIS input libs plug right in if you want more than what ogre offers already. ANd you can write your game in several languages. C++, C#, Java, VB.NET, Python and we made a 3D module for Blitzmax with it.

It also has LUA, and Squirrel scripting addons. The toughest part is probably going to be AI, but currently Torques AI isn't all that great out of the box.

One nice thing is the exceptional fixed function pipeline, as well as shader support with material LOD and fallbacks that you can set up for different GPU's. So it runs on a broad range of hardware whilst only requring one engine for shader and non shader cards.

#10 I find that the most time-consuming part of building a game production system is the tools. Ogre comes with animation and model exporters, which is a good start, but you'd need world editing tools, and scripting tools, and phsyics tools, and soon you're spending all your time making GUIs instead of working on game code.

Quote:
Torques AI isn't all that great out of the box.

Torque has AI?

#11

Quote:Torque has AI?

Yes, and there are 2 resources... AIGuard and AIPatrol that plug right in and work great.

#12 Also with just little scripting you can turn the swarm script from the skeleton pack into good Ai. So you can have swarm of spiders, chicken or cats hunting you down for the kill.