Review

I started using Torque engine a few weeks ago. As a torque newbie I would like to share my toughts with you. Hearing thought from experienced programmer might be helpful for your future developments.

First of all Torque is very powerful engine and I like it very much, but it has some disadvantages.

1. Although Torque script is very flexible, sometimes it confuses things. Scripting is thightly coupled with engine which is a very big disadvantage from my point of view. For a very simple application you are forced to use scripting. As a programmer I can easily say that, debugging scripts is very painful operation. Also maintaining and pointing errors inside the scripts are very difficult.

2. Torque has very week documentation which shadows the power of the engine. Basically as a developer I want to see bunch of global variables and singleton instances (both coding and scripting sides) of the project I have been using. That is really impossible in this engine.

3. Also when you investigate codes, it is really impossible to follow executing statements. That is because a lot of main ingame states are changing outside the executed code. Changes takes effect inside the scripts, sometimes that can be a gap.

4. You have no idea which functions, global variables, object instances that you are allowed to use inside the scripts.

5. Documentation, documentation, documentation. As my first impression, documentation work, left to end user. Game engine is on a stable version 1.5 but there is nearly no documentation please take a look at http://www.garagegames.com/docs/tge/ this link and please take a loot at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library link. Which one is generated for programmers?

There are a lot of classes inside the Torque. A few sentence which explains what a class does would have been very effective even inside the code.

Let me give you a simple example. I did use Gamebryo engine, which has week documentation too, on an AAA title. Also I have used a company's own engine in Europe. There are well known AAA title released on that engine. For both I rarely take a look at documentation, everything was inside the code. Assume that I want to implement POV and A* technique in Torque, which I have implemented several times before for 3D titles. If you ask me do I have any idea where to start, I honestly answer no. The documentation should give information to a programmer that where to start programming. Which assests game engine using, basically what is the global or ingame instance of the scene root object. Where is the main entry of the application etc. etc. Keep in mind that there are 20 different filters on game project and also there are at least 7 projects inside the solution. Who can be volunteer to dig up nearly 500.000 lines of code to only find the objective of a single global varible? Also how much time that operation takes?

Those are some basic disadvantages of the engine. Please keep in mind that we are human beings. Also we are purchasing engines to speed up our works ;). We may require some help on working someone elses codes and we don't want to buy or don't have time to read the books ;). We may require to see what a function does and what its arguments does instead of reading the knowledge which we know already from the books. Also we may not want to copy paste someone elses scripts or codes.