Engine Features

#1 I believe that per-pixel lighting and normal maps are supported; you can define your own custom materials that hook up to your own custom shaders and do anything you want... or there is a generic material that will feed many types of shaders. It also supports post-processing effects, like motion blur, etc.

Basically just add your HLSL .fx files to your project, then assign GenericMaterial to your object and set the Effect Filename to your FX file. You can also bind various parameters as required by the shader's input. (or if you have a common shader you use a lot you could inherit from RenderMaterial and give your material properties corresponding to these parameters).


As far as shadows go, right now it just has a BlobShadowCaster component, but the architecture is very extensible. You can create your own shadow rendering component that would add render instances to the scene manager's shadow rendering bin. It sorts the rendering of the bins correctly so that opaque vs translucent vs shadow vs etc rendering happens in the correct order. The great thing about the component system is that you can put your component into your game project or into your own re-usable game library, without having to modify TorqueX source code if you don't want to.


The rigid body physics works, but the original implementation doesn't support moment of inertia - the angular component of applied impulses was being ignored. I posted an enhanced RigidBody in the TorqueX Pro forum that implements moment of inertia and center of mass, so that works well enough. It has some constraints built-in like ball joints, but no gears/motors/springs. There is full raycasting support, collision, contact, shock steps, etc. If it helps, I am using it to do a four-point raycast vehicle with suspension and it all works.


No video support right now. If you are targetting the Xbox 360 then I don't know of anyone who has a video solution other than $200,000+ engines; if you don't have a ton of video then there are projects out there that can take the video frames and store them as compressed textures, then play back the textures onto a surface. It works, it just takes up a ton of space.


It does have networking support, and of course you have XNA's networking support as well.


No AI that I know of, but using various delegates (like OnCollision) you can certainly get notifications when things happen, then have some sort of AIComponent make move decisions. There is a system in the FPS demo game for making various objects controllable, then abstracting the controller (such as which player or an AIComponent). The demo game uses this to let you "use" a turret it you are within range of it, where the output of the Player is connected to the input and camera of the turret, then switched back to the player object and player's camera when you stop using the turret.


3dsmax export is handled via the 3dsmax DTS exporter; there are lots of good tutorials in the TGE and TGEA areas on the Torque Developer Network, as well as out on the web. You can follow those - TorqueX will use the exact same DTS files. The animation support is good - you can create animation threads and tie the values of the animations to the game state, so in my case the suspension shock arms will retract or extend based on the physics. The only thing to note is that the collision shapes of the DTS models are ignored right now - you specify collision primitives separately. There is a Mesh collision implementation for terrain, but it doesn't work on movable objects right now. I was thinking of extending it but haven't yet had a need.



Now on a roadmap, that is something I would also like to see. I know that the 3D TorqueX Builder is under development and should be out "soon". The videos of it in action are really cool.

As for other features, the TorqueX devs seem to be really quiet and tight-lipped so I have absolutely no idea.

Personally, I think of TorqueX Pro (version with source code) as a really great starting point - a 90% complete engine - that will save me a ton of time vs implementing something from scratch on XNA. I can only assume that it will keep getting better with time and adding more features. Remember - the 3D version only came out in March!

#2 Hi Russell,

thank you for the reply!

It seems that TorqueX is still a little rough. :-(

I do not understand well if TorqueX is a open or closed source project.
Please, Can you clarify my ideas on this?

I am working on a little visual simulation and so I am not targetting the Xbox 360.

Is possible to use TorqueX in a winform application?

I think that TorqueX is a very interesting platform and the 3D TorqueX Builder a very cool tool, but for the use of this technology in a business project is important to have a good documentation and at least a list of features.

Ciao

Stefano

#3 The TorqueX Pro license includes full engine source code.

Yes, you can use TorqueX in windowed mode.

#4 Very good! :-)

Is there any example of winform+TorqueX ?

#5 forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1028285&SiteID=1

forums.xna.com/thread/10166.aspx

forums.xna.com/thread/10166.aspx

The last one is more specific to getting xna games working in visual studio 2008, but has some winforms crap in it.

#6 Also, TorqueX is closed-source.

#7 Thank's for the reply... I will try followinmg the examples.

#8 Just to make David's statement a little clearer because often times people don't understand the difference between closed-source and 'with source'. TX is indeed closed-source, which means you can not distribute any of the code from the engine in _code form_. For example, you couldn't paste a snippet of the code in this forum post.

You can however view/modify/etc the source code if you have a TX Pro license. So you can do whatever you want to the source, except distribute (in code form, you can build it into an exe or binary file and distribute that with your game).

#9 Ok, thanks for the clear explanation!