New to TGEA - Top Down Camera "shooter"?

Hello all. It's been a while since I've touched Torque and recently purchased the TGEA engine because of all the flashy new stuff. I did some searching in the forums and didn't really find anything that met my need. I am looking to implement a top down shooter type control to the engine. Imagine if you will the camera being located directly above the TGEA orc and then when he shot it would go forward along the axis of his facing.

I break this down into two problems that I am trying to address.

1) Camera positioning. I saw years ago the advanced camera resource but it's woefully out of date and doesn't address TGEA. (Or does it? I saw another post where someone was making it work but was that in TGEA or TGE?) I tried searching but everything "top down" or advanced camera came back with nothing. Or it was out of date or related to TGB. I have TGB but my goal is for more of a top down shooter with minimal changes to the code so that I can have basically a 2d top down multiplayer game.

2) "Ray Trace" for firing. You know how if you go into third person mode and then you fire the weapon it seems to take the direction of fire as if it was tracing a ray from the camera so it never shoots foward? This I would like to change so that no matter if the camera is looking straight down at the orc when he fires, he fires along a straight line (to him that is) instead of something based on the camera position.

Again back to the top down shooter. Whether it's a space shooter like a galaga or like the old arcade games where you controlled the player movement and fired in the direction they are facing.

Thanks for any help or guidance.

-Will