TGE Dead?

#1 I think so.

TGE doesn't have the greatest graphics engine in the universe (that belongs to Carmack's baby, Doom 3). That's ok. TGE is designed to be visually appealing, and more importantly, a solid engine.

Take the unreal engine, for example. It's got good graphics and such, but the reason that they can charge a few hundred thousand for the license is because its got a solid core - a scripting language, good networking, support for major modelling packages, tested reliability, and all the miscellany that you need to actually make a game and not a technology demo. Having that in Torque - the GUI, scripting, and networking code - is easily worth the effort.

Torque has the potential to look good. You need to have good modellers and texture artists. I'd suggest adding Melv's code patches, too. But basically, it's a matter of garbage-in, garbage-out - if you give Torque something beautiful to display, it'll display it just fine... You won't end up so behind the curve that people'll say, "Oh, it's another old and out-dated Torque game." (Unless you forget to texture your models or something ;)).

Remember, you've got the source code. You can up the texture resolutions and add extra rendering passes all you like, or use someone else's code to do it, when said code is released. The rendering technology in Torque is secondary in value to the core functionality that you get in the package.

#2 I agree with Ben... All that TGE needs now is solid docs... ( may be a consolidation of tutorials).. i have started a project for that .. I think this is sorely what torque needs

#3 You get the source with the license, you can make sure that Torque meets your graphical standards by adding whatever rendering features you want.

There is a team that has added per pixel and vertex shaders to Torque and it looks every bit as good as anything else that is currently available.

Just as a side note, their work is not available to the community, but does show that it can be done if you know OpenGL.

#4 Ryan Armstrong has said many times that his team plans on giving back to the community. I know they have DOT-3 bumpmapping almost complete, and I think are working on shaders.

Hopefully, more teams will also donate--in one form, or another--over the coming months and help keep Torque up-to-date.

Eric

#5 Thank you guys, for all the insight, and I think a nice book(or something like it) on Torque, would be great.

#6 Thanks for the plug there Eric ;) Yea, I agree with what has been said. I am no pro coder or anything (still learning :) ) but the Torque engine is a very solid piece of work. Sure it has its shortcomings, but if you look around at this community, you will find that most of those are already being worked on, or are on someones queue. So you get a very solid engine, with excellent netcode, and a lot of strength in other areas, such as GUI, scripting, and all around stability. PLus you have access to a very large and very helpful community. AS for the graphical side of things, as Eric pointed out, my team will be donating a large portion of the code we develop that we feel the TGE community can use.

Current Projects the TA Team is working on:

DOT3 Bumpmapping: Nearly completed. Will be able to be applied to a .dts, .dif and terrain file.

Displacement Mapping w/ a very efficient tessalator.

Wrappers for Cg. The wrapper for nVidia's Cg is also nearing completion, and will allow you to access any and all nVidia chipset features, and utilize the very efficient Cg language to do so.

Once these features are in TGE, you will have a lot of graphical power as far as the engine goes with shader support and bumpmapping. Displacement mapping will really let you crank up the detail level for higher end cards, but be warned it does require a GeForce2/Equivalent or higher with vertex shading capabilities.

We are currently looking to release at least bumpmapping around early November, and we hopeful will also be able to release the nVidia wrapper and displacement mapping as well.

After those enhancements have been completed, we will be tackling expanding .dif files capabilities with breakable capabilities, animation, texture lighting, and transparency, as well as working on some shader specific effects. Later on we will tackle dynamic lighting, but this is a while of, and a very big task.

Bottom line: stick with TGE, as it is, it is a great engine for indie gamers and professionals a like, and the cons that it does have, are already being worked on by the community.

#7 I think you're having some kind of communications disconnect with your coders, Ryan. Rendermonkey is an IDE. It really doesn't make much sense to produce a Rendermonkey wrapper.

#8 Whoops I posted that wrong sorry. Thanks for catching that, I'll edit it.

#9 Half Lifes popularity can attest to the fact that graphics are not what counts in a game. It would be nice to have them available to enhance the mood, thus intensifying the story.

#10 CounterStrike has crappy graphics...doesn't that pretty much answer the question?

Torque is capable of good graphics. You need good modellers, good animations, good textures...but you need those in any game. A bad model will look bad in Torque...and just as bad in any other engine.

I would guess that for 99% of TGE projects, the engine itself is not the limiting factor when it comes to graphics.

#11 I agree. Thus far, I've only seen a handful of screenshots that have actually outdone Tribes 2. You need art, not code, to have good graphics in a game--and you can push the poly counts much higher than in T2, because hardware has advanced a lot since its release.

#12 *cough* except the majority of the market hasn't upgraded there computers yet. You really limit your market when you push the hardware too much.

Besides graphics don't help your game if it gets in the way of playability. Not to mention if it adds complexity to netcode, your in for a painful deployment.