Customizing Torque for a Medical Application

Hi Guys,

I am new to Torque, and also to gaming, although I'm an experienced C++ programmer. I'm involved in a start-up company that develops a robot for rehabilitation treatment of post-stroke patients. We would like to integrate a game with the treatment virtual environment. It seems that I can use Torque for what I want to do, but I have some customizations to make and I'd like to better understand what there is to do before purchasing and diving into learning the engine. The idea is to show a virtual arm on the screen that moves in a 3D environment. The virtual movement is controlled by the patient arm that is attached to the robot. In the virtual environment the patient may move cups or other objects around. We would also like to have effects like coffee spilled from a cup and collision detection. Here is a list of my knowledge gaps. Can anyone help me to be more confident that this is the right way?

1. The game is part of the application. The game has to render inside a window supplied by the main application so it would fit nicely with the whole user interface. Anyone knows if and how it can be done?
2. We need real-time communication to the main application to transfer coordinates and other movement aspects. Can it be done with TCP/IP for example (There is a TCPObject - is it appropriate?)?
3. The communication should go both ways, in case for collision detection, for example. Is it a problem? Can I do it the same way as the in-going input?
4. I might need to change the graphic scene for different patients or different treatments. Can such an action be performed on the fly by loading another scene / world (maybe with similar object names)?
5. I know I can compile Torque engine as a DLL, but in this case I need to take care about initializations and DLL interfaces. Do you think this is a good idea that worth the trouble?

Any help and guidance would be appreciated. I am not afraid of tweaking code, as long as I understand the whole structure. I couldn't get a clear picture of the game executable structure from the documentation I found. Any hints or links for that?

Danny Gera