Torque 3D Development - Release!!!

We're finally here. Release day!

Download the Torque 3D 1.0 release from your account now!

It's been a bit quiet for the past month while we sprint to the finish. I've been in Europe demoing Torque 3D to publishers, studios and the press (you'll hear more about this soon). Meanwhile, the whole team here has been putting in a monster effort to bring you the most stable, solid release of Torque ever.

If you've already made the jump, you know that this is a whole new breed of Torque. The tools are ground breaking for development productivity. The content pipeline gets your art into Torque at light speed and live asset updating lets you iterate on your content in tools of your choice and watch them update in Torque instantly.

What's Inside

If you've been following these dev blogs, you've seen almost every feature of Torque demonstrated first hand. You can also find all these details neatly organized on the Torque 3D page as well. So down to details...here's what's in this release:

Engine Advanced Lighting* Particle System Revamped Terrain System COLLADA Import Pipeline Audio API Improved Material System Improved Skinned Mesh Performance PostFX System* Improved Water Blocks and Planes Physics (via PhysX)* Live Asset Updating New Tools River Editor Road Editor Datablock Editor Decal Editor Particle Editor Material Editor Shape Editor Viz Toggles Collada Exporter (for Interiors) Improved Tools Terrain Editor Terrain Painter Object Editor GUI Editor

Publishing** Windows (D3D) OSX (OGL) Web (FF, IE, Chrome, Safari) Projects PhysX: Cloth Room FPS Example: Burg Blank Room Deathball Desert * Limited or N/A on OSX ** Console licenses for all major platforms available separately.  Contact licensing@torquepowered.com for details.

FPS Example? Yes. If you've been a part of the beta groups, you've seen "FPS Genre Kit" as a project in previous builds (including Beta 5). We are planning to build out a much more robust and complete for-pay "FPS Genre Kit" (with improved functionality and documentation), but we want to minimize confusion between the projects. "FPS Example" has all of the same functionality as "FPS Genre Kit" from the betas. What you're seeing here is less content, but primarily a renaming.

Now, some of you are wondering "what's Burg?" Here is your answer...



In a couple weeks, we'll also be releasing Rasmus Deguchi's War Machine demo. Check it out here:

What about...

Gerhard's stuff
From the beginning, we've been very impressed with Gerhard was able to do with older version of Torque. I had hoped to ship Torque 3D with at least one demo of his stuff, but we encountered a few obstacles. Gerhard lost the artist he was working with and on the programming side, we struggled to keep his projects compatible with the Torque core, particularly GFX. Demos like "Wetness", "Depth of Field", "SSAO", and "Soft Particles" all showcase some great artwork and clever extension of Torque. We now have all these technical features in this release and neatly integrated in the PostFX system, with the exception of Wetness. We're going to follow up on that and build a nicer, more flexible implementation of Wetness into PostFX. See the discussion of that here. Much <3 to Pat Wilson and Sickhead for doing all this kickass PostFX stuff, including Light Rays, Scatter Sky and yes, even lens flares / coronas.

Undercity Demo
The Undercity Demo was built primarily to show at GDC last March. We're really proud of what Logan put together for us and we're looking at doing more work on this demo before releasing it either as part of the forthcoming FPS Genre Kit, or as a FPS Example.

Pacific Demo / Forest Kit
The Pacific Demo is built using Sickhead Games' Forest Kit foliage technology add-on. The Forest Kit is slated for a release to coincide with Torque 3D 1.1. This branch is already being actively worked on and you'll hear more about both the 1.1 release and the Forest Kit add-on in the coming weeks. Tom's already posted a nice teaser showing ground cover materials being properly lit by both Advanced Lighting, and Basic Lighting, all with wind animation.

Barricade Demo
The Barricade Demo was originally built to show off Torque technology circa 2006. Yikes. Sickhead Games are working on an updated version of this to be released in the near future.

Warrior Camp Demo
We never got to a point where we were satisfied with the way this looked, so it's been paused until we decide what (if anything) we want to do with it.

Luma's Racing Kit
Still in the works! Luma's been jamming on all kinds of other cool projects, including Rev, but they are working on finishing the Racing Kit in the next few months.

How is Torque 3D licensed?

The Torque 3D 1.x license is currently posted on the Torque 3D page. You can view it there. This document governs the Professional and Studio licenses. You'll find no reference to the "Basic." Why? As I've mentioned on several occasions where it's come up, we were never really hot on the spec for "Basic." It confuses the primary product spec ("Professional" and "Studio" share identical features) in creating a feature delta and frankly, the number of people who've jumped on the "Professional" license has convinced us that a "Basic" version is not really needed. What you'll see contemplated in the EULA we've posted is an "Artist" version instead. What we're considering here is offering a binary only, full-featured version of Torque 3D for $500 / seat. Discounts for owning prior versions of Torque would apply.

If you'd like to make your opinion known, log your vote in the form below. We'll defer making a final decision about this for at least a month or two.


No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.

What's Next?

A couple weeks ago we spun up an official Torque 3D 1.1 branch for work in parallel to the 1.0 release. The primary goals for the 1.1 release are:

1. Performance and optimization
This will mostly be targeted at improving Advanced Lighting (shadows), but the uber geniuses at Sickhead and GameClay keep coming up with ways to get cycles back all over the place. Don't be surprised to see huge improvements (over the already great performance) on mainstream hardware and embedded devices in the next couple releases.

2. Usability improvements
We've a bevy of new tools and we're not silly enough to think we did everything perfect the first, second (or 50th) time, so go, use them. Tell us what you like and don't like. We'll keep improving until they are as perfect as they can be.

3. Particle System refactor
This has been in the works for months actually and Pat (with the help of pureLIGHT) is preparing a fully awesomed-out particle system for 1.1. I'll save going into the spec for a separate blog, but it's going to be all kinds of hawt. Here's Pat showing off wiring up 150 point lights in a PhysX "Lightfall."

4. Core improvements necessary for compatibility with Forest Kit
These are ongoing, but expected to wrap with 1.1 and coincide with the much anticipated release of Forest Kit by Sickhead.

5. OSX feature parity
We're obviously a *little* disappointed we weren't able to get Advanced Lighting to run well enough on OSX to ship with this release (see Alex Scarborough's forum post on Advanced Lighting for details), but we're confident that Torque 3D is the best game engine ever released for OSX games. Basic Lighting (what you're seeing in the Burg Demo) is really a very advanced, very fast forward renderer capable of more than any previous lighting system we've had. Objects and materials can recieve up to 4 lights at a time and each light can cast projected shadows optionally. We'd also like find a workable cross-platform solution for physics. PhysX supports everything *except* for OSX, so we're likely to look at Bullet in the next few months. In all likelyhood, we may never achieve feature parity, but we'll push OSX as hard as it can be pushed for you guys, and then we'll push it harder.

The developer community is already on Torque 3D in a big way. Here are some highlights from past weeks you might not have seen. As always, cool, well made stuff contributed back will go into the core for everyone to use.

Particle Ripples | Parallax Terrain | Lens Flare & Coronas | Daniel Hopkin's Project | Song Yongjin's Project | Cartoon Project | Huge Terrain & Lots of Lights (<3 Danko) | Tom's Pretty Terrain | Deepscratch's PostFX | Brian Mayberry's Project | Yuri's GMK | Konrad Kiss's Xenocell | Gareth Fouche's Sewer Level | Jeff Faust's AFX | pureLIGHT (the incredible) | Violent Tulip's Verve | Travis Vroman's Blizzard Job Application | OMEGADOG!
Special thanks to Sickhead Games for contributing more to this release than I thought possible. You guys rock!

Torque 3D development blogs:

• Post #1 - Kickoff
• Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
• Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
• Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
• Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
• Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
• Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
• Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
• Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
• Post #11 - Depth of Field
• Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
• Post #13 - Soft Particles
• Post #14 - World Editor
• Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
• Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
• Post #17 - River & Road Editors
• Post #18 - Beta is UP!
• Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, and the Material Editor
• Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
• Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
• Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
• Post #23 - pureLIGHT
• Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
• Post #25 - Beta 3!
• Post #26 - Documentation
• Post #27 - Beta 4!
• Post #28 - Shape Editor
• Post #29 - Beta 5!
• Post #30 - Collada Import GUI Dialog
• Post #31 - 1.0 Release!!!
• Post #32 - Coming Soon!