xbox 360 and torque 3D

#1 Torque 360 is for licensed console developers with an official devkit. It is not compatible with XNA. Torque X was an engine that we developed with XNA in mind, however we have discontinued it for XNA 4. There is a great community project that is porting it to XNA 4, though.

TorqueX CEV

EDIT: clarification of URL.

#2 I am talking about torque 3d..
It says right on the main page that it supports xbox 360.

#3 It does if you are a licensed console developer with access to the XDK.

See the Registered Developers page for more information on becoming a licensed developer with Microsoft.

#4 Ohh okay.. torque websites kinda misleading.. Guessing to get my hands on a xbox 360 development kit it wont be cleap correct?
I am just looking to create some small games for me and my friends to play and I just thought it would be cool if I could put my game on the xbox after its done..
Anyways thank for your reply david.

#5 No it won't. Neither will getting your hands on a Wii and jumping through the certification hoops with Nintendo. Console development on that level is an expensive and risky venture and there is a barrier of entry that the console manufacturers have in place.

If that's your goal, then XNA is a great place to start, whether it be with Torque X CEV or programming your games from the ground-up in C#.

#6 Console development takes a decent amount of money, and a decent amount of history in the industry to get approval from the console makers to make games for their systems.

If you wanted to develop for Wii, PS3 or 360 you're easily looking at $2000-$3000 each in dev kits alone (and this is after the DRASTIC 360 price drops they just announced this week). Then of course there's getting your game rated by the ESRB (required by the console makers as well) which costs more.

It's (unfortunately?) not at all an easy endeavor for small teams or people just starting out...

#7 It also costs a significant amount of money to go through each certification pass.

#8 Okay thanks guys. I'm okay with the PC I guess :P I like the web feature so thats good enough for me!

#9 That's what makes the PC games market so very cool - you can find some "diamonds in the rough" if you will out there. Not really so with console games. They're not willing to let the little guys in, and I suppose it's how they recoup the money "lost" by selling their hardware "at a loss."

Don't forget that you can still develop for Mac and Linux, though, along with a whole slew of mobile devices. Someone posted (blog or forum - can't remember) about porting one flavor or Torque (I think TGB) to Android without too much headache. So, even without the consoles there are plenty of targets to shoot for.

Some day I'll get my butt in gear and build a game, but in the mean time it's a blast just playing with the Torque engines.

#10 Thanks for posting Richard :)
Yeah, your right and it does support more systems then others, I should be happy with that :)
Ive only been using the toque engine for a few days and I'm loving it, easy to learn I got the hang of it within a few hours :D

#11 Let me get this forum start again... :) Ok my game is almost demo ready my goal is to have it on Xbox live indie games like Marble Blast Online or like Firing Range with a demo and a full game. What I need to know is after I'm demo ready what is the next step? Do i need to lower the texture resolution? Its about at 2048 x 2048 on everything and model polygon count it like 8-15 K on playable models and enemies anything from 3-10 k. The game has a RE4 camera view that can switch from first person view. I want to have as many enemies on the screens as resident evil 4. The main thing I need to know is how much money i need to save to get the Xbox kit and get it rated by the ESRB and anything else.

Thanks any information will help my goal is to release March 2012

Kory

#12 There is a push by some electronics rights groups to get console platforms jail-broken similar to the iPhone. Don't know how far they will get with it, but if it happens it could open a whole new set of markets. Most likely some form of Linux kernel with games written on top of that if it were to happen.

The vendor model for consoles is called vendor lock-in. Microsoft is a master at it for all their product lines. Nintendo pioneered it with the NES. There may have been others, probably Atari. In some cases it was for practicality. The console makers do NOT want an open system. Otherwise you would see hundreds of knockoffs for games and consoles. It increases their profits, and a case could be made for it increasing the quality of the games as it tends to only be for serious developers.

Also, even if you got a dev kit you may not be able to distribute the game to anyone. I know the developers of the Xbox media center for the old Xbox were not legally allowed to distribute binaries. So the only people who could legally use it were licensed owners of the dev kit. At least that is how I understood it.

I was introduced to vendor lock-in in the process control industry. A lot of my time was spent reducing the lock-in of my employer to reduce costs. I had to maintain a lot of systems that used proprietary interfaces on purpose in order to keep competing products form inter-operating. These proprietary interfaces often included the term "open" as if any engineer would be fooled by their use of the term.

I see that with other companies as well. They try to pollute the name space of truly open technologies to try and gain your confidence to use their interface. A good example is AOL. They called their interface OpenAuth, but it is a proprietary interface to their mail system. This pollutes the name space of OAuth which stands for "Open Authentication". OAuth is a standard interface (there is an RFC) for website authentication. I have a certain distaste for companies that purposely do that. Now AOL may have innocently done it by accident so I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

The only open platforms at this point are the PCs, Macs, and Android Phones. Am I missing any other platforms?

Sorry for the tangent.

@Kory,
Good job on getting to this point!

#13 Hi Kory,

I think you should get in contact with Microsoft Live Arcade, if you think your game is ready. If they like it, you will probably be allowed to buy a dev kit (no idea how much it costs), then you can make sure it runs on the 360. You'll have to jump trough lot's of rings to comply with their requirements. Personally I think a release in march 2012 is not realistic, the timeframe seems very short.
If you want to go to Xbox Live Indie games, you can do so by the way by just registering at the creators club, then you can publish to Xbox Live indie games. Note tough that your game needs to be written with C# in this case. Also, the revenue on this channel seems to be very bad, so I think publishing to pc is the better option.

#14 Thanks Frank and Andy

I'm working on a PC version that is the alpha of this series that will give me a understanding how the PC market works then I want to go for the Xbox release. I been doing research with T3D that is C+ program and a little on the outdated version of Torque X I would have switch over to torque X but I already had a lot of work done on T3D. I also notice that Torque 360 is the Xbox version of T3D with out having to us C# so what I want to know is when I finish my demo the next step will be to contact Microsoft then Torque if I get approved for the dev kit to get Torque 360 then finish it and upload it to Xbox live?

thanks again
Kory

PS: Hope I can finish demo and get it to Microsoft around March

PS: I was wondering I notice no one has ever incorporated a splitscreen into t3d and most game are multiplayer should I try to find out how to implement this into T3D or wait for Torque 360?

#15 I do not know, but I guess Torque 360 has the necessary support for console related features like splitscreen, guide handling and so on. Otherwise I think you are correct. Get a demo to MS and see if you get approved. Then get the cash to buy the xbox 360 dev kit and the torque 360 licence. Then it will be published by MS on Xbox live. Or go with your demo to a publisher and see if they are willing to publish your game on Xbox Live. For sure the process is quite complicated and difficult. The game must be special and really polished. I'd put all my energy in a pc release and aim for steam, and if that works out, then see if it's worth to go for the console(s).

#16 You would still need to control your render targets for the split-screen since you will have two cameras and culling routines working for networked play depending on your setup. The XDK doesn't have anything as easy as Include <"/splitscreenGameplay.h">. A number of developers have incorporated it into T3D, mostly in the simulation industry where you may not only have split screen, but multiple screens split in a variety of ways to provide feedback mechanisms).

Considering cert passes can cost $10,000+ (been a while since I looked at the numbers) and most companies have to jump through them several times, I would say that March would be an aggressive timeline if you had the game (not demo) 100% complete, the devkit secured, and all marketing materials in place.

From the sounds of it, you are looking more for a publishing pitch since you are talking about the demo. Will the complete game be finished by the demo release date? Microsoft is looking at potential titles with a much more critical eye and often are only working with proven developers who have studio by-in (or are break-away hits that would benefit them from exposure on their platform). The bar has been raised quite a bit higher on the traditional XBLA channel.

#17 Thanks David and Andy I will do my best and give you a update and video in march or a little later to show WIP. Thanks for the advice again. :)