Torque Educational Materials

#1 Hey Dexter,

This is great work - I'm happy that we're reaching the time where education materials are beginning to take shape.

One of the first things I start out with is the graphics rendering pipeline, its features and how it's the backbone of everything we do. For beginners, the focus is more on what it does and how it relates to technology - advanced classes would be more concerned with tricky development issues.

One perticular exercise I've given students in the past is to create a small scene in Lightwave/Maya such as a guy dancing around a campfire. Then go and build something similar within the torque engine.

The object is to demonstrate the key differences in approaches to design and development in real time apps vs. pre-rendered stuff. But also, to build in some understanding of what's actually going on under the hood when we play games or click the render scene button and go for coffee. I think anything that reinforces this would be great.

Another thing (trying not to be too wordy here!), that might help beginners from an organisational point of view would be some element of agile methodology study (such as SCRUM). Most newbie projects never go anywhere simply because people in the past have perhaps found it difficult to cope with the programming skills, or just aren't able to organise their themselves properly.

Anyhow, that's me done for now! :-)

#2 I've been teaching a course on iOS game development with Torque2D and iTorque2D for the last 2 years at RMIT in Melbourne, but this year the university has decided to switch to Unity (against my advice).

They've done this for one reason - there is no free version of Torque for students.

Without a free version that students can use at home there is basically no point in teaching with Torque. Even though Unity is a more complex engine, and it requires 3D art assets and more programming skills, students prefer it because it is free, and universities provide what students want.

Licensing the labs with multiple copies of Unity pro and Unity iOS is costing the university tens of thousands of dollars more per year than Torque licenses were, but they don't care. The only thing that matters is student demand as this is what creates new enrollments (and income for the university), and as long as there is no free version of Torque, there will continue to be no student demand.

You need to fix this soon before Unity steals this market from you.

#3 email sent

#4 Thanks for the feedback. We are always looking for ways to balance the cost of support with getting the largest market for our products. We have felt we should focus on getting the overall cost of our engines as the low cost leader instead of going free and charging a lot later on, which is what the competition does. However, we'll continue to be open to hearing other ways to get our technology out.

#5 Conor, do you mean a free full version of Torque 3D with source code access, or is the demo version good enough?