Game Development Community

Major differences between Torque Game Engine and T3D

by Relsii · in Torque 3D Beginner · 05/06/2013 (1:46 pm) · 1 replies

I have a pretty old version of Torque, I bought it a long time ago and never really did anything with it. Its either the Torque Game engine from 2007 or the Torque engine version 1.5. Before I go and mess around with the latest version of Torque, (id rather just stay with the old one since I purchased it and am making something simple with it) what are the major differences/benefits that the T3D engine has over the one I have (I think its the TGE 1.5 or something)? I am talking about things such as features (lighting, smooth/flat shading, better water), performance, multi-player (larger packets), larger .DTS files (more polygons and stuff) and stuff such as physics.

I did say that I didn't really do anything with the torque engine that I purchased however I do have a couple of little fun games I made, if I do decide to switch to T3D will the games work on it (in case I ever want to revise it) or will I have to use old torque? Does the T3D engine still use/support .CS files and the same functions in TorqueScript from the older engine?

About the author

Recent Threads


#1
05/06/2013 (9:10 pm)
T3D is the better engine. The T3D codebase is cleaner, more performant and has numerous usability improvements (like better integrated editors and faster, more modern art pipeline) that reduce dev times. Frankly, T3D is the result of significant financial investments and years of iteration/R&D in earlier engines (specifically TSE/TGEA).

To quickly touch on the features you mentioned, T3D offers:
* completely new rendering system that uses D3D9 (or OGL on Mac), with support for shaders and an advanced, modern lighting engine
* support for the COLLADA mesh format which allows artists to export both static and animated meshes from any art package (provided it has a good COLLADA exporter) instead of relying on closed-source, proprietary (and often unsupported) DTS exporters or BSP modelers (like Hammer, QUArK or Construct for the old .DIF interiors)
* Physics support via either Physx or Bullet