Torque: InstantAction bites the dust?

Source: http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blog/view/20495/

However, there are no further information on what will happen to the product line, the licenses etc., yet.

what does this mean? i didn't follow any torque developments recently... is instantaction the owner of the torque engines? what about garagegames? so the torque engines are dead now?

Instant Action bought Torque some time ago, created the Instant Action platform and wanted to let people play games via browser at their platform. It probably did not work as expected so they want to get rid of some costs. Thus they try to sell the Torque engines or will just shut it down.

From my point of view it is quite hard now for Torque3d to survive. But their 2d-tools are great products and could survive.
Another option could be to free it just like the Blender users did. When they spend enough money to a foundation they could eventually buy it, make it open source and create some professional service around it (support, books, tutorials, game projects). But then they have to compete with Ogre, though they at least have some tools and not only a rendering engine.

We will see, what happens.

By the way: 2 other engine makers (Leadwerks and C4) already offer 50% off to Torque licensees.

...not really surprising though. i always wondered about their business practices. it seems like each time their current engine is half done they leave it behind and start a new one. yes, i never used their 2d engine but it has a better reputation than their 3d ones.

Hm it is not good that competition is dying...

Lookinf at the recent beta features here, 3dgs needs some kick in the... to get going

I agree but aren't there enough competitors left (Shiva, Unity, C4, Leadwerks only as a few examples)?

time to get leadwerks then, i got Torque 3D, never used...

You never know who's next.

Well, Torque have some solid 3D world and terrain editors with some cool things like roads, river tools.
It have grass management , a great lightmapper !

They can survive, if they decrease the price, and propose
a commercial version.

Another way, would be to develop a C# version.
Easy to use language with great free editors (like Mono).

They have a solid 3D engine, with great tools, and great multiplayer part also.

They can survive if they really put the hands on it and change
prices also !

mono is not an editor. is an open source re-make of the .net libraries.

What they need was not another language they needed a solid manual/library reference like the one gamestudio has. I have torque3d never really used it except from playing with editor. It's not because my lack of skill, i used a wide variety of engines, even written a not-so-mine engine(ogre+openal, not for games only for a 3d presentation), it's because lack of "good" documentation.

What I saw from their forums is that they complained indeed mainly about docs and about some bugs. And another problem of the users is that they did not keep their promises.

From a commercial point of view Ratchet is right. They lost their track to support indies, tried to address professional developers with higher prices and better technology. But the tech did not grow fast enough and not mature enough to reach that goal. Besides that the Instant Action platform did not succeed as expected.

Currently they all hope that somebody buys the Torque asset.

but why should anyone buy it? doesn't it have a kind of bad name/reputation now? i often read that their source code isn't that great either quality-wise. what would be the advantage over building a game engine around ogre for example?

I like very much Leadwerks but is it really so slow as people say ?
Did anybody make a comparative 3dgs, Unity3d, Leadwerks ?

In leadwerks, stuff like ssao are always on by default so it's not really comparable unless you use the same shaders in all engines.

Actually Leadwerks is quite fast, can render terrains with millions of trees as an example. What I dislike personally is the workflow, the tools, the usage of different scripting languages for everything (material, physics, scripting). Thus it looks a bit inconsistent to me.

Nevertheless, the results are great, it renders objects very nicely and fast and it is powerful in terms of capabilities.

Maybe I like it because I come from Blitz3d ( before 3dgs )
Leadwerks set of commands is quite similar
Moreover I still prefer the traditional 00P hierachic style over the new " components " phylosophi
A matter of taste of course
However about the speed I have my doubts
I have a one year old desk top , an other five or six years old desk top and a two years old lap top
I downloaded Leadewerks and Unity3d demos
Unity demo ( The Island) runs fast on all the three PC's
Leadwerks demo is acceptable but I would not say fast, only on the new desk top

I accept that , as Quadraxas said , In leadwerks, stuff like ssao are always on by default but frankly speaking I dont see that advantage in terms of visual quality

Did anybody make other comparative test ?

Same here. I tried Unity, but it's not my favorite style. I also like the traditional OOP. (working with Delphi since many years)

One reason more to hate the current situation of InstantAction/Torque because Torque/TorqueScript has also the OOP-style.

That of course can cause some problems with modern technology. Leadwerks just like Unity and most of the big commercial engines use deferred rendering now. This is fast, when you use different lights and many shaders at once, faster than old forward rendering. But it also requires shader model 3 (available since how long, since 2004?). So on modern and moderate aged hardware it is just the better solution.

But when you have stone-age hardware, then Unity scales better for sure. It can downscale from deferred lighting, to forward lighting, pixel lighting to vertex lighting and even harmonic spherical lighting. Thus it can not only render on very very old hardware, it can also run on different platforms, mobile devices and consoles. This scalability is even part of their rendering optimization. When you have 8 lights visible at the same time as an example and you dont configure them all to be "very important", then Unity renders only the nearest of them as pixel lights, a few will be vertex lights and another few harmonic spherical. So it still renders faster than most engines forcing all 8 lights to pixel lighting.

But this also shows that you dont have the same quality on each platform. It might render faster on your 6-years old PC. But it also scales down to a lower quality.

I was expecting Leadwerks to be slow on old hardware, the point is that it is slower than Unity3d even on my modern PC
Moreover I used Unity3d and Leadwerks demo's
I suppose that demos are optimized for the engine

But the demos of Unity are not that demanding. The bootcamp and the island demo are using quite small textures, only a few lights and moderate shaders. But they both show some bigger scenery. The bootcamp demo even uses the new technology from Unity 3 for a smooth transition between realtime lighting and lightmapping. So everything that is a few meters away does not use real-time lighting anymore. Leadwerks does not do anything like that, everything is realtime.
The bootcamp demo also uses the new occlusion culling in several areas and the terrain has no normal maps at all.

Thats why in my previous post , I said

"frankly speaking I dont see that advantage in terms of visual quality"

Sometimes ago in Leadwerks forum a member posted two screen shots of the same scene
Which one do you prefer ? He asked
Most of the people answered : no preference , they are about the same stuff
An other group choosed the one on the right side,just a minority the one on the left side

Useless to say that the best shot was supposed to be , can you guess it ?
Of course the one chosen by a minority of people

Leadwerks demo run, at least on my moder PC , about half speed than the Unity demos
On my 2 years old portable computer it does not even start while Unity demos are still a rocket

I wonder whether it is really wothwhile developing such advanced rendering features

Thats why in my previous post , I said

"frankly speaking I dont see that advantage in terms of visual quality"

Sometimes ago in Leadwerks forum a member posted two screen shots of the same scene
Which one do you prefer ? He asked
Most of the people answered : no preference , they are about the same stuff
An other group choosed the one on the right side,just a minority the one on the left side

Useless to say that the best shot was supposed to be , can you guess it ?
Of course the one chosen by a minority of people

Leadwerks demo run, at least on my moder PC , about half speed than the Unity demos
On my 5-6 years old PC at about 3 fps, on my 2 years old portable computer it does not even start
Unity demos are a rocket on all the three PC's ( and 3dgs demos are not that bad , too )

I wonder whether such advanced rendering features are really needed

I can understand this point of view especially between programmers. The same probably applies to casual gamers. My wife also would not see a difference between lighting and rendering techniques. But core gamers are different. They recognize a lot of differences, otherwise there would be not such a success of games like Crysis and Mafia2. So it really depends on the target audience you are aiming to.

Well, to be honest: If you target core gamers, you should use a proven AAA engine like cryengine, unreal or source.
Just because they are optimized for one genre.
Oh, and you should at least have a big pipeline with a lot of good and succesful projects, otherwise you won´t get the needed money.

If you got a budget of >5.000.000 usd, then you won´t fiddle around with indie authoring systems.

Yes, your are right in some cases. But just to show you that there are indie fps shooter games also available:
http://www.alpha-prime.com/

This had a much lower budget and I personally enjoyed it very much. They did not use any of the big engines and they licensed some middleware for tasks like AI. But it is a very good game with lots of additional gameplay options like controlling vehicles, cameras, remote control of many objects, indoor and outdoor scenery and some modern visuals especially at the time of release.

So I am sure it is doable. Yes, it needs some very ambitious people, time and at least a decent budget. But it can work even without the budgets you mentioned.

Alpha Prime != Crysis, sorry.
There are worlds between HL2, Crysis, Stalker and Alpha Prime.
Which showed up at the same time. I was indeed speaking of AAA games, though I hate this term.

There are a lot of reason that the most developer studios are either using their own engine / toolset based on Ogre for example or they are using an approved industrial standard.

You probably did not get my point. I did not talk about AAA games. I just want to express that there is a difference of technology to use depending on the target audience. And Alpha Prime is an example that targets core gamers and no casual gamers although it is not a Crysis or HL2, it still is not a casual game.

And I agree with you that it makes sense to use dedicated tools like UDK to make games aiming to core gamers. But indie technology like Unity is getting closer. With the current toolset it works very similar (occlusion culling, static and dynamic lightmapping, realtime specularity and normal maps even when using static lightmaps, deferred renderer, unlimited number of lights, ...).
Leadwerks and C4 are also tools going into the core-gamers directions. Thus it makes it a bit harder to address casual game developers who are going with Unity or Shiva (more platforms, better scalable).

To come back to Torque: It also tried to go that way. The Instant Action platform was advertised to address core gamers and thus the technology should become strong enough to support this concept. But it grew too slow. And there are just way more casual developers than core-game devs.

I personally checked a lot of these tools in FPS scenarios. And at this moment I would probably start a FPS project in UDK, it renders just faster and still looks amazing. My second option would be Unity. The new toolset is very good and flexible. The workflow is even better.
But I have read in some forums that Crytek wants to offer a similar license like UDK. So I am really looking forward to check that out as an additional option.

A part from AAA games the point is an other in my opinion

Everybody can download Unity and Leadwerks demos
It is about the same scene, an island

Can anybody seriously claim that Leadwerks graphic quality is much better than Unity graphics ?
I dont think so, but leadwerks demo run at about half speed on a modern PC in comparison to Unity demo
Not to mention on old hardware and portable computers

In conclusion I wonder whether the game engines new trend does really make any sense

Does it make sense to put some esoteric graphics features which just a minority of people can appreciate before engine key feature such as fps ?
In my opinion it is simply ridicolous

Unless it is smply a matter of software optimization
Nothing to do with graphics feature
Unity has a huge team, leadwerks designer is a lonly wolf

If so it is a shame because I definitely prefer Leadwerks engine architecture

I understand you perfectly. And because of that I always admire the amount of optimizations they put in to still render fast even with nice graphics enabled. I already mentioned how Unity switches between dynamic and static lighting, how it switches between pixel, vertex and hs lighting. And then there is occlusion culling to only render what you see. All this allows to scale, to render fast even with nice graphics enabled.

The same counts for UDK. I mean they use static maps for almost everything. But those maps contain the direction of light to influence normals and specularity. It is a very old-school technique, just like old Quake lightmapping but with some tricks to look modern.

The Source engine from Valve is similar, it uses lightmaps, zones and portals and still it can render tons of polygons and graphical effects in each zone, it supports modern post processing effects and it scales very well, it runs on PC, Mac, old and new hardware.

So from my point of view there is absolutely no problem to include modern graphical features, if it scales good. I realized that modern engines all use Ambient Occlusion and it really renders fast today. They optimized it a lot.

It appears Torque is back and Torque3D full source license is $99 for limited time.

iTorque 2D, Torque2D licenses are also $99.

It also appears that they sorted the weird eulas. Single eula rules all engines and it's quite about general stuff, there is not too many tiny details. Seems like it's pretty much same as the 3dgs license, buy once, make games no royalties.

That sounds awesome! Makes me want to buy a copy of t3d, just for nostalgic reasons D:

Hm seems like their website is done right now, will try it later.

website is ok, maybe you have to flush the DNS cache

only downloads are not working atm, they are working on it.

Hm i flushed DNS but its still not working. Weird. Will try it later again

If it still does not work you could try some direct links:

http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20775

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32539...s_New_Focus.php

Yes

They seem to be back to the roots : Indie people first
The last offers where becoming too much expensives , and they
should remembet that they can't put same prices as Unity Engine.
Well things are coming nicely , for 99$ i could perhaps buy
it if i succeed makings something with a demo (i hope it will be some demo of the engine).

I'll have to try workflow and script coding to see if it is not too much ocmplicated compared to 3DGS.

Well, they become realistic and target indie people with small
budget, really really good news

Thanks Quadraxas for mentioning the new selling politics.
I couldn't resist and bought it immediately and, after a while when downloading wasn't possible, finally downloaded and installed it, today.

Website finally works, hope it stays $99 for a little bit longer, still have to wait for my paycheck before i can get it D:

On the T3D site it shows "C# programmer" for the documentation. So now you can also use C# with Torque instead of TorqueScript? Or can you even manipulate the source code now in C#? That would be epic.

Kiyaku: As far as I have read from their blogs, they just continue business with exactly the same products. T3D as an example is still buggy as people complain in their forums. But they promised to iron some bugs out for the 1.1 release. Zones and portals as an example do not work and are not documented.

C# would be indeed a nice option.

Actually it is what I thought myself
The 3d engine is not a good deal , the engine being dead but for the 2d engine this is not a serious issue provide it is stable
Does anybody know whether torque 2d engine is reasonably bugs free ?
is C# also supported or just the Torque C++ like script ? ( Not so bad, anyway, in my opinion)