torque(not the old torque game engine advanced) is actually pretty powerful and has alot of realy cool features built right in. their lighting system is very in depth(with source code ofcourse) they have a few tools they call editors that are built into the world editor. Things like a road, river, path, particle, and forest editor. The workflow and graphics pipeline are so effortless it will BLOW YOUR MIND! unless your mind has been blown by some foxy woman in a red dress....in which case it will DECIMATE YOUR SKULL!

its templates serve to be a good basis to build up from. I remember in 3dgs the templates were cool...but not enough to make a game that was passable in the market.

The engine runs off of PhysX, and has some other plugins you can buy. Like Verve(not quite sure what it is but i know it has to do with cutscenes o_O?) and PureLight(awesome plugin, used it with Leadwerks)-for advanced light and shadow rendering/baking. it kinda replicates what unreal engine 3 does...combination of baked and realtime lighting to get the best light possible(except unreal takes forever to build on a single pc).

its not a suite like 3dgs so youll have to fend for yourself when it comes to model editors...but i think we all have our niche. mines cinema 4d. but as a perk getting your models into the engine is EXTREMELY effortless. just export as either .dae or.dts and make sure its saved in the folder/subfolders for your models and its in the engine instantly. It has an inhouse material editor thats not as extensive as say unreal or the mat editor in 3ds max, BUT it has support for alot of materials that can be made in 3ds max and c4d. so if you make it there and then import chances are the material will stick .

its got alot of cool widgets that you can just throw into the world...scatter sky(a mix of sun/clouds). a time controller for day and night - no more scratching our heads to make a day/night system. percipitation system. river/water editor that lets you manage the width of the water volume the depth and even the viscosity !

all-in-all...its amazing. im having a blast...and every now and then when i need something i look back into my old 3dgs folder and grab a few things...heck what brought me here was a model pack i'd seen a while back. A pack of cliffs. Wanted to use it in my current project...but cant seem to find it oh well

-cheers