Indie-Resource.com

No idea why I thought of the Torque 3D game engine today as well as Garage Games (the company who makes Torque).

Wow, when did Torque become MIT open source? While that is very cool, it did make me think of just how badly they must have been getting trounced by Unity 3D. They were once the toast of the 3D indie game development community, and today I swear I haven't heard a single developer even mention them as an option for well over 2 or 3 years.

I know there were a lot of issues when GG was bought out some years ago that drove some of their community to Unity, but I am not too familiar with that.

So I don't have much more to add about it. I just thought it was crazy that Torque is now MIT licensed, and also crazy how far they fell after the buy-out (probably a mix of self-inflicted wounds and getting blitzed by Unity and UDK).

It has been open source for quite a while now. People the previous month paid $1200 for it. They made it far too complicated and never listened to the community. I remember making an FPS with it ages ago and just to add 1 weapon was 2 days of work.

I havnt heard of torque being mentioned in awhile.

What was the story of the issues from when GG got bought out? I know this was well before they went open source, so as bad as the $1200 thing is, it was something else. Are you familiar with those days, Halls?

And Sim, yeah...that it what made me think about it. I totally forgot it existed, when only about 8 years ago or so it was all indie devs used to talk about and suggest to new developers.

I don't know all the stories but I do know there was some bad splits and people removed from the company which caused some rifts. I also know some directions were taking that made many of the community members very angry. They spent more time making the graphics look pretty than actually making the engine useful.
The Web plugin was a HUGE joke and lie. They stated "Play a Torque game through the browser" which actually meant you can download the game and then it will open in a browser window. NOT stream games through the browser. That is why I left the community.

Ohhh, I remember that browser game issue! That is when Unity's star was rising and it really showed Unity out-doing Torque since Unity had a true web player.

hallsofvallhalla wrote: I remember making an FPS with it ages ago and just to add 1 weapon was 2 days of work.

I think Halls nailed it. Torque was an engine with potential. Specifically, its networking code really gave it a shtick. But the workflow... gaaahhhhhhh! They really needed to make the engine more productive to develop on. With Torque, you had to go to c++ for every little thing. This was fine when there was no Unity, but an untenable position when Unity came onto the scene. Devs were going to go where they got more to show for their dev time.

Exactly and GG refused to listen to the community about our frustrations on having to touch the source all the time. They also left a gem in the rocks when they refused to work with the TMMOKIT and basically crapped all over everyone who owned TGE. ATGE was horrible.

Definitely makes sense to me

hallsofvallhalla wrote:Exactly and GG refused to listen to the community about our frustrations on having to touch the source all the time. They also left a gem in the rocks when they refused to work with the TMMOKIT and basically crapped all over everyone who owned TGE. ATGE was horrible.

Yeah, and that was near when you left too. You were working on your Forsaken Sanctum MMO to boot.