Torque Network Gaming Library Released Open Source

An anonymous user writes "GarageGames launched the Torque Networking Library under the GPL today - this is the PC game networking technology behind Tribes and Tribes 2. It's also available under indie and commercial licenses for closed source projects, but OpenTNL.org is the home for the open source release, which also has an official FAQ online. Along with the library itself is a master server implementation for game tracking, a graphical test app, Zap and a retro-styled space shooter."

Re:Linux Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Tribes 2 was as Linux Friendly as Quake 3 and UT2004: I have the linux client and it works very nicely.

Nice try though

I've been working with Torque

[oskillator]

I've been working with the Torque engine for a while, and my assessment is that it's very solid where it counts (assuming you want to make a tribes-like game), but surprisingly flimsy in areas like extensibility and documentation.

I imagine it's par for the course in the game industry, where code is written to be abandoned within a few years.

Re:Other good network layers

[ezavada]

Hmm... I guess I really should have hit preview.

I meant to say:

Other network layers to look at are OpenPlay [sourceforge.net] and SDL net [libsdl.org], both of which are also also free and OpenSource.

Re:Linux Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Torque is Linux friendly, and Mac OS X friendly as well. Most Torque Games have been released for all 3 platforms (with the exception of the old tribes series, which were made before the engine became publicly available). Just look at Marble Blast, Think Tanks and Orbz! All Torque games, all available multi-platform.

Re:Other good network layers

[Anonymous Coward]

Small to mid-sized??

I think not. T2 could handle 128 players, and I'm sure they've made even more improvements over the past 3 years.

And the part about weak security... maybe you haven't checked out their page yet, but from what I can see, it looks like they've put a lot of work into making it very secure. Check out the sections on encryption and client puzzles.

I'm impressed they'd actually GPL this. Cool stuff.

Re:Awesome news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Darkstar was the original engine; it later was used in Tribes 1, 2, and then became V12 and thence Torque.

Re:Awesome news!

[silentrob]

Tribes and Tribes 2 will be available for free download on May 4th. Or will also be available bundled in Computer Gaming World on the same date.

IGN Article here [ign.com].

Re:Linux Games

[bman08]

That's just not true. The difference is that my windows copy of Tribes 2 was useless in linux, instead I had to buy the loki version for another 40 bucks. Both quake and ut have linux binaries for the windows game that are free. To me that amounts to a wallet-load less linux friendly.

Re:Awesome news!

[Mark Frohnmayer]

Yes, TNL can easily handle 60 players who all have line of sight to each other. TNL takes a different approach - for most simulations the TNL server allots a fixed amount of bandwidth per client (Tribes 2 was 3K per second), regardless of how many objects are visible to that client. For each packet the server sends, it proritizes objects based on relevance to the client and then writes updates based on that priority. TNL performs a bunch of other tricks to reduce bandwidth usage as well. Take a look at the design fundamentals [sourceforge.net] for more in depth info.

Re:Awesome news!

[BrookHarty]

I'm hoping with the free release of Tribes1 and Tribes2, tribes1 will have more tribes1 servers online. I checked a few days ago, and there was only 5 normal Base servers with players, and 1 was password protected (But full 32 players). Tribes1 is mostly mods now, Renegade, Ultra, etc. Super weapons like mechs. Tribes2 at least has bots so you can always play on downloadable maps. And the Bots are rather good at Rabbit on higher levels.

Tribes3 (Vengence) should be pretty impressive using the Unreal2K(4?) engine.

So, now that the games are free, will we see an emergence of new servers and players? If you run a lan party, make it a tribes lan party, share the game. (Legally!)

Re:Will the for sale version differ from the gpl

[Mark Frohnmayer]

The for sale version will be the same as the GPL version. Anyone who wants to contribute back to the official version of the TNL will have to be willing to assign a shared copyright to GarageGames for code they submit.

Re:Multi-platform, what about languages?

[Mark Frohnmayer]

The only tricky part of getting TNL to work with other languages would be the RPC framework, which does all kinds of macro trickery, inline assembly and worse in order to get clean-looking, high performance RPC out of C++. But then, if you're using TNL from another language, you don't need the C++ RPC functionality - you could implement RPC for that language using the NetEvent code, which is the base for the C++ RPC as well.

Game based on torque

[zerocool^]

The entire torque engine is doing very well for it's self, and I just wanted to chime in and say:

Legends: The Comming of a New Age is comming along nicely. It's free, and can be downloaded from here [tribalwar.com]. It's made with torque's entire engine, and is enjoying a moderately good following so far.

Good game, but, I've been too distracted by UT2004 to play. I need to make a point to play legends more.

~Will

Re:Awesome news!

[Cylix]

There are still plenty of Tribes 2 servers.

I still play as no one has quite made a game that captures all the aspects of Tribes 2.

Onslaught mode on Unreal 2004 is as close as it comes now a days.

There is a mod in development which captures the original Tribes play style and this mod is currently in development on Unreal 2k engine (I suspect it will be moved to 2004 when the resources are availble (now maybe?).

If the mod is developed well enough it might be offered in an upgraded Tribes 3 package. Much like TFC and Half-Life were packaged after the initial release of Half-Life.

Still, nothing quite matches 64 player Tribes 2 matches.

Re:OSS MMORPG

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of the authors of PlaneShift. We have tested it with upwards of 80 concurrent clients and consumed about 15% CPU during that time. We have been working for over a year on the next tech demo release (v0.3), which should be out in the next few weeks. I expect to support at least 500 concurrent players on a single box in that release.

Stay tuned for more info when 0.3 (aka "Crystal Blue) is released.

Re:Awesome news!

[eison]

That's the really impressive stuff - it *was* out two years ago. It became available back in 2001 for $99 + some contract terms regarding publishing if you go over $250k in sales.

These guys just rule.

Re:Used to be non-free *STILL IS $100*

[GarageGamer]

This is NOT the full Torque Game Engine (TGE), but TNL the Torque Network Library as a stand alone API. This netcode is still at the core of the TGE architecture, but now can be leveraged by other applications and game engines. For those not wanting to or able to publish their source we also provide our trademark 'indie' license for $295 and a full commercial license at $995 a programmer seat. Jay Moore GarageGames Evangelist

Re:OSS MMORPG

[ultranova]

Mod parent funny all you like, but there was a post [slashdot.org] on Slashdot recently bitching about how he couldn't get funding to develop this kind of user interface...

Hmm... I feel an inspiration coming in. An adventure web browser ! It reads HTML pages and renders rooms based on them, with links as doors (and one for "back"), shaped by keywords (so for each occurence of the string "troll" in the page, make one troll appear in the room). Bigger pages make bigger rooms, and the general theme and shape of he room are decided by analyzing the text somehow.

And yes, I'm serious.

Re:Awesome news!

[Jagasian]

Quakeworld is nothing more than a patched Quake that optimizes the networking code and fixes some physics bugs (mainly bugs that prevented people from being "bounced" into the air from standing by explosions). The project was started in 1996, but the release that allowed for 64+ players was in 1997, when Quake was at the peak of its popularity and servers started running those death32 maps that were basically a bunch of smaller Id software maps glued together into one large contiguous map.

Quakeworld also was the testing grounds for other improvements/features such as radiosity in maps, improved score boards, a global ranking system, extended server settings and gameplay modes (deathmatch 3, deathmatch 4), etc...

I am not sure how beefy the server was that was running the 64+ players, but I was there. The problem was that everyone started to meet in the same room. It brought clients to a crawl as back then everyone only had 28.8 dialup. It was also killing everyone's framerate to have to draw 60+ player models.

Re:Two thumbs Up

[abandonment]

We have had our entire game engine available under an MIT license for 5 years - alot longer than Torque has existed.

Plus we beat torque feature-for-feature for graphical rendering quality and ease-of-use.

The rest of the game industry IS doing similar things - just no one on slashdot seems to be inclined to check anything out outside the familiar box of 'garage games == everything indie'