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Open Source Games

Torque 3D To Be Released On Github Under the MIT License 54

Posted by timothy from the tux-racer-reboot-please dept.
New submitter iamnothing writes "Eric Preisz, CEO of GarageGames, announces, 'Eleven years ago, The GarageGames founders did an incredibly innovative thing when they sold a full source game engine for $100. We are excited to continue in their footsteps by announcing that we will be releasing Torque 3D as the best open source game technology in the world. Once again, GarageGames will be changing game development.'"
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Torque 3D To Be Released On Github Under the MIT License More

Torque 3D To Be Released On Github Under the MIT License

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  • Hope the engine code is better than their website code, seems the site's down, and the proper slashdotting hasn't even started yet...

    (yes I'm being sarcastic, relax...)

  • That would change gaming... (Score:4, Informative)

    by eagee ( 1308589 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @08:51AM (#41299023)
    If Torque wasn't kind of a crappy game engine... I mean, I've worked in Torque, and it was pretty rinky dink by comparable standards.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Torque has always been more of a "Lets throw all this code in and hope people can make a game with it" type of engine. This is great if you want something to build off of, though not so great if you want something clean and consistent.

  • We're so excited... (Score:3)

    by sl4shd0rk ( 755837 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @08:51AM (#41299025)

    We forgot to cluster the webserver

  • Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @08:55AM (#41299075) Homepage

    "Several notable commercial titles developed using the Torque engine include Blockland, Marble Blast Gold, Minions of Mirth, TubeTwist, Ultimate Duck Hunting, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, ThinkTanks, The Destiny of Zorro, Penny Arcade Adventures and most recently, indie video games S.P.A.Z. and Frozen Synapse."

    Sorry, but apart from the last two (who don't exactly excel in their fields, though FS is a good enough turn-based shooter to be fun in multiplayer), that's not a good advertisement.

    And a game engine is a game engine. It just takes work away from programmers who already know how to write one, if they could be bothered, so they can focus on the game itself rather than trivialities (and lots of indie studios make their own engines because it's just that much easier if you keep it all in-house and know what every line does). It's a time-saving device, not a miracle of engineering.

    To say the article summary has some hyperbole is to understate it dramatically.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The engine also powered Tribes and Tribes 2 but in earlier stages (technically the engine that was used for Tribes 1 was called Darkstar I think...but from what I understand that basically evolved into the v12 engine which powered Tribes2...which was then renamed Torque when it was released for $100. I think at the time GarageGames actually wanted to open source it, but due to some issues with Sierra/VUG, they had to charge $100 for it)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taktoa ( 1995544 )

        Open source Tribes 2 would be freaking awesome. That game was fantastic... it had a mod called Construction Mod that effectively mimicked Minecraft / Garry's Mod (albeit with somewhat different mechanics), except it was released in 2003 (GMod was 2006, Minecraft was 2009). I played that mod extensively - it was very fun. Even vanilla Tribes 2 was great - IMO Tribes 2 and Battlefield 2 were some of the most groundbreaking multiplayer FPS's.

        • I'll just leave this here:

          http://www.tribesnext.com/ [tribesnext.com]
          http://www.goonhaven.org/ [goonhaven.org]

          We still play. Our pub (Goon Haven) has between 10-20 players on at any given time. Even have ladder matches going on pretty regularly!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Adriax ( 746043 )

            Yeah, I tried that a year ago or so. At first I was happy to get to play tribes again, then I quit after my entire team started berating me for not knowing bombers were glorified missiles used to fly into the enemy base, not over it...

            • Yeah, some of the players that have stuck around seem to think that the way people do things in comp are the only way to do things, and have completely lost sight of the fact that it's a game that's meant to be fun first and foremost.

    • That's a direct quote from the wikipedia article on the engine [wikipedia.org] and is not in the summary. If you don't like it, feel free to edit it or discuss it on the talk page.

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @09:53AM (#41299897) Journal

      Sorry, but apart from the last two (who don't exactly excel in their fields, though FS is a good enough turn-based shooter to be fun in multiplayer), that's not a good advertisement.

      If you can make a complete game in it, it's a good game engine. If the game sucks, that's the designers fault, not the engine's.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Ignacio ( 1465 )

        Sure, but there's a difference between making a great game in 1 year with a great engine, and making a great game in 3 years with a poor engine.

      • If the game's graphics and input and sound sync suck because the engine sucked, that's the engine's fault (and the developer's for choosing it).

        I'm not saying that's the case with Torque, I'm just saying that engines have limitations that can cause a game to suck independently of the skills of the programmer using it.

  • Nothing made public on there yet but presumably this is where it will be:-

    GarageGames GitHub Respositories [github.com]

    • i wish they would just drop the code already and let their traffic go there rather than hammering their sad ci page. It looks like they didn't tune or cluster their database very well

    • Yup. That's where we're going to house it. We're still cleaning up the repos some. We had to make sure to pull anything that was proprietary. We're most of the way through our code review now. It will be live as soon as it and the site problems everyone has noticed are taken care of.

  • Awesome (Score:3)

    by Georules ( 655379 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @09:09AM (#41299257)
    I learned a lot tinkering with one of the older Torque engines when I was young. The community was very helpful and accepting of those with little to no programming experience. This should be a great addition to open resources.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by asylumx ( 881307 )
      What were some good starting points? I've tinkered with 3D a few times but never got very far (I'm mostly an enterprise web guy). I never was able to find my way into the community.
      • From what I remember, I compiled the engine and then tried to tinker with it. I wanted to try to do things, like add a weapon bar or ammo counter, so I would search the forums and community resources http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources [garagegames.com] to find tutorials about how to modify the code. Most people on the forums were happy to chat about adding features and many of the resource tutorial developers would provide help with the code they provided.

  • Content creation pipeline? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Seriman ( 775126 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @09:33AM (#41299547)
    No matter how a person might feel about the games using the engine or the engine itself, this is a good thing. If it does something wonderful for open source gaming, however, it will be through a more competent content creation pipeline. There are loads of excellent open source engines out there but getting your content into them can be a serious challenge. If it isn't released with solid import options and content creation tools it will just be another engine choice in a growing pool of already competent engines. Again, that's not a bad thing at all, it just isn't anything new.
  • That's about all it's worth. It was the first engine I ever used in-depth nearly a decade ago. I then found Unity 3d several years ago and that was a true game changer. I will take a look at it again since it is being open sourced but I can't imagine ever using it for more than the educational value of knowing how they did certain things.

  • Torqued Off (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As someone who paid full price for Torque 3D, and also ShiVa, I can say without a doubt that I am very pleased to have gone on and purchased Unity3D for over five times the price of Torque. It was a lesson in where the minimum bar is for a competent product platform. Even more so since with Unity 4 my app should be portable to support Linux with only a bit of work. So if you're doing any serious development, understand that free is too expensive.

  • Best Open Source Game Engine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    At the end of the day, it is the best open source game engine available today. That isn't saying much for open source game engines, but can anyone honestly name one that is better. Them going with MIT is a big plus too. My question is whether it will get ongoing support from GarageGames to keep it a viable open source project, or if it will just wither and die. One of T3Ds biggest failings is documentation. You can see from their own demos that they can do some pretty cool stuff with it (check out the

  • A better open source engine (Score:4, Informative)

    by Da_Slayer ( 37022 ) on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @12:06PM (#41301845)

    I would just like to point out the OGRE - Open Source 3D Graphics Engine [ogre3d.org] which is MIT licensed and has been around since 2001. OGRE is a better built system and the games in the gallery show this off.

  • ...that most torque users jumped ship to unity a long time ago, because torque sucked. And there's no reason to go back.
  • I am a longtime Torque user (see my free game http://www.singularityfps.com) and I must say it is the best prototyping tool out there, at minimum.  But in recent years the inexpensive licenses did not include source, which is essential if you're really serious about making a game.

    And that was a big deal because the community on the GG forums are one of the biggest benefits to using the engine.

    I am well pleased by this move. 

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