Torque Game Engine Advanced

Torque Game Engine Advanced
This screenshot shows off many graphical effects such as Bloom, normal mapping, and cubemapping
Developer	GarageGames
Latest release	1.0 / 2/15/07
OS	Currently only for Microsoft Windows
Platform	PC
Genre	Game Engine
License	Indie License ($295) available for individuals and companies who made less than $250,000 in sales the previous year, and Commercial License ($1495) available at a higher price for individuals and comapines who made more than $250,000 in the previous year
Website	Official Torque Game Engine Advanced Product Page on GarageGames Website

Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) (known in development as Torque Shader Engine or TSE), is a next-generation video game engine recently released by GarageGames. TGEA is the technological successor to Torque Game Engine. GarageGames utilized a pre-release version of TGEA to create a popular Xbox 360 Live Arcade game Marble Blast Ultra. Bill Gates was quoted in USA Today on May 11, 2006 edition as saying his son likes to play Marble Blast Ultra.

General concepts of Torque Game Engine Advanced

TGEA was influenced by Dynamix V12 Tribes 2 Engine technology. TGEA is based on the foundation of Torque Game Engine and still shares many of its best features. Among the features still shared with the original Torque Game Engine, TGEA includes an extended revision of TorqueScript interface, GUI editing, GeoTerrain (TGE Terrain) and WYSIWYG world creator editors. The main scientific leap that TGEA provides is the utilization of hardware accelerated, programmable GPU technology. This allows scalable game development toolsets that can utilize current and future video graphics hardware. TGEA is and will be a base for other improvements as well. Torque Game Engine continues to progress (there were major revisions in the latest 1.5 release) and is far from out of date.

TGEA Technologies

A screenshot of Dreamlords by Lockpick Entertainment, a new TGEA online game.

In addition to supporting existing Torque Legacy Terrain, TGEA incorporates entirely new terrain rendering engine, the Atlas Terrain Engine, which is a substantial improvement over the blended terrains of TGE. Atlas uses GPU hardware to render a massive terrain block and its textures. This allows Atlas to scale with faster systems of the future. A new Shaded water rendering system is implemented with full reflection, refraction, and Fresnel reflection. TGEA incorporates a new lighting system based on Torque Lighting Kit including a light manager tool, scene lighting and dynamic shadows among others. Torque Game Engine Advanced 1.0 supports Direct3D rendering via an API-independent graphics layer. Future versions are expected to support both Direct3D and OpenGL pipelines to allow TGEA to support Macintosh and Linux platforms as well as Windows. There will also be TGEA compatibility with Microsoft's game development suite for the Xbox 360, XNA Game Studio Express. Along with all the new features it also incorporates all features of the Torque Game Engine

Procedural and custom shader support

TGEA contains several ready to apply shaders and common shader settings. Custom shaders based on High Level Shader Language can be compiled by the engine and applied as custom materials. This can be applied to both interior and exterior type 3d art assets. Fallback materials can be configured that allow support of Pixel and Vertex 1.X first generation video cards.

Development status

February 15, 2007 Production release of TGEA 1.0 and end of Early Adopter Program
January 23, 2007 Release 4.2 Beta.

Licensing

TGEA can be used by independent game developers for US$295.00 per user, provided the programmer is not employed by a company with an annual revenue of greater than $250,000. If the programmer is employed by a company with a greater annual revenue then he must use the more expensive US$1495.00 per user commercial license (compared to the less advanced [with graphics and networking] Unreal Engine 2, which can be licensed for $350,000).

See also

• Torque Game Engine
• Torque Game Builder
• GarageGames

External links

• TGEA product page
• Feature Comparison of TGEA with TGE and other engines