Torque 3D Pros and Cons

I want to hear about Torque 3D pros and cons.

Torque 3D is open source. It’s free, which is a big pro to a lot of people.

Sometimes you have to pay for the features you need.

Torque has more features than Unity installed, things you have to pay extra for whether you have Unity’s free version or even Unity professional. You get access to the source code of the game development engine, something Unity does not allow.

I’d rather use Unity to do something in a few hours than spend weeks trying to tweak Torque to do it better.

Torque 3D is not as good out of the box as Unity, though. I’ll admit that.

I’ve heard that Torque has a broader license, so you can do more with it.

Torque does not charge royalties if your game engine sells a hundred thousand dollars worth of games. If you use the free version of Unity, you have to start paying for the pro license once you sell a hundred K of games.

If I sell 100K in games, I’ll have the money to pay for the professional license. And if I’m just getting started in a game engine, I’d like the professional help from a paid group.

Torque’s community has a lot of hacks and resources.

You do not know if the errors you are getting are because of the game’s design, or the changes to the game engine. That means you lose productivity, until you really understand the game engine.

Torque has a simple interface.

So do the free 2D game engines the kids are learning to make apps on.

Torque has a decent renderer, but that does not matter unless you’re doing an advanced PC game. And you do not have to pay extra to gain the ability to make a PC game in addition to a mobile app.

How much work does it take to export to both PCs and devices?

I do not know the answer to that, but Torque’s user forums are helpful. And the Garage Games staff jump in to offer free online help in the forums periodically.

Which means I either have to pay for their direct help or beg someone to help me for my particular problem. I can see why it is not more widely used now.

Speaking of appearances, Torque is weak on art imports; it can be hard to import characters’ models and skins from other tools, especially from Blender.

And because it is so small, I’m sure the asset store is not very big.

Too many hackers working with it to have quality paid for models, backgrounds and skins.

It sounds like Torque 3D is the game engine for hackers making games, instead of game developers who sometimes need to tweak things to get the look they like.

[rranft]

"It sounds like Torque 3D is the game engine for hackers making games, instead of game developers who sometimes need to tweak things to get the look they like."

This is backwards. Experienced game developers understand the underlying engine source and know how to update the engine to support their new features. Those new to game development are generally better off learning to use Unity.

Torque 3D is definitely difficult for new users. You are expected to be of intermediate skill in C++ and you have to learn a proprietary scripting language (it resembles C, but it has some "quirks").