GarageGames.com Inc. used this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif. to introduce its new Torque Constructor game development tool. Torque Constructor is an interior editor designed to work with GarageGames’ cross-platform Torque Game Engine. The company also showed off its complete range of game development technology.
Torque Constructor
Torque Constructor hasn’t been released yet — it’s being announced for the first time at GDC. The cross-platform software, to be made available for Mac OX X, Windows and Linux, was developed on GarageGames’ Torque Application Platform. It provides capabilities for game designers to create detailed interior architectures and load them directly into the Torque engine. Features include rapid preview and real-time modification, brush tools and support for static meshes.
New and improved Torque Game Engine
GarageGames’ Torque Game Engine (TGE) was first developed as the core technology behind commercial releases like Tribes, Starsiege and Tribes 2. GarageGames has developed TGE as an inexpensive AAA-quality 3D game engine that can be licensed inexpensively by independent developers — it costs as little as US$100 to license and use, potentially without royalties depending on your revenue. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux platforms, and serves as the core technology behind titles like Marble Blast, Orbz, ThinkTanks and Dark Horizons: Lore. At GDC this week, GarageGames is showing off a new build of the engine with a new demo as well.
Not just for 3D gaming
GarageGames’ efforts with TGE have yielded a side-project called Torque 2D (T2D). Designed specifically for 2D games, the T2D engine — now available as an “early adopter” release — features rigid-body dynamic physics, a particle effects editor, sprite-based animations, a C++-like scripting language called TorqueScript, static and animated tiles, a fast swept-polygon collision detection system and other capabilities. It works with Apple’s XCode Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Also being shown off at GDC this week is the latest tech demo of GarageGames’ as-yet Windows-only Torque Shader Engine (TSE); Torque ShowTool Pro, a Mac and Windows-compatible 3D visualization tool designed for the Torque Game Engine; and the Torque RTS Starter Kit, which provides the foundation for Torque Game Engine developers to create their own strategy games.