I have been poking around looking at various 3d engines for development for a little webgame idea I had and decided it would be better suited being built in an actual game engine.
After a small amount of research I looked into the Torque engine (not linking there right now, read on) and it was highly lauded and rated well. I downloaded the demo’s and joined the rather large community that works in Torque and things seemed pretty cool, though a few things started to make me suspicious and so I went ahead and did some digging around and then got more suspicious. After some small amount of googling I found an interesting post from a game dev company saying “After thinking long and hard about the (lack of) progress we’ve made
over the last 10 months while trying to get Torque running as a decent
game engine, we’ve decided to scrap it altogether and return to our
previous engine, which was based on Ogre 3D. We’ve got it all building again and it looks great so far!”
Now this got me taking a serious look at Ogre 3D and I have to say I think it fits the bill for me, so I sent the following email to the guys who wrote the post above.
Hi,
Thanks for the comparison of CS and OGRE as well as your post about
switching away from Torque..
I have been messing around with it and was considering it as a game
engine but lucky me my ’spidey-sense’ kicked in looking through the
completed and in-development games and so I started digging around and
OGRE really seems like where it is.. Been pointing some folks to your
post about 10 months of Torque and you guys quit it.. (sorry about
that btw..) but at least you could point some of the rest of us away
from the torque engine..Few things that should make anyone suspicious of the Torque engine is:
a) they have the largest base of users (or so it seems) but one of the
lowest numbers of actual games created with it.
b) all the ‘paid plugins’ and ‘packs’.. smells of a money pump to me..
like one of the free mmorpgs that you have pay for stuff to get
anywhere..
c) the restriction of content only for license holders, like the
tutorials that you can only look at if you paid for the license.
d) the walled garden approach ‘feel’ you get with all the above..thanks again, OGRE seems the way to go.
Which in turn got me this response
I’m only too glad to share my experiences with others in similar situations.
I hope I can save you some time in your search for a decent game engine.
IMO, Torque isn’t it. I’ve lost faith in Garage Games as a company. I feel
they’re somewhat unscrupulous and/or random in their business approach.
Certainly not the kind of company or platform I want to base my livelihood
on, as I’m hoping my game will eventually be.Best of luck to you in your project as well.
I replied with
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, in my experience open source projects are almost always the best
when you are doing things to base a business off. I used to work for a
Microsoft shop that in it’s early phase was almost done in by
licensing.
Later I went to a domain name registrar (directnic) which was at
the time very profitable and built their entire business on the back
of apache/php/mysql and all 100% open source projects and they did
very well (until godaddy ate them up and they switched primary
business to parked.com)..
Anyway.. as a ‘test’ I dropped a fishing for a job post in the forums
there.. Manhattan coder looking for *paid* work in a physical office,
7 years experience coding, etc and not one response except one guy who
tried to give me job hunting tips.
I am now convinced that Torque is a hobby/learning engine and nothing more..
Not to mention the new license..Anyway, I am rambling.. they almost sucked me because what I want to
do is basically take an idea I had for a web game move it into an app
so I don’t need to deal with browser issues and can have some real
animations and such.. Torque seemed the way to do it..Good luck on your game, will definitely check it out.
and the following came back
That response doesn’t surprise me at all. I think the whole GG community
are unrealistic people who don’t realize how bad Torque is, otherwise they’d
already left and gone to a different engine, or made their own.And thanks for the good luck, we can always use some of that!
now..
This is basically the response you get from people who have used this engine..
I am glad that I didn’t let myself get suckered in and I suppose I hope that this post can help others who may be making a choice about game engines.
My two cents on the matter is, Torque is a great learning/hobby engine but to even consider it for any serious development you might be deluding yourself. OGRE 3d is not tehcnically a ‘game engine’ it is more just a rendering engine, and it requires knowledge of C++ unlike Torque which has it’s own scripting language. OGRE has a lot of tutorials and many many external libs can be used easily with it. Not to mention the number of games made with it is impressive.
The other engine I seriously consider is irrlicht after reading a post about it byt the guy who wrote raknet which I am hoping to use with OGRE.