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Recentlty got my hands on Torque3d. As a guy that always liked to evaluated and look through the details of technology, i wanted to know what where the major differences between Garage games new engine and Unity3d which generates a lot of buzz theses days.

A Guided tour of Torque 3d

After installing the software, the first thing I fired up was the documentation. One of the major disadvantages the Torque engines had, was documentation. The documentation on the tools are pretty solid. Everything is explained from World editing, Terrain editing, Material and such in fine enough details. Scripting is also well detailed, but you get access to TDN (Torque Developper Network) and can have lots of old documentation that proves to be still usable (At least the TGE and TGEA are pretty close to Torque3D).

Torque Toolbox

The Torque toolbox is the basic launch pad of the application. From there you can fire up the World Editor, Gui Editor and other shortcut you would configure down as Editor Quick Links. What I find easier to understand than Unity is that each level is really well presented in project Levels. In Unity you can put your map somewhere down into lost directories and if you change their locations you have to re-register them for builds. As such Torque3D wins by having a solid directory structure. By contrast in Unity3d you have to be carefull. If you want to load dynamic data you have to put the dynamic data into a folder called “Resources”. There can be a multitude of /Resources folders scattered around, good luck searching for an asset and thats why they introduced the Search function in Unity 2.6.

Projects

Here is a listing of all projects inside the /Projects folder. When you ask for a new project a series of dialogs will help you create it with certain templates that can serve as basis for your game. For the moment, only Full exist and serves as a basic 3d shooter project.

Project information

In this view we can choose the project build (in case you change the source code in C++ and recompile), the project levels and the various buttons that can launch the editors quickly. The Cleanup button is very handy. When you want to extend the engine, you will drop your code into a specific folder : C:\Torque\Torque 3D 2009 SDK 1.0\My Projects\<project name>\source. After adding new files, you will click on clean-up so that the visual studio files are automatically set up with a structure akin to yours. These files that you add extends the engine and are part of the DLL that will ship (for windows) with your game.

Extending the code source

People that are not frightened by C++ should feel pretty comfortable with the size of the engine. It is well layered out. One thing that I found disastrous is that the C++ documentation is nonexistent except for an SFX part. Personally, I find it a little bit frustrating, but in Unity3d when I tried to implement C# script, I stumbled uppon the same problem, almost all Unity3d documentation is in Javascript. Although the documentation on C++ is scarce you can find lots of TGE and TGEA documentation on extending the Mission Editor which is an older version of the World Editor. Even if this documentation is non existent, I find it frustrating that they did not put some high level concept of how to do stuff in the shipped documentation. For example, we should not have to browse to find how to implement a new button or a new scriptable object. It should be there since its a basic task all developers will have to do for their art team. On that side, Unity3d offers good tutorials, namely the 3d platformer tutorial which is well explained for beginners.

Support for shader tools

As written in TDN, since TGEA, ATI and Nvidia shader tools are supported. Unity3d has yet to permit us to edit and debug shaders in their own shading language. This is a major plus, because those tools are industry proven and used.

World Editor

The world editor feel strange after playing with Unity for the last 6 months. When you understand the concepts behind Datablocks in T3D, you realize that T3D is much more open to custom resource management. Resources can be saved/loaded with a clean API. In Unity3d, there is no way to add a new unique resource type. You have to invoke Mono to write/read everything. T3D have a clean API that is geared for games and when you write code you know it will just work on all platform, just look at the engine, and do the same !

Object edition

Object Edition is similar to Unity3d. Transform, Position and other data is there in the inspector, I wish that T3D would have given better Vector edition, right now everything is on the same line. On that point, I miss the dragging on Integer/float values in Unity3d.

Fluent pipeline

Objects and textures are updated instantly inside the editor. In Unity3d, you have to fire up the game in some ways to see models play animations. In Torque3d, you can visualize texture and animation changes instantly. Change the 3d models scale and other properties in real time inside max, hit save and torque will update it (similar to Unity). Unlike Unity, torque can let you script animation sequence importation and model constructions. As such, you can share multiple biped animations for example for all human models, Unity support for this is rather blurry. There is mention in the docs that you can do something like that, but I never was able to sort it out. You should anyways watch the video here to check the differences

As of now, I am still in my first week of checking out T3d. I am very happy with the speed of the engine, its facilities. There is support for basic things in a game such as precipitation, clouds, sun, night/day cycle and such that you have to implement from scratch in Unity3d. Both are making good headways in letting us do great games. I will probably add a tutorial or two, once I get the things sorted. Professional developers should carefully check it out against Unity3d.

Unity3d 2.6 has been rolled out. You can get a full interview with Helgason on the state of things here at gamasutra.One thing to note is that Unity is now offered free for indies. This could spell trouble for garage games that just rolled out their new Torque3d engine. Torque being tailored more at developers who want full control over the C++ source code, may find that Unity, being more user friendly will garner more momentum in academic places. Garage Games will probably counter strike to this we imagine. Although Unity has announced full support for SVN, it is only available in their pro version. The rationale is that people that use it for free will probably be evaluating it or developing as one man army.

Of things to note that is still not available is full support for debugging with Visual Studio. In fact, as one forum member stated clearly, full interactive debug won’t be available until they upgrade their mono backend. Heres the full quote from Dreamora :

“Debugging requires Mono 2.x which won’t happen with Unity 2.x likely but with 3.0 as it was mentioned by a dev on the user voice system, that there are incompatibilities which makes it impossible to use it with 2.x as all webplayer installs need to remain backward compatible.

With the switch to Mono 2.x (2.4+) we will actually get debugging.”

See the thread here

In an editorial originally published in Game Developer magazine magazine’s October 2009 issue, editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield considers whether the “evil” part of “necessary evil” really applies to game publishers, specifically discussing U.S.-based publishing processes. Quoting: “It basically became sitting down on a panel with eight people, probably three of whom were from the game industry, and the other five were either from a cosmetics company or hair color or water and power company, and they would be approving our games. It was like the same questions would come up every time. ‘Well, how is this like Diablo? Tell me how this is like Diablo.’ ‘Well, it’s not like Diablo. It’s not at all like Diablo. It’s completely different.’ ‘Oh, well, no. You need to give us a game like Diablo.“

read it all here

As explained by SmelLikeDonkey with his experience releasing an iPhone game on the App Store. By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80% during the first week after release. Since a common excuse for piracy is “try before you buy,” they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.

Practically-speaking, the TS would be on a par with the Wii in terms of its processing power and graphical grunt. The new unit is set to retain many features of its immediate predecessor too – notably a DSi-style built-in camera and a higher-resolution touch-screen interface. Full backwards-compatibility is also on the cards, we’re assured.

If NVIDIA hopes to survive in the world of post-Fusion products (combined CPU/GPU offerings) then they will definitely need products like Tegra to win designs like this.  Nintendo has sold over 100 million Nintendo DS systems and if NVIDIA does indeed power the next revision of it with a Tegra-based processor, that is a huge boost to the company’s bottom line and could put the Tegra brand on its way to “capturing 50% of nVidia’s revenue within the next couple of years.”

Read the rest here