Dave's straight up engine review

First off, I'm sorry to say I do not have fancy pictures created 'just' for this review.
Instead I 'can' show off some fancy pictures from my TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced) project, but please note that these are not the best representation of what this engine can do.

In fact, I'm writing this review to give a fair view on the engine itself. It seems lately that, here on Moddb, people like giving TGEA a poor rating. I honestly don't feel 5-6 is at all fair.

The first thing to know about this engine is not at all about the engine. When you buy the license, download the software, and set everything up... You have a rough looking player model, and a handful of architectural models. No textures, no extra code, thats just it.

Nowhere near making an actual game. This is upsetting to many potential developers for some reason.
This is because TGEA is for a pretty serious project, and for developers who have a good amount of experience under their belt.

The second part to mention is Torque has a serious learning curve. Models must be exported in a 'very' specific way, and learning how to get across minor technical problems will be every Torque developer's know-how.
99% of these technical glitches will be from the developer. Well, because, when making a game from scratch, you need to add a lot of content. Somewhere down the line, 'someone' will accidentally do 'something' and something will go wrong.
Every bit of code thats added can be buggy, every model made could have problems...ect. This is what drives more potential developers off.
Instead of figuring out what the problem really is, often times they blame the engine and leave it at that. (I've seen it time and time again.)

Ok. So we've established "The engine takes some learning skills" and "game development takes a lot of time."

Great huh? If you got past that part with Torque, your already past half the people who dislike the engine! Ok now, lets get into the engine itself.

Experimenting with water, and the default character. (An orc.)

TGEA is the 'advanced' version of TGE (Torque Game Engine). In a basic sort of generality, the engines are very similar. If you know how to work with TGE, you can probably figure out TGEA in minutes.
Both of the engines are built more towards older engines. That is, still use BSP shapes as a major source of models and lighting and things like that.

Shaders are the newer thing in Torque Advanced. Shaders are HLSL files and the engine has a variety of default options, such as glow, blur, scrolling, ect.
Fortunately you actually get most of these coded out for you, so even if your not a pro coder, you can still slightly modify the code to get a fair result.

BSP objects created in the BSP constructor (The standard being 'Torque Constructor', a separate piece of software that is free.) are not able to have shaders applied to them. Specifically, you can't directly apply normal maps onto them. If you need to, you'll need to use another piece of software like QuArK. You can also use tools like GtkRadiant and Worldcraft.

Mapping is entirely WYSIWYG. Mappers 'usually' will have to export models in-game and set the models up while the game is running. This has its ups and downs. You can drop your player to whatever has just been placed and adjust the scene or test it out right there.
On the downside, whenever lighted objects are moved, you'll need to eventually re-light, which takes about 15-20 seconds. You can also say WYSIWYG editors ultimately won't look as good compared to how other engines do it.

On the modeling side of things, objects usually have a pretty low range for polys.
For weapons, your looking at about 2K~2.5K polys (1st person model.) For things like characters, generally you want lower then 3K polys (2.5K is fine). In all reality, thats not bad, but with today's standard on how many polys a weapon or player should have, thats considered low.
The best part of modeling is exporting a model to the engine itself. Model files are called .dts and, depending on your modeling program, you will NEED to get an exporter set up as the first thing to do.

For the available modeling programs (I don't even know all of them). 3Ds Max, Maya, Truespace,  Blender, and Milkshape are some of the general ones that are supported and will work.

For coders, light coding is all done in Torquescript. Which is an easy to learn C++ style code language that doesn't require headers. Most weapon programming, character coding...ect is all done outside of the engine in .CS files. When started up, the engine simply calls upon a main file that initiates the compiling of .cs files on start up.
I refer anything to outside the engine as 'light' coding as its stable enough, but easy to do.
'Heavy' coding would be jumping into the engine and manually compiling the code source yourself.
The engine itself is C++, and to compile it I found myself needing two separate Dx libraries.

The engine will require some getting used to for coding. I'd recommend picking up the engine and really looking at it, or at least some documentation before really tampering with it.
There are some software solutions for helping coders use Torque script effectively, such as Codeweaver.

A last thing to note about the engine's architecture is that its a client/server architecture, and that, no matter what, there is always a client and server running in a match. Even when its single player.

For texture artists, remaining in the 'old' side of things is your best bet. I found myself using JPEG and PNGs for textures, and barely even dived into DDS.
Textures are usually 256x256-512x512, and for important objects 1024x1024. 2048x2048 are for if you have something very important. Decals and grass are simply transparent background textures (PNG.)
For some objects, like the sun's corona, the background is black.

Now that I've explained some basics on how the engine works, I'm going to go a little into what the engine is good at.
Torque is great for wide open areas, and fairly closed in areas as well. Your virtually not limited in either way. 'Technically' your limited by poly heavy scenes, but as demonstrated below, thats not always an issue either.

3D grass text. Each red dot is a cluster of grass that is around ~200 polys.
Each cluster of grass has a 1024 metal test texture. The terrain is 256 with a 256 detail texture.
~40FPS with a Nvidia 8500GT

Torque does not have any major obvious glaring disadvantages. It can do anything in its own low poly lower res basic style way. A large problem with this is it does not have a major advantage. It does not have an area of what its 'really' good at. The lighting system isn't to die for, but it gets by ok. Which can be said about most of the engine's features overall.

A large part of this can be contributed to the fact its really how you build it up. If you aim for low poly low res texture stuff, large area environments are a breeze. If you want higher poly and higher res texture stuff, you can create portal-ed detail environments.

As I said time and time again, Torque is an older engine, especially compared to the brand new stuff.
No, its certainly not the best looking engine. Its especially not the easiest to use, and for $300 for a indie license, its not the cheapest either. Fortunately the community is pretty nice and always seems to know things that are beneficial to your project.

So, in a quick summary:

For it's price, a great start and effective engine for an experienced developer
After the learning curve, easy to navigate and use
Torquescript is easy to learn and use effectively
Can look great, once you learn how to use it effectively

Can be difficult to learn
Can be pricey
Some features, such as the lighting system, are very basic
In-game WYSIWYG editor can be finicky

So, in a run-down. If you want an engine that is able to do open environments, coding (Net-coding and general coding for an FPS is basically built in) that works for an FPS/RTS genre game, your an experienced (Or at least partly experienced) developer, and you have some cash you can pass over to pick up the engine, this is an engine for you.

Compared to many alternatives, Torque is more expensive but better built for an FPS/RTS environment. If your looking for alternatives, there are plenty of free (Or at least cheap) engines hanging around that might be better for you.