TGEA Milestone 4 Demo

The TGEA Milestone 4 demo is finally ready for your viewing pleasure. You can grab it from Downloads/Devlopment Demos/Torque Shader Engine EA. Yeah, we've got a lot of renaming to do.

What is TGEA? After getting lots of feedback on the TSE name change to Torque Advanced
Technologies, we've decided to change it once more. TSE is now Torque Game Engine
Advanced or TGEA. We feel this accomplishes our goals of establishing that TGEA
has more to offer than shader support, that it fits in with our current branding
strategy, and that its acronym is not slang for "crap" to people with funny
accents.

This demo features the Orc once more, but he's not dancing this time thank goodness.
It's mostly just showing off the new MS4 lighting and self-shadowing that John Kabus
added to TGEA. The editor is functional, so you can play around with the lights
and add your own and such.

TGEA is coming along well, and we're feature complete at this point. From now on
its a cycle of bug fixing, testing and feedback until we're done. There are plenty
of docs to be added and refined as well, particularly in the areas of compiling on
VS2005 and using Materials. Some of the code also needs better documentation
such as the new RenderInstance rendering structure.

For those of you wondering where TGEA fits into the Torque product line, it is
our high end engine, aimed at serious 3D developers. A version of it runs on the
XBOX 360, so it's got console port potential. The core of TGEA is the same as
the Torque engine with the same object model, scripting, networking, and
editing tools. For the most part the core is exactly the same we as regularly
merge the code between the two. TGEA is a bit more complex to use than TGE, but
it offers higher performance and better visuals if you know what you're doing.

Pretty much all of the rendering code in TGE has been gutted in TGEA. Among
many improvements, it has:

- A full blown material system that can procedually generate shaders
based on artist preferences. It also can be used for storage of per-surface
data such as sound, physics info, and shader parameters.

- An integrated dynamic lighting and shadowing system that works alongside
the material system to take full advantage of shader surfaces.

- A prototype super large (Atlas) terrain system that can effeciently render
very large view distances, take up only a bit of video memory and yet deliver
unique non repeating terrain over several square kilometers.

- Fully transformable water with realtime reflections and underwater rendering

- A new batched rendering system to render objects like characters much more
effeciently than in TGE.

- Support for full screen effects such as glow, bloom, refraction, DRL, and HDR.

- An abstracted rendering layer to support multiple rendering APIs.


This engine has been in use internally for some time and was used for our hit
XBox Live Arcade title "Marble Blast Ultra". It's been pretty well battle tested
and is ready to be used to make your game or Serious application.

I personally can't wait to finish cleaning up the remaining bugs and get it out
the door, it's been a long time ;)