TGE 1.5 & New Products

Torque 1.5

Another week, more stuff here at GG. Ken, Matt, Paul, Ben & Joe have been hard at work squashing those last few bugs in 1.5 that cropped their heads. On the presentation side, things are still coming along very well. Below are some shots of the new Starter.FPS example, which inclues awesome sound work by new associate Jon Jorajuria of Dark Combat Audio and has art assets from Todd Picken's RTS Environment Pack included.

Several pieces of the winter environment of Todd's RTS Environment Pack are now included with TGE 1.5 to further add value to TGE 1.5

Additionally, new GG Intern Joshua Dallman of Red Thumb Games has donated four new high-quality skyboxes to Torque 1.5 as Starter Content. Be sure to send these guys your thanks!






Additionally, we have some new products coming down the pipe rather soon that I'd figured I'd mention. Some are known, some aren't.

Overlord
Overlord is an awesome web-based team management tool at a great price which is a great help to small indie teams and mod makers. We were so impressed with the work Jacob Fike had done on Overlord that we hired him on as an employee to become the third member of our internal web development team, and are putting Overlord up to be published here exclusively on GarageGames.com, look for it to be available soon.

Games Extract Car Pack
Adam deGrandis is back at it again with this really awesome & flexible Games Extract Car Pack. The pack includes a car mesh with nine different textures, 5 levels of detail, environmental mapping, a wheel mesh, working brakelights, and all the scripts to allow you to drop it into your game. Also included is the source in .max and .3ds format for the geometry and .psd format for the textures, as well as detailed documentation featuring how to get the Car into your game. And as a special bonus, a custom racetrack environment, complete with new terrain textures, a new skybox, and race track road pieces which you can use in your own projects. It's definitely whammy bar quality stuff, available soon.

L3DT
Aaron Torpy of Bundysoft has a great tool out there for terrain management, it's been immensely popular with the TorqueAT community, and it was only natural for us to get with Aaron to offer this great tool to the community directly. We've taken it one step further however and L3DT Professional will be available on GarageGames.com very soon with some bonus features. Aaron and Ben Garney have been busily working away on adding Direct to TorqueAT exporting into L3DT via a plugin. So when L3DT Professional ships here on GarageGames, you'll be able to create your huge Atlas terrains directly in L3DT's awesome editor, and be able to bring it straight into Atlas & TorqueAT with no hassle. This is really awesome stuff.

Arcane FX
Faust Logic's ArcaneFX Tool for TGE is going to be ready soon for publishing, post TGE 1.5 launch. Arcane FX brings powerful spellcasting and particle animation tools and content to TGE in the likes of what is seen in World of Warcraft and beyond. Anyone whose been lucky enough to try to Beta agrees that ArcaneFX is one of the hottest things to come to TGE in a long time and is "freaking sweet". Read more about it on Jeff Faust's most recent blog entry.

We had an informal community weekend this past weekend for our Associates and anyone who had already purchased a plane ticket to Eugene for IGC already or an IGC ticket. From what I hear, it was a huge blast and we had a bit larger attendance than we planned from what I hear (don't tell our building manager!) and some of our guys are still recovering. Unfortunately, I missed out due to unexpected last minute complications and was 3000 miles away the one weekend everyone was in town, however I really hope to see you guys all out finally next year. :)