The iPhone Announcement

Hey guys,

It's been a while since I posted a blog, and I'm really happy actually to be writing on this subject for the first blog back in a bit. I want to say that I'm *really* encouraged by all the great work you guys have been doing. There are plenty of community members who really deserve special recognition and praise for some awesome work. Apparatus is wowing us with his gorgeous art, Ryan Mounts is doing cool stuff (and sharing it) on ambient occlusion for TGEA, Blackskull Studios is offering some great Torque-ready assets at a discount to GGers, and Dave's Fry Up is genius. Lots of kudos to go around and it would take the whole blog to cover all the posts and forum activity that's made me laugh or smile in the past few months, so I'll try to stay on track and just say "thanks" and please keep it up!

Okay...back to the iPhone thing...so we've been wrangling together work that various Torque users have done and combining it with our own updates and work to pull together a good game development solution for the iPhone using Torque. Essentially, as with the Wii, TGB and TGE both being OpenGL-based and Mac compliant make their use for iPhone development a natural fit. Both products do plenty to tax the iPhone's already impressive hardware, but we'll be adding lots to the iPhone specific version of Torque over time to really get it optimized. Why do the iPhone? That's pretty easy to answer :) The iPhone is at its peak in terms of popularity, and now with the Apple Developer SDK open to anyone and the iTunes App Store hosting games, there's a real path for indies to do very well with their games.


MBU on the iPhone? Accelerometer inputs? Oh the possibilities...

I wanted to write this blog to let you guys know what was up with the announcement, but also to see how many of you were interested in joining the effort. The product should be considered "beta" at this point, but really so should the iPhone SDK. Torque happens to be a great fit both in terms of its memory footprint and hardware support out of the box, but we'd like to take all that further if possible. If any of you are already using the iPhone SDK or have done some thinking about how you might improve TGE or TGB for deployment on the iPhone, feel free to get in touch with me and we'll see if we can loop you in.

Last thing I wanted to address here was the possible perception that this iPhone thing has in any way distracted us from the main Torque lineup. It definitely has not. We have SO much cool stuff going on for Torque on PC it's scary. Seriously, we're full steam ahead and though we're taking a longer cycle on our next couple releases, they'll be well worth it. More details to come probably toward the end of August, but I'll see if we can't preview some of what we're working on just a little earlier than that.

Thanks again guys for making the community so much fun to watch and work for. You make this job fun :)