Question About Blender vs. World Editor Torque

#1 For the first question about Blender, that's exactly what you can do. I only use Blender.
But for the sake of performance it might be better to check your poly-count for each import. And not to forget to take advantage of hardware based instancing in Torque3D.

The Torque Collaborative World Design Tool does what you need. It may be a bit outdated, but you got the source code to make things happen. Torque3D will have a final release for the 1.1 soon. Therefore an update might follow for many tools as well.

There is that management system and you can use any CVS of course.

#2 Thanks for the information.

#3 Anytime :)

#4 I've had good experiences in the past using an online service (specifically, XP-Dev) for collaboration and project management - even in single-person jobs, having a Trac project integrated with an SVN repository is a huge help.

I suppose it's theoretically possible to create an entire level in Blender, but bear in mind that you won't be able to create dynamic objects - just a single mesh. Unless you add in some complicated logic to allow you to place nodes in Blender that get automatically turned into dynamic objects in Torque, you'd still be placing the important objects in the world editor. (Depending on the type of game you're making, I guess.)

Still, I wouldn't recommend this approach - like Alexander said, you lose any engine optimisations that apply to separate objects, such as the revamped zoning/occlusion system in 1.1, the existing (in TGE at least, not sure about T3D) terrain culling, ghosting, etc.

#5 @ Daniel - That part about the the zoning/occlusion system is still sometimes confusing me. I thought that with the volumes set for occlusion the rest of any geometry will be occluded and therefore not rendered? So, that only applies to separate objects?

#6 What's involved with the revamped zoning/occlusion system? I haven't seen much info on this.

#7 Correct...occlusion is on a per-object basis for the most part (there is a way to do sub-object occlusion but I am not sure if it is in 1.1) so if you have one giant object then you won't get any performance increases from occlusion.