I've Been Looking At Torque...
by Ethan Meanor · in Torque Game Engine · 06/23/2006 (10:15 pm) · 3 replies
We're planning an action/adventure game, with a strong influence from the GTA franchise. It will involve vehicles - cars, motorcycles, and boats and planes hopefully - a very large gameplay area, cutscenes, a lot of people onscreen at once at times, etc. And also important, a modern setting. I assume that can be done, but it's worth noting. Is Torque a good engine to use for something like this? Is this the kind of thing the engine is intended for, or would we be better off looking elsewhere?
#2
06/24/2006 (6:02 am)
I can't see why not. TGE has a very large gameplay area. I know some games have up to 100 people on them at once. What is nice about TGE is that for $100 you get the source. Also Torquescript allows you to prototype and debug your code quickly. Several others are working on games that are similar to yours, so I would say yes to using TGE. Usually the only reason a game doesn't get done with TGE is because of the person/team does not put the effort into finishing it. Some games take a month to a couple of years to finish. 
#3
I do not know what your programming experience is like, but the closer it gets to the low end, the more difficult it would be to do in the vast majority of indie engines, free or commercial.
06/24/2006 (8:52 am)
You will need to make some extremely heavy modifications to the engine for large streaming chunked environments. What you are asking is not trivial in any engine, except perhaps BeyondVirtual since it began its life as an eco-friendly GTA clone. You will have to scale your artwork accordingly depending on view-distance, etc. BV is about the only engine which I can think of which wouldn't require a major overhaul to create such a title. It seems that there is a level-streaming plugin for A6 which tries to facilitate this as well (made for RPG's and Soul Reaver-esque "no loading screen" games).I do not know what your programming experience is like, but the closer it gets to the low end, the more difficult it would be to do in the vast majority of indie engines, free or commercial.
Torque Owner Tim Heldna
Download the demo and see if Torque's rendering is up to your standards. Torque, to an extent, can handle large gameplay areas but you have to be wise with map design and use low poly models. Torque does have vehicle code which is a plus, but you will need to tweak it and improve on it to suit your needs.