• An API independent graphics layer, TorqueGFX, currently supporting DirectX 9, but designed with forthcoming OpenGL support in mind.
  
• Procedural generation of shaders that support normalmapping, detail maps, specular, cubemapping, glow, refraction, reflection, texture UV animation, and more.
  
• Powerful shader interface allowing easy integration of custom shaders and effects.
  
• Versatile vertex buffer and texture management, with support for static, dynamic and volatile vertex buffers.
  
• New lighting system.

• Materials - TGEA updates Torque so that all rendering uses the new Materials System. Materials are surface descriptions that can be used for things such as physics and sound information, but has been fleshed out for rendering. The Materials are designed to work on all types of geometry. They look the same whether placed on a building, the terrain, or on a skinned character. They are unified as much as possible throughout the engine.
  
  
• Flexibility - Data specified in Materials is used to procedurally create the shaders necessary to render the different materials. This is a very powerful system because it does not rely on programmers to create the shaders. It is an art/designer driven process. Because there are many different Material parameters, there are thousands of possible shader creation combinations. In addition, the shaders are generated specifically for the hardware that the engine is running on. Shaders automatically scale in power and render quality based on the platform. It will even multipass render a Material automatically if necessary. This adds up to massive time savings for developers; artists can get results without directly involving a programmer, and programmers don't need to write dozens of mundane shaders.
  
  
• CustomMaterials - Procedural generation of shaders is a real time saver, but it can't create every kind of shader imaginable. For special effects or custom "looks", the CustomMaterials are available. They allow shader programmers to easily drop in their own .hlsl or shader assembly files right into TGEA framework. There are even fallback hooks for each level of shader hardware, so there is full control over how it looks on all platforms.
  
  
• Rewritten Renderers - Each of Torque's major renderers has been rewritten to be simpler and run more efficiently. The interiors, for instance, are now batched and rendered per zone. What's more they can do bumpmapping, specular highlights, lightmaps, fog, and detail maps in a single pass on hardware that supports 2.0 level shaders.
  
  
• New Terrain Engine - TGEA's new Atlas terrain engine is a complete rewrite of the Torque terrain technology, taking full advantage of modern hardware. Geometry is stored in vertex buffers, enhancing rendering performance. Atlas also supports terrains of arbitrary size, as it has terrain paging management built-in.
  
  
• New Water Renderers - TGEA's enhanced Water Renderers produce amazingly realistic water with normalmap-perturbed dynamic reflection, surface reflection, and more. The new Waterblocks are easier to use and more efficient to render. Taking advantage of the latest graphics hardware, TGEA Waterblocks have full effect fallbacks, supporting the entire range of shader hardware.
  
  
• TGEA supports render-to-texture functionality for all kinds of special effects. This allows Glow and Refraction Buffers and all kinds of effects in the future like Depth of Field, Motion Blur, 3D HUDs, and many other possibilities.
  
  
• TGEA supports and fully manages static and dynamic vertex buffers as well as textures. This is a big upgrade from TGE in that now everything is transformed and lit on the GPU rather than the CPU. Since it manages all the allocations using ref counting and smart pointers, developers do not need to worry about keeping track of vertex buffer and texture memory allocation - it's all automatic.
  

• Torque Lighting System: Introducing multiple shadowing algorithms, self-shadowing objects, bloom, specularity, dynamic range, and more. Flexible in-game lighting editors and tools support significantly increased game atmosphere and design efficiency. Light objects can be configured as static or dynamic, omni or spotlights, and are capable of illuminating multiple interiors, shapes and terrain.
  
  
• Procedural Generation of Shaders that support bumpmapping and normalmapping, detail maps, specular, cubemapping, glow, refraction, reflection, texture UV animation, and fog.
  
  
• Custom Materials: A powerful custom shader interface allows easy integration of custom shaders and effects. Users can drop in shaders from demos or tools such as FX Composer and RenderMonkey. Also included are exclusive fallback hooks that allow full control over how a custom material looks on all hardware platforms.
  
  
• Modern Scenegraph and Batched Rendering for creating complex scenes with huge numbers of polygons.
  
  
• Puppeteer Mesh Animation System: Allows the use of animated multi-bone skeletons for dynamic, flexible character actions with a high level of detail. Fully supports motion capture data for ultra-realistic animations.
  
  
• GeoTerrain: Featuring multi-pass texturing and lighting, and layered volumetric fog, the portal-based interiors -- with detail brushes and animated lightmaps -- are able to connect directly with the environment-mapped terrain. GeoTerrain can easily be created using an alpha-channel height map, then edited within the engine to customize levels.
  
  
• Doorway: Seamless integration of interior and exterior rendering.
  
  
• Atlas Terrain Generation allows for limitless, dynamically paging terrains, taking full advantage of modern hardware for efficient rendering.
  
  
• Water Renderers: Easy to use Waterblocks with limitless size ocean bodies, normal map reflections, refractions, and perturbed surfaces.
  
  
• 3D Toolset: Edit every aspect of your world, including terrain attributes, weather and fog, configure objects, set triggers, and mission logic all in the WYSIWYG Mission Builder. Build fully scriptable interfaces, write custom controls, edit, and test without exiting the GUI Builder. Includes mesh exporters for Maya, 3D Studio Max, LightWave, Blender, MilkShape and more.
  
  
• Networkable Physics: Lightweight systems allows for hundreds of players with collision detection, rigid body, and vehicle physics.
  
  
• Xbox 360 Portable. Create your game with Torque Game Engine Advanced, and port to XBox 360. (Requires separate license to Torque 360 game engine)

Customer review from Joseph Euan, Apr 09, 2006 at 17:32 GMT

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