Mission Builder

The Mission Builder is an in-game tool encompassing eight sub-editors tightly integrated with each other which provide the backbone for creating, modifying, and saving the various unique areas of your game. The major components of the Mission Builder are the World Builder and Terrain Builder.

World Builder

The Integrated WYSIWYG World Builder is a powerful object placement toolkit for the easy building of game scenes and structures. This editor gives you control over all elements of the in-game environment from a graphical viewpoint, and you can create, place, size, scale and rotate individual mission objects, as well as view and modify any of the properties of those objects. Simply select an object and you can easily manipulate all of its script-exposed parameters via text boxes, spinners, radio-buttons, and/or checkboxes. Edit the parameters for water, terrain, the character, the sky, and other objects with ease. The 3D World View is not blocked by any dialogs or menus, giving you an almost-full screen view while you manipulate objects via mouse and hot-keys in real time.

Terrain Builder

Terrain is the basis for the large outdoor areas seen in many Torque games. Torque represents open landscapes using a heightmap to determine elevation, and can blend up to 6 textures together over the terrain's surface. Terrain is edited in-game using the built-in Mission Editor. The Terrain Builder consists primarily of the Terrain Editor and GeoTerrain. Atlas-generated terrains can also be used and edited to a limited degree in the Terrain Builder (further integration of Atlas into existing tools is planned for future versions of TGEA). You can find out more about GeoTerrain and Atlas on their respective pages.

Terrain Editor

The terrain editor is a sculpting tool for GeoTerrain, although to call it a mere sculpting tool sells it short. With the terrain editor, level designers have direct control over the form of their terrains. With its host of smoothing, sculpting, and growing/reducing tools, you can create whatever worlds you can imagine! The terrain editor allows you to manually adjust the height of the mission map as well as define whether portions of the map 'exist' at all. You can load images as terrain files and apply various algorithmic filters to the terrain. For example, by selecting a number of textures and applying such filters, you can determine blending, placement, and other variables. You can even choose from a palette of textures and paint directly onto the terrain.

GUI Builder

"GUI" stands for Graphical User Interface. It is the summation of all the controls (windows, buttons, text fields, etc) that are used to interact with a game and it's settings. The GUI Builder is an easy to use, drag and drop graphical user interface creator. Torque's GUI system is a powerful and flexible in-game tool, which provides immediate feedback about the design as it is being created. It offers precise control over your game's interfaces, and allows you to create most any interface you can imagine. GUIs are important because they are the interfaces users of your game will use constantly, every time they play. All games require a GUI of some kind, whether it's the menu screen, an in-game Heads-Up Display (HUD), or an options dialog, every game needs GUI controls which can receive user input, and display results in a visual fashion. Designing intuitive, easy to use interfaces that gamers interact with is a major part of game design and knowing how to utilize the GUI Editor to its fullest potential is critical to your game's success.