Hardware Accelerated SceneGraph Driven Framework

Torque X's scene graph is a data structure which manages the paramaters of your game. The hierarchical nature allows you to change game-wide properties, or only those pertaining to a specific class of objects. Scene graphs provide an excellent framework for maximizing performance and productivity. Torque X culls the objects that won't be seen on screen, and sorts properties such as textures and materials by state, so that all similar objects are drawn together. The culling of off-screen objects prevents unnecessary drain on the CPU, buses and GPU, while state sorting alleviates strain on the GPU, keeping the graphics pipeline clear and graphics throughput running efficiently. As GPU's get faster and faster, keeping that pipeline clear becomes more and more important to maintain speed and efficiency. New to Torque X is the high performance batched rendering system where objects and materials are rendered as efficiently as possible.

Full Sprite Support

Torque X has a very impressive sprite system. Sprite rendering in Torque X is ultra-fast and sprites, like all Torque X objects, can be scaled and rotated in graphics hardware. Sprites are divided into two main kinds: those with complex animation capabilities, and those without.

Animated sprites work with animation data and an animation controller to create animations. Animation data defines properties such as the frames that make up the animation, the duration of the animation, whether the animation should cycle once it has completed or not, and can also specify what frame the animation should be started on. The animation controller takes that data and makes sure it animates properly, by determining what frame the animation should be on based on how long the animation has been running. It also generates responses if needed such as when frames have changed or if the animation has ended. It also controls the scaling of the animation speed and length. These two utilities manage the process of defining, setting up, playing, and manipulating animations.

Those without complex animation capabilities are referred to as static sprites, and are perfectly free to move about the scene, can have full collision and physics, and their rendering frames can even be changed, but they dont have a powerful animation interface. Of particular importance is that static sprites have none of the animation overhead incurred by animated sprites. Thus, while all sprites could really be animated sprites with no animations defined or played, the specialized static sprite class limits extra calls for functionality and contributes to an increased efficiency.

Parallax Scrolling

Parallax scrolling is defined as different planes of graphics and/or animation which scroll at different rates depending on their perceived relation to the viewer and camera, creating an illusion of depth. This is easily achieved in Torque X by defining multiple scrolling backgrounds, which you can then sort and assign to different rendering layers with different scrolling speeds. The effect is a simulation of a 3D scrolling environment.

Layers

Objects can be assigned to layers, and you can specify that layers be sorted for rendering. In fact, the sort order for layers can be changed at will, and objects can be re-assigned to different layers at any time. Also, objects on the same layer can be assigned intra-layer z-ordering, and this ordering can be changed at any time. In this way, Torque X gives you very fine-grained control over the z-ordering and rendering of your objects. In addition, Torque X doesn't limit you to using a small number of rendering layers, which makes it easy, for example, to set up amazing looking parallaxed backgrounds with lots and lots of layers.

Camera

The camera system in Torque X is extremely flexible. Set windows to cover a given area of the scene with a specific zoom level, then zoom, and pan the view any time. You can also mount the camera to have an object. This mount can be rigid or force-based, so you can make the camera follow an object (such as a player avatar) from a fixed distance, or react to collision or other forces on the object. In addition, camera effects such as shaking in response to a specified interaction are implemented in Torque X, with adjustable parameters.

Split Screen Multiplayer

With Torque X you can split the screen as many times as you want for multiplayer games. It can also be extended to be used for creating mini-maps. We provide a starter kit example to get you started in using this feature.