Is there someone, who repented to buy torque?

#1 I am really surprised tha there is not an answer to your post - to me it who is still mulling over spending the grand to buy it vs the $900 Unity engine, boils down to me - support and so you need to read over the forums for each see which community is more active and supportive, then review each of the features incorporated into each - try the demos and go from there.....I am personally leaning to buying the Torque3D engine mostly for the web player and how easily incorporated it is, I am still researching the ODBC support and as far as the community goes this is an active community but not always the most helpful and in some cases outright retarded (very few...but still there)

#2 This website has always been focused on the community. We are one (1) click away from the front page and not burried in the depths of the site. There are some fantastic resources available for free which have been created by the community.

In saying that, we, in many respects, are no different from any other community in the interwebs. We have some outstanding individuals who go above and beyond, and we've got our fair share of misfits. Most people here, however, are genuinely interested in helping others solve issues they encounter, not only because it may help them in the future but because they are indeed nice people.

#3

Quote:I am really surprised tha there is not an answer to your post

I'm satisfied, so I did not respond to the OP, because it seemed like he/she was only interested in hearing buyer's remorse stories and I don't have one to tell. (T3D is useful to me just as Unity is) This might not have been the intent of the OP and might and been a misreading on my part; but if I were to troll forums looking to start yet another religious jihad about engine choice, such a first post would not be a bad start.

#4 Well I myself am still evaluating both T3D as well as Unity. From my experience so far is that Unity had better documentation/tutorials and community/forum. Not to say that Garage Games people aren't helpful, it's just that Unity's members are more in abundance. I can't speak on Torque's private forums though since I have yet to purchase the engine. But since the free version of Unity Indie is available, they'll get even more members which means more resources.

I'm also noticing that T3D is targeted toward high end computers/video cards. Unity is very broad, allowing you to develop for systems that are much older. If you're a designer such as myself, T3D has a lot of sexy visuals right out-of-the-box. With Unity you'll have to code them yourself. This I'm referring to is skattersky, clouds, lightrays, etc.

Just skimming the surface I feel that T3D's networking platform is a bit more robust than Unity's.

I'm also noticing quite a few bugs with the T3D engine, which I'm sure will be corrected with later versions. Unity has been around for a while now, so their engine is a bit more stable.

Those are my two cents...

#5 @Adam - Just as a response to the documentation, I just pushed 114 (printed) new pages of documentation for Torque 3D. I expect the next push to be just as many.

#6 Michael, what do you mean by printed? Is this documentation going to be available online soon?

#7 @Adam - As it stands right now, there are about 90 individual HTML pages that make up Torque 3D's documentation. This does not include all the placeholders that will make up the final docs, which will end up being 150-200 individual html pages.

Page count means when I load up the docs in something like MS Word and perform a print preview, as if it were a book. The last set of docs I pushed online (Rendering documentation, GUI documentation, new script docs, etc), I performed a page count in MS Word. It ended up being 114 new pages of documentation. I'll be performing a full page count later today to see where the current docs stand. In simple terms, you load a doc and you have X amount of pages to read through. That's what it means.

All the docs I write are available online at The Official Documentation Page

#8 Thanks Michael.

#9 @Adam - So, I couldn't wait. I went ahead and performed some page counts and got the following numbers:

Number of individual HTML files: 60
Printed Page Count: 694
Estimated number of pages taken up by bad format and table of contents: 94 (Extremely modest and critical number, could be less but I don't have time to just print preview the whitespace)

TOTAL PAGE COUNT: 600

600 printed pages of documentation. That's more than a lot of game developer books you can purchase. To add icing to the cake, the docs are not finished. I plan on spending the next 4 months wrapping up the documentation for Torque 3D, so you can imagine what the final counts will be by then.

#10 Very nice!

#11 I am evaluating Unity 3D and Torque 3D. I've been very impressed with the Unity 3D documentation and tutorials. And everything seems to work as advertised. And the Unity 3D indie is free.

Here is my experience with Torque 3D so far.

If you buy the discounted version of Torque 3D in December for $100, you will see the following.

1. If I use the World Editor to create a randomly generated terrain, it gets blown away when I save my level, and I only see the flat terrain when I return to view the level. So all my time and work disappeared.
2. My player falls through the ground plane. To reposition him, I have to select an asset, and move the camera to the selected asset. Then I have to move the player to the camera.
3. If I delete a terrain and create a new one, I have no way to save that terrain. So the level is hosed, and I have to start over.
4. My terrains do not get assigned the names I give them. So I can't find them. If I specify something like "theOceanTerrain" I won't find it because it got changed to "BlankRoom_0.ter" or something like that.
5. If I create a terrain, it doesn't get stored in the art/terrains directory. It gets stored in tools/art/terrains.

So the terrain editor and terrain painter are nice eye candy. But totally useless as is, unless you have a way to save your terrain.

#12 Well unless you killed someone or stole something before buying I see no reason to repent before buying...

#13 hail mary...

i'm gonna switch repented for regretted and work on that assumption

TGB, Yes but mostly because i have failed to do much with it and the TGB community is so much poorer than the TGE/A/3D community imo

TGE, No

TGEA, Yes for a long time

T3D, depends, if a bug is in my way on any particular day :)

i still have woes about documentation, tho documentation as a whole has increased in quality an exponential amount in the past year or more (if the two chm uploads were fixed i'd be happier :p), although i'm sure the GG documentation 'team' is overworked (Master Perry needs help, either a tardis or other people writing up some docs).


Overall i'm happy with GG and the torque producs, and thats as close as an endorsement as you'll ever get from a depressing pessemist of a misanthrope

#14 The several Torque-based engines I've purchased have had issues. But, at the end of the day, I've learned a LOT from them about the game development process; not just programming, but asset management, 3d modeling, publishing, etc. That education was well worth the $$, even if I never ship a game using a Torque product.

So no - I don't regret the purchase. It wasn't everything I'd hoped for, but I did get my money's worth out of it.

#15 @Robert Galante - For the life of me I can't replicate a single one of the bugs you are describing.

@Bloodknight - Much thanks for the honesty and the compliment. I know one when I see it, even if it comes from a self-proclaimed "depressing pessimist of a misanthrope =)

#16 Michael,

The first issue Robert G is talking about is logged as a bug in the private forums. I first encountered it with the 1.0 release.

#17 @Mich
Issue in the alpha with terrains, it's been reported.
That's why it's an alpha

edit:
Doh, beat me to it, Chris can speed type!

#18 Going with Torque is really a no-brainer. Only reason why I have not purchased Torque 3D yet is because I need to build or get a PC that can handle it (my outdated PC is no longer any good) but I can speak on behalf of TGE, TGB and TGEA.

Torque 3D has the game mechanics kit, Verve, pureLight, the 3D packs, and other additions. These things make game development much easier and look much nicer. I'm not aware of Unity 3D having any such things.

I think you'll be coding more in Unity than you would be in Torque 3D - and with more work in general. Torque 3D seems to be more ready-to-go than Unity, meaning you can get something up and working in Torque faster than you could in Unity.

I hope Torque's community is going to keep heading in this "no coding, ease of use" direction, meaning more products for those of us who are coding morons, where we can focus more on art assets and game play instead of fretting about that evil word we call programming.