GarageGames Releases Torque Game Engine Advanced

Game developer and engine creator GarageGames has announced the commercial release of the Torque Game Engine Advanced, as used in the firm's Marble Blast Ultra, providing a new low-cost game engine for indie and budget-conscious developers. The Torque Game Engine Advanced, which was known throughout development as Torque Shader Engine) takes full advantage of modern hardware technologies. It's available for PC, but users can create games with Torque Game Engine Advanced, and port to Xbox 360, if purchasing a separate license to the Torque 360 game engine. Other major features revealed by the company on Torque Game Engine Advanced's release include: - TorqueNet: Strong multiplayer networking foundation built into the code. TorqueNet uses both UDP and TCP, with key features including support of multiple data delivery requirements, partial object state updates, ghost management, packet stream management, and an optimized Notified Delivery Protocol. - Torque Lighting System: Multiple shadowing algorithms, self-shadowing objects, bloom, specularity, dynamic range, and more. 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: Supporting bumpmapping and normalmapping, detail maps, specular, cubemapping, glow, refraction, reflection, texture UV animation, and fog. - Custom Materials: A 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. - Puppeteer Mesh Animation System: Allows the use of animated multi-bone skeletons for dynamic, flexible character actions with a high level of detail. - 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. - Water Renderers: Easy to use Waterblocks with limitless size ocean bodies, normal map reflections, refractions, and perturbed surfaces. - Networkable Physics: Lightweight systems allows for hundreds of players with collision detection, rigid body, and vehicle physics. Torque Game Engine Advanced is available via an Indie license for $295 - license holders will have access to the full C++ source code and do not pay any royalties. The Commercial license is available for $1495 -- also with the source code included and without royalties. More information on the product is available through the GarageGames website.