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Here are some of the premier projects using Torque 3D right now. This isn't an exhaustive list, just a showcase of some of our favourite projects. If you'd like your project to feature on this page, let us know!

Frozen Endzone

Frozen Endzone is the premier tactical future sports game! It combines the strategic depth of Frozen Synapse with completely original creative gameplay and a thrilling futuristic aesthetic. You must design a play to get the ball into your opponent's endzone, using the stadium's procedurally-generated terrain to your advantage.

Airship Dragoon

Conquer the super-continent of Pangea with an invasion of Airships! Battle Dastardly Pirate Insurgents! Keep the locals happy or else they will be revolting! Turn-based Steampunk squad tactical combat and global strategy with emergent gameplay. No two games the same.

AfterWorld MMO

AfterWorld is a "free market economy" persistent-world massively multiplayer online game set in a science fiction setting of post- apocalyptic Siberia. Enjoy a complex skills-based role-playing system, an advanced crafting system, and more than 100 square kilometers of vast Siberian landscapes.

BeamNG.drive

An open-world driving simulator, and so much more.

Life is Feudal

Life Is Feudal challenges you to go back in time and discover living medieval life. You must not only survive, but find a way to prosper. How will you fend for yourself? Where will you live? How will you defend against other players and predators from the wild? Will you establish or join a peaceful community?

Something Else

Something Else is not a shooter. That doesn't mean you won't have to handle a weapon, but it may be a bit different from what you have experienced in other games.

Deadly Matter

Deadly Matter is not a shooter. That doesn't mean you won't have to handle a weapon, but it may be a bit different from what you have experienced in other games. The story behind the game is based on science and history. Be prepared for the unknown and face immense forces that threaten our existence.

Blood & Mana

Blood & Mana is a fast-paced multiplayer medieval arena combat game, mixing elements of the RPG and FPS genres. Equip your character for each battle with no restrictions, no levels, and no classes. Choose from a vast collection of armor, weapons, spells, skills, and items.

Rendering

Torque 3D includes both a high-performance forward-rendering basic lighting engine, and a deferred-rendering advanced lighting mode so you can tailor your game to meet the needs of different customers. The modern rendering system includes per-pixel lighting, normal and parallax mapping, and materials generated by a high-level editor, or written from scratch in GLSL/HLSL. The engine comes with shaders for water, sky and sun, and many common material types.

The engine also has a powerful PostFX system allowing you to create custom post-processing effects. It ships with buit-in effects including:

  • HDR/light adaptation
  • Depth of field
  • Lens flare and sun rays
  • Screen-space ambient occlusion and FXAA
  • Refraction, reflection and glow

Editors

Torque 3D comes with everything you need to construct environments and levels from your assets. Shapes are imported in Collada DAE format and placed in the in-game editor. Switch to playing through your level with one press of a button.

  • Powerful terrain editor that allows you to import terrains or sculpt them by hand.
  • The shape editor provides tools for previewing and touching up your shapes after import.
  • The road and river editor modes make it simple to place paths that become solid roads, flowing rivers or decal tracks across the terrain.
  • A fully-featured material editor means you don't have to touch a line of shader code to create great-looking visuals.
  • The GUI editor lets you place HUD and menu elements in an easy-to-use WYSIWYG environment.
  • Torque 3D will automatically reload assets that are changed outside the editing environment, enabling speedy development iteration.
  • Editor modes are implemented as plugins, so you can add your own custom modes.

Networking

Since its inception as the engine behind the online shooter Tribes 2, Torque has consistently provided high performance, reliable networking for fast-paced online games. The engine has networking built into its core, including interpolation and prediction to smooth over high-latency environments and provide instant feedback to clients.

Time-invarying data is transferred via datablocks at client join time, reducing the amount of data that needs to be networked during gameplay.

Physics

Torque 3D provides a plugin system for physics. There is a simple implementation built in which can be easily swapped out for PhysX or Bullet libraries.

Scripts and source code

When you get Torque, you get everything. The entire source code is yours to modify under the permissive MIT license. The codebase is mature and extensible with a plugin system, allowing you to easily add features of your own, or from other libraries, to each project.

If you're not the recompiling type, Torque provides a scripting engine using a custom C-like language called TorqueScript. You can create whole games without touching a line of C++. Check this out: 

$minion = new AIPlayer();
$minion.name = "Fubar";
$minion.setMoveDestination("50 0 0");

function Fubar::onReachDestination(%self) {
   echo("I made it! Says" SPC %self.name);
}

Please note that the roadmap is currently being debated by the Steering Committee. This version represents our rough ideas and intentions and may change when we settle on an actual plan! When that happens we will document future engine versions here with their planned outcomes.

Short-term

The theme of our immediate efforts will be cleaning up the state of the repository, forging new links with the community, and putting in place procedures that will make the Committee more effective in the future.

Middle-term

Long-term

Torque began as the game engine behind Starsiege: Tribes, one of the venerable online shooters of the late 90s. When Dynamix folded after releasing Tribes 2, members of the company decided to continue by reconfiguring the game engine as a standalone product called the Torque Game Engine. The game engine was written in C++ (with a couple of files of assembly to do the heavy lifting of terrain texture blending), used TorqueScript for gameplay scripting, and ran on the Big Three - Windows, Linux and Mac.

GarageGames sold TGE for around $100USD throughout the product's lifetime, increasing this to $150 with the release of TGE 1.5. Its selling point against other engines was its strong networking (which had powered 128-player games of Tribes 2), its terrain rendering, and the fact that a license bought you the entire engine source code. During this time, GarageGames spun off numerous other products - TorqueX focused on delivering the same strengths to the XNA platform, and Torque Game Builder refactored the engine to render 2D graphics instead of 3D, though using the same platform core and scripting engine.

Eventually, as game technology moved on, TGE was superseded by TGEA, the Torque Game Engine Advanced. This kept a lot of TGE's strengths (and weaknesses) but added more modern graphics capabilities and enhancements to the terrain system. TGEA was available for roughly twice the price of TGE, with the same open-source (not free and open source) license. Eventually, TGEA was replaced by Torque 3D, which brought the engines all the way to the modern era with a deferred rendering engine, Collada asset loading, and revamped editors. At this point, unfortunately, the burden on GarageGames of maintaining OSX and Linux versions began to show. Linux support was dropped entirely and OSX support began to lag behind (the last version of T3D that officially supported OSX was 1.01).

Shortly after the release of Torque 3D, business machinations forced GarageGames to increase the engine's price to $1000, and introduce a script-only version that sold without access to the engine source code, only the TorqueScript starter projects and editors. The company began to run into difficulty and found it increasingly difficult to sell licenses at a profit. When their parent company folded, GarageGames was left looking for a buyer to keep them alive.

They found one, who stepped in and encouraged GarageGames to re-release Torque 3D under the original source-included license for just $100. Unfortunately even after several updates, Torque 3D (and its new sibling, Torque 2D) were not able to sustain GarageGames. Faced with the inability to continue being solely engine developers, they released both Torque 3D and Torque 3D as free open-source software for the community to maintain, and moved their focus to consulting in video game software.

Torque 3D's first two years as an open-source project have been rocky at times and exuberant at others. GarageGames set up the first Steering Committee, a body of members nominated from the existing developer community to become custodians of the official repository, determining the future direction the engine should take and guiding community contributions in this direction. Under their leadership, Torque made great advances such as integration with the Oculus Rift virtual reality display and Razer Hydra and Leap Motion input devices. Unfortunately the first Committee, after several membership changes, found itself unable to perform for a variety of reasons, and a second committee was enlisted from old and new community members.