I was uncertain if this would be the correct category to post this in, but i'd found it be the right one. If not, please move it. I have been looking on various 2d engines recently, and i stumbled upon Torque 2d. Trying peoples work and looking at the screenshots, it sure looks like something special. I wonder if anyone users it, and how well it works etc. By the way, a really nice forum. Great work. Edit: Forgot link... Torque 2d Website /anlino
Ahem. *cough* *cough* http://www.revve.com/indieblog/archives/2005/08/torque_2d.html Seriously, though it is a nice product, but you need to watch out for the drawbacks (mentioned above). I have a license for it, and I am not sorry I spent the money. I do, however also own a license for PTK, and I have chosen to use it for my first game (and will most likely continue using it). I have a post about it as well at http://www.revve.com/indieblog/archives/2005/08/ptk.html.
Thanks, revve. I have checked out PTK earlier, but it didänt fee like what i was looking for. But hey, thanks for the information. The only thing you cant get enough of.
Ouch... you said in your review... "The reason I wouldn’t recommend it is GarageGames have a history – once you buy a development product from them, you’re pretty much on your own. No support, no proper documentation. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Tough luck, kid! It’s a great product, but don’t expect help if you’re stuck."... That's pretty harsh... considering that I'm the guy on the other end of the phone who answers most calls. I have never told anyone "sorry you're out of luck, I can't help you". I'm constantly referring people to different locations and helps. We've been spending the better part of the past two years building up the documentation and tutorials for all the engines and dev tools. Pretty much everyone who works at GG spends way too much time on the forums and email helping people. Plus, with the massive group of developers that seem to live on the fourms are trying to help people who run into walls. And we also put in a google mini server so that you could find anything you need on the site. Your statement is really a slam against people like Melv May, John Kabus, Chris Calef, Dave Wyand and tons of other guys (creators of 3rd party dev tools) who answer almost every single support request that comes into them regarding their tools and products. And that isn't even talking about the GG employees... Personally, I may be partial to things that we produce and create, but there are lots of good platforms to build your game with (blitz, T2D, PTK, HGE, DBPro, and other frameworks). Experiment with the different products, try things out, download the demos, get involved in the different communities, and find where you as a developer feel most comfortable.
I have no information about Torque 2D, but I want to mention that PopCap have released the framework/engine they use to make games. It's free to use (you only need to mention somewhere (see license) that you use it). Read more and/or download it here: http://developer.popcap.com/ EDIT: If I remember correct, they use BASS (http://www.un4seen.com/) for sound and music, so you'll need a license for that if you use it.
I guess that's what I'm trying to get at... yes.. if there is a reason and a specific situation that actually happened... we'd love to hear about it so that we can work to better support indie developers. You can even use my email address at benjaminb@garagegames.com and I will get back to you.
I do realize that I've been a bit harsh inthe original post on my blog, and I was planning to do an update soon (T2D vs PTK). Even though I've chosen to use PTK for my first game, I am still actively playing with T2D (I have a TGE and TSE license as well), and I consider all three GarageGames products to be excellent at what they do. I was not aware that any phone support for the development engines are being supplied, and even though I haven't yet needed support for these products yet, I have heard many people complain about lack of documentation. I do realize that there is a very large amount of documentation available, but from personal experience, it is very difficult to find. The recently added Google search does help a lot, but if you don't know exactly what you need, finding what you need can still be a bit daunting. I do lurk on the GarageGames forums a lot, and I am aware of TDN, which has been hyped a lot, and I personally cannot wait for it to be made available to the public.
The important is not what the tool can do, but what you can do with it ! I would suggest that you play around with the demo versions of the tools you're thinking of using. Try to make a little simple arkanoid with them for example, that's a tiny project that should take only a couple of hours ( for a very simple one ). you can even use the assets of this example http://www.phelios.com/ptk/examples.html that way you can compare the time/difficulty you spent writing it in each language. pat.
I made a comment on my blog regarding this post, where I explain my view about the product. Since many people will not nessecary see the comment, or re-visit the post after looking at it originally, I will post it here.
Just as a heads up, PTK now supports reading resources (images, config files, etc. as well as your own data) from packed assets, it works on both pc and mac - that's what Atlantis does. It works transparently -- you can read from seperate files while developing your game, and then read from the packed asset files when you build the final game, without having to change the code. Best regards, Emmanuel
Thanks for all of the answers, guys. On less than 24h, i have gotten like 10 answers. This is really a active forum. Nice to see that. I am still a bit uncertin on what to go for. I will have a deeper look on PTK. I guess i dont need to ask about it's power's, since it have been powering a lot of the games on this website... /Anders
I tried to set up the PTK in Visual Studio, from the tutorial i found here: Click here Though all i got was this: First, i ran it. Respond: These building configuration(s) is out of date: example1 - debug win32 Would you like to build them? -From there, i choose to run. Later, this lovely error: There was build errors. Would you like to continue? -from there, yes... - respond: Unable to start debugging. Unable to start program '-Path-'. Couldnt locate file. - Output: ------ Build started: Project: example1, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------ Compiling... Main.cpp c:\LDG\example1\Main.cpp(1) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'ptk.h': No such file or directory Build log was saved at "file://c:\Ldg\example1\Debug\BuildLog.htm" example1 - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s) ---------------------- Done ---------------------- Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped I am kind of new to this c++ thing. I have been using various versions of Basic earlier. I would be glad if someone could give me a hand on this.
If you're spending some time checking out some frameworks, why not give IGE a look? There are also online examples and documentation. http://www.saurusgames.com/developers/ige/ I'm happy to answer any questions like "can I do X?" and also I can add any features which are missing. Peter
I must say that's not true at all in my experience. It is true that the docs suck, and Google search doesn't help much, but the forums are active and you will usually get the answer you are looking for. It's not ideal, but it's not as stated above. Performance issues are the worst problem of T2D. That's being addressed to some extent now, but there's a long way to go. That said, the engine's not done, so using it for commercial games is a gamble you'll have to weigh for yourself after a test drive. I built a whole lot of support code to get it into shape for my game. Edit: Just wanted to add that a large proportion of the support code I wrote was because the TorqueScript language is less than ideal (IMHO). There are code patches you can apply to improve it (ie, exposing C++ STL containers), but I'm going to be using Python now, so that will solve a lot of the problems in my case.
Hey, since you are looking at alternatives, perhaps check out http://www.pygame.org/ Drop on in to #pygame on irc.freenode.org if you want to chat. Or email us on the mailing list. Cheers,
I bought Torque2D and decided not to use it. The estimated time it would have taken me to learn the ins and outs of the Torque engine and use that to write my game is long than the estimated time it will take me to write my own game engine and use that. In particular, TorqueScript is far too low-level for my tastes.
I share your opinion of TorqueScript. That's why I've spent a lot of time modifying T2D to run as a DLL that can be integrated with Smalltalk. Unfortunately, that means I've made a cross-platform engine Windows-only, which is a little perverse. But there's no reason why my changes couldn't be ported to the other platforms. The engine mods are language-agnostic. I also had to do a lot of Smalltalk-specific work, however, to make the DLL easy to use. Your language of choice needs a way of taking responsibility for dispatching messages to an externally created window. Generating wrappers for T2D's classes and functions is recommended (it isn't all that difficult; I added a couple of functions to the DLL for visiting every class and function).