Talk:Torque (game engine)/TGEA

Licensing
I wrote a licensing thing for this article, though I'm not the best writer. Feel free to correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.56.241.134 (talk • contribs) 00:36, 22 March 2007‎ (UTC)
 * I removed the licensing info as it was pure advertising. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.108.110.89 (talk • contribs) 08:07, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Blatant advertising.
I am very surprised no one else has commented on this yet but this entire article reads more like a promotion/advertisement than an unbiased informational article.

Beyond that, it has a plug for one of Garage Games' own products, Marble Blast in one of the opening paragraphs (to paraphrase)...

"Bill Gates' child has been quoted as stating his child likes Marble Blast Ultra"?

And...? What does that have to do with TGEA itself? Exactly.. nothing at all. That's not intended to inform. It's intended to sell. It's a blatant plug. If it were listed in a matter-of-fact manner, along with a list of other games produced, or currently in production, using the tech, its intent might be only slightly less obvious.

And the rest of the "article" goes on to promote, rather than discuss, the engine. I see nothing about what languages it supports. Nothing about its editors, its scripting language, the terrain system, nothing about any of that. It's all marketing talking-points.

Further still, the "advertisement" is riddled with biased comments "It has all the best features from TGE" - The best according to whom? Oh right.. the marketing person who typed this up.

This is ridiculous. Someone might come here actually looking for some useful information on the engine, and all they're getting is a poorly veiled brochure.

Unless Wikipedia welcomes marketing in lieu of actual articles, I'd really love to see them remove this until someone can actually write up a real, unbiased and purely informational article on it instead of this.

jimjam 08:00 20 June 2009
 * Removed some marketing comments to lessen its brochure structure, unable to add any new facts though. Also removed

licensing infomation whic was pure sales pitch.

Kuroi07 21:50, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It was released on Microsoft's system, and the founder of the company and at that time the guy calling all the shots, said his kid played one of their games. But I believe that game was made on TGE and ported over, so it doesn't really matter.  Also, if the child of one of the richest people in the world, who could have any game he wanted, likes a game made with their system, then that is saying something.


 * I believe the article should include a criticism section, reference various well established sites that review game engines. Their marketing approach has changed considerably, where they tell people they'll need to be able to program to make anything work, as oppose to the misleading marketing done with TGE, which left so many bitter customers out there.


 * Looking through the link to the comparison of TGEA with the final version of TGE, you'll notice most is exactly the same, other than the fact it now renders better, and doesn't have the crippling limitation of map size that TGE had. Dream Focus (talk) 17:55, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I removed link to unfinished game
I removed the link after visiting the site, there no game there, just a forum. A recent post on that forum reads: TeamCombat is the working name for a standalone FPS game, development is very early and still in the prototye stage. So you don't have a game to even link to.  D r e a m Focus  16:03, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Mac OS X Support, Torque 3D, Licensing
Mac is supported as of 1.8.

Make a note of the fact TGEA being an evolution of TGE still uses the older tools and formats, whereas T3D which is all GarageGames now officially sells, prefers COLLADA format.

There is no cited reference for it being reportedly cheaper than Unreal Engine. With the exception of UDK, which doesn't come with engine source code (Not much, if any C++ at least) Unreal Engine reportedly sells for over 700,000 (In USD) and I've seen other sources claim this as well, but the only confirmation is correlated with version 2 and not 3 of the engine, while it's not unreasonable to believe they kept the same rates for new purchasers of version 3.

UDK costs $99 but again comes with limited (At best) engine source code for commercial publication. TGEA cost $295 for entities making less than $250,000 revenue (Indie) while the commercial unrestricted version costs $1495. T3D costs $1000 for indies including source, or 100 in binary-only form, with the studio version having no published price. (Probably a negotiated per-site, per title, percentage royalty if necessary deal)

Also, the licensing bit is pure fact, you can obtain it at the rates I cited, so no need to shoot it down like before with it being advertising, though the claims about the constant herding is pretty much true, based on their lack of roadmap and sporadic replacement of previous products out of the hat, as shown with TGE customers a few years back who were met with higher licensing costs if they chose to switch and reduced support if they didn't, to TGEA that is, then TGEA customers being urged to T3D as of now.

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=25 http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=218 http://www.torquepowered.com/products/torque-3d —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sparcdr (talk • contribs) 16:58, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Merge With Torque Game Engine article
This engine is a continuation of the Torque Game Engine and follows into T3D which has no dedicated article. It is unreasonable to have a distinct article for a now-deprecated version of a game engine, particularly when the current version has no article of its own. Maybe the Torque Game Engine article should have the entire evolution of the engine, perhaps listing release dates and new features.Piggysan (talk) 21:48, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
 * It was notable for the years it was out. More information here than is over there.  I'm against the merge.  And it got plenty of coverage on its own.  Also, it was not a continuation of another product.  TGE and TGEA(formerly known as Shader) were for years developed at the same time, totally different engines.  They gave up on both of them after developing something new, making both products obsolete.   D r e a m Focus  04:22, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I've merged TGEA with the TGE article since its only a component of the current engine and does not satisfy the notability criteria, and is also too much advertising for the same product. Please see the talk page of TGE for my notes. You might be surprised to know that every single line of the TGEA article was already copied wholesale into the TGE article as made the merging laughably easy. -- Tom Jenkins (reply) 20:54, 21 February 2011 (UTC)