I purchased a license to the new Torque version of Garage Games T3D engine. The speed, features, and tools make it the perfect choice for future game chapters of Tribulation Knights. It is too late to migrate the current chapter of the game over without delaying it. So I will move forward with publishing the first chapter using TGEA 1.7.1.
I have to say that the new engine when finally released will make my job easier when designing levels and environments. The new model format collada is a welcome addition for Torque developers. I have looked at multiple large levels built in 3DSmax and imported into T3D in several large pieces using the collada format. The results are fantastic.
I have to tear myself away from it so I can finish the current Tribulation Knights.
TK Models in T3D Engine
The image above demonstrates the high quality of the rendering capabilities of the new engine. I recreated the terrain from chapter one, in the T3D engine in only minutes.
A level building comparison:
The roads I built in chapter one using the TGEA 1.1.7 engine took me a long time because of the pain to line up the road pieces. Even then I had to tweak the terrain so that the road would look correct when laying on the surface. Time it took, at least 4 Hours.
In T3D I have the capability to lay down roads, or paths using a spline technique. After adding them I can go back and tweak the path, and alignment. Time it took, only 30 minutes.
An indie developer has to watch the bottom line on every purchase, and I admit I did debated over this decision. The discount I received for being an early adopter, and a existing TGEA licensee helped me with the cost. The actual results I receieved when using each beta interation has proved to me that it was worth the investment of my money and time. I am so excited about using it on Tribulation Knights, but at the time of writing this it is only up to Beta version 4. Only once it has reached a full release version will I consider jumping to it. The reason why is that I have to convert my code to each version of the code, and that takes time. Each change and modification would need to be moved from a previous version to a new version of the code. That takes a lot of time, troubleshooting, and bug fixes. I want to avoid that and wait for the full release. Once that happens, expect to see more screenshots and videos of TK conversion tests.
Go over to the Garage Games website and check out the engine for yourself.
http://www.garagegames.com
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