What is Torque?

Torque is a fully-featured professional 3D game engine that lets you create immersive environments, simulations, games, visualisations, or whatever else you can imagine. It comes with powerful built-in tools for level and gameplay design, and is built on proven networking code that makes supporting large multiplayer environments a breeze.

What's a game engine, then?

The game engine refers to all the common tasks that different multimedia applications must all perform - handling user input, network communications, the simulation loop, loading shapes and textures and rendering them, handling APIs on different operating systems, and so on. A game engine deals with all these for you so you can start working on the parts that make your game different.

Most game engines, Torque included, include more than just input, rendering, etc. They include objects with high-level behavior - for example, Torque has ready-made classes for NPCs, several types of vehicle, projectiles, etcetera. This can save you a lot of time getting basic stuff like character movement up and running, as well as a ready-to-go environment to jump into rather than starting from a clean slate.

Finally, many engines also provide some sort of integrated editing. Torque is no exception, and lets you open up the world editor right in the middle of your game, so you can edit your environments in the same realtime 3D as you play them in. There are editors for the GUI, environmental objects like rivers and roads, a generic datablock editor for your object properties and stats, a shape editor for viewing and tweaking imported meshes, and a bunch of others.

Why choose Torque?

Torque has a lot of competition, and the game engine market isn't the same as it was in 2002 when GarageGames released the Torque Game Engine (Torque 3D's grand-daddy). In this changing landscape, we reckon Torque still has great benefits. It's open-source, so you have complete control of your project (including the ability to, for example, redistribute your editors with your game). For first-person and third-person action games, it has a wealth of existing code that can be used to great effect.

What platforms does Torque support?

Currently, we officially support Windows XP and above, and Ubuntu 14 and above. People have also ported the engine to Mint, CentOS, SteamOS and OSX. We're looking at expanding to have official OSX support in the near future.

Who's using it?

Some users of Torque engine technology include Mode7 (makers of Frozen Synapse and the upcoming Frozen Cortex), BeamNG (behind the acclaimed realtime physics engine and vehicle simulator), the Queensland University of Technology, and numerous independent studios and developers. See more...
