--- layout: page title: Engine | Torque 3D root: .. ---

## Made with Torque

Here are some of the premier projects using Torque 3D right now. This isn't an exhaustive list - you can see more projects over at the wiki, and even add your own to the list.

#### Frozen Cortex

Mode 7

Frozen Cortex 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.

#### BeamNG.drive

BeamNG

An open-world driving simulator, and so much more. Hailed as having "the most amazing video game car crashes ever", this is not a game for the faint-hearted, nor those who like their cars in one piece.

#### Airship Dragoon

YorkshireRifles

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.

#### Tower Wars

SuperVillain Studios

"Hello there, good sir! Or is it madam, perhaps? I must say, it's jolly good to have you on board! We need all of the fodder... ERRR... HELP... yes, yes... all of the HELP we can get." Tower Wars combines elements of tower defense, RTS, and all-out multi-player mayhem to bring you a completely unique experience.

#### Metal Drift

Black Jacket Studios

Metal Drift is a vehicular sport combat game set in a distant future. As the player, you command an agile, high powered hover tank in a futuristic sports arena. Core game play centers on intense tank-on-tank team combat seen through an immersive, first person cockpit.

#### Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps

Max Gaming Technologies

DH:MC is the sequel to the 2005 IGF Finalist "Dark Horizons: Lore". In the year 2210, the battle mech is the premier weapon of war. As part of your faction's Mechanized Corps, you will need to hone your intellect and cunning to survive the missions ahead.

#### Life Is Feudal MMO

Life Is Feudal team

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?

#### AfterWorld MMO

Dedicated Logic LLC

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.

#### Villagers and Heroes

Mad Otter Games

Villagers and Heroes, a fantasy role-playing game with a vast multiplayer world, is easy to learn, has an intuitive user-interface, and features wonderfully rich gameplay providing thousands of hours of exploration and challenge. The Seven Realms, populated with quirky characters and ghoulish beasties, offer hundreds of quests and an array of different gameplay styles.

#### Age of Decadence

Iron Tower Studio

Well, if you want a hardcore, heavy metal roleplaying experience that challenges you, this is the ticket. Otherwise, take a pass. The game is vicious, both in its lack of morality and its merciless systems. If you want to be the hero of a story, run and don’t look back. If you want to be Atia of the Julii or be a power player, this is your RPG.

#### Deadly Matter

Studio Dim Sum

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.

#### Virtual Reef

The Cube

The Virtual Reef is a life-sized marine ecosystem expanding across two levels of the Science and Engineering Centre in Brisbane. Multi-touch technologies enable the user to manipulate, intimately explore and interact with the reef world, specific behaviours and relationships.

Get the source code

## Features

### 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, allowing you to quickly get up and running with networked games.

Torque uses a server authoritative networking model that helps you to reduce cheating and exploitation. At the same time, the game state is predicted and interpolated locally so each client experiences a smooth view of the action. 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 built-in implementation which can be easily swapped out for PhysX or Bullet libraries. They enable features like:

- Cloth dynamics
- Rigid body dynamics
- Destructible objects
- Destroyable joints
- Fluid buoyancy

### 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() {
       datablock = MinionData;
    };
    $minion.name = "Fubar";
    $minion.setMoveDestination("50 0 0");

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

## Roadmap

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.

- Complete and launch this website!
- Set up automated testing to increase ease of maintenance.
- Merge (possibly into unstable branches) or reject all outstanding pull-requests. In particular:
  - A usable CMake alternative to the current Project Generator
  - 64-bit-ready changes
  - VS2013 compatibility

### Middle-term

- Linux and OSX support via OpenGL rendering layer.
- DirectX 11 and PhysX 3.3 support.
- New modular script templates and content distribution.
- More difficult existing pull-requests, particularly improvements to the TorqueScript language.

### Long-term

- Clean up engine source code (e.g. use of non-STL container replacements, signed/unsigned mismatches).
- Modularise scripting engine, paving the way for other scripting languages.
- Entity/component system replacing hardcoded gameplay classes.
- Overhaul editor suite

## History

1998 | Starsiege: Tribes Developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra, Tribes was a landmark online shooter and the first incarnation of what would later become the Torque Game Engine, introducing the engine's signature large terrains, efficient fast-paced networking and bespoke scripting language.
2001 | Dynamix closed Tribes 2, enhancing the original Tribes' gameplay and graphics, was to become one of the last games developed by Dynamix before their closure. Several Dynamix veterans went on to found GarageGames, licensing the Tribes 2 game engine which was released under the name Torque Game Engine.
2007 | Torque Game Engine Advanced This incarnation of the engine focused on updating the rendering engine, including per-pixel shading and a new terrain system.
2009 | Torque 3D The next evolution in the Torque line introduced a modern deferred- rendering engine, an abstract physics layer with a PhysX implementation, and a COLLADA-based asset pipeline.
2012 | Torque 3D MIT As part of GarageGames' move towards being a service provider and consultancy, the Torque 3D engine was released as free open-source software. The first Steering Committee was set up to manage community contributions to the engine, and has been going strong ever since.