3d game development tools and Torque

The tools we chose for the game development class were driven mostly by the choice of books, but many of them are cheap/free and industrial strength as well and I would use most of them on my own projects even if I had some sort of budget. The engine we are using is Torque, but all these tools would be useful no matter which engine you use.

PaintShopPro is a great paint program. The first edition of the book used this tool, while the second edition uses Gimp. Since I already had a number of students in an earlier class that had used PSP I chose to stick with it. Also, it is my favorite paint program and in my opinion better than Photoshop for everything except CMYK. I've done a ton of image and print work over the years and PSP is an amazing value. Corel bought it from an independent developer a few years ago and I've been expecting a $400 price increase. I'm sure I'll grudgingly switch to Gimp if that happeens.

Milkshape is the tool used in the book and we made sure it was available for the students. It's not the best 3D tool by a long shot. It is missing a lot of features which also makes it a lot easier to learn. A double edged sword, but still a great value for $25.

For texture mapping you have to used a second tool called UVMapper. It's free and easy to use.

QuArk (Quake Army Knife) (free) is the tool we used to create interiors. Interriors are BSP trees that have a lot of properties that speed up rendering and collision detection. The cost is that the tools that do BSP are all very confusing and QuArk is no different. If you use QuArk for Torque, make sure you read the PDF tutorial that comes on the Game Programming All In One CDROM (it's not printed in the book any longer). It is a great tutorial that will take a lot of the guess work out of a confusing UI. Also, make sure you download QuArk from the Garage Games site and not the one main site as it's already configured for Torque. The Unreal editor is a BSP editor and it is just as confusing. Just because you pay more you are not going to find a good BSP editor.

Audacity (free) is not my first choice of audio tools, but my first choice (CoolEdit by Syntrillium) was purchased by Adobe and the price raised by $400. I'm not one to pay hefty fees for software and have found that I can live with Audacity. I'm going to be really mad if Corel does the same thing with PaintShopPro.

Blender (replacement for Milkshape) is my last tool of choice and it is a controversial one. You either love it or hate it. Blender was a commercial 3D editing tool that moved into the open source community driven world and is well updated and supported. It is absolutely free. That's not the controversial part. You either love it or you hate it as the UI takes a little getting used to, but once you have it down it is extremely fast. The commercial equivalent is 3D Studio Max and is used by 98% of the game studios. My only problem with it is the $3500 price tag. I'll do another blog entry just on Blender.

That's my list of (cheap/free) software to use in 3D game development.