Is Torque the best game engine for my project?

I was asked in an e-mail if Torque would be the best engine for a specific project. I wasn't given much information on the project, but this is my opinion on the matter.

For commercial games Unreal is the king and owns about 90% of the market. It is in the $100-200k range to license so it is out of reach for anyone that isn't very very serious. I'm not completely sure on the pricing because it's something that isn't advertised. They price it on a case by case basis and we tried to get a license for Chapman University and that was the range we were given.

The next most popular engine for commercial games is a tie between Quake and Half Life. Both have similar licensing expenses, but rumor has it that the Half Life engine is very hard to understand. I don't know first hand. Of the three I think Unreal is probably the easiest to learn having spent some time with it. Torque has a very strong following, but is mostly seen as a hobbyist engine. That doesn't make it bad by any means, but that is the view. It is well supported and while there is a steep learning curve, it isn't any steeper than the other engines out there. There are a number of commercial games available on it and the company just released a next gen version of the renderer so it is still growing and doing well.

The next thing to keep in mind is the game itself and if the engine supports the type of interface you are designing. Each engine has different specialities and one engine may be best for one design and wrong for another. Torque is best at FPS or third person multiplayer games. There is also a 2D version of the engine which I would also highly recommend.

Torque Game Engine (3D) does not have a good physics engine. I think the others are better, but there are a lot of threads out there on the Torque forums that talk about integrating other physics libraries. The 2D version has a great physics library.

Why use Torque as a game engine?

As I said in my previous blog entry I've been teaching a game development class using the Torque Game Engine. There were a number of factors that lead to the choice of Torque.

The early meetings with the curriculum board lead to the adoption of Unreal as the engine of choice. As the fall arrived and I had been spending months working with Unreal, reality began to sink in. Since this was a programming class there would have to be more to it than just level editing. While Unreal script is programming I also wanted to be able to have the students understand the actual C code behind the engine. Without access to the engine source this would mostly be a level editing class. The Computer Science department wanted to make sure this was more of a programming class than a level editing class.

In general, there are always C code tweaks to an engine to make any game so anything short of source code would not be a realistic environment for the students. Workable, but not realistic.

When the department attempted to license the Unreal engine it was out of the budget. Rumor had it that it was in the 100s of thousands which was way outside the budget for an edu setting! Another factor was the majority of the official documentation for Unreal requires that same license. While there is a lot of independent documentation on Unreal and this may not be a problem it was a factor in our decision.

Torque had come up in earlier discussions and a review showed it was actually perfect for the educational setting. At around $100 a seat, it included the source. That decision was made in December and I've spent the past few months trying to stay ahead of the students while I learned the ins and outs of Torque. Stressfull, but I think the results I am seeing from the students are amazing.