March 10, 2009

Back to the garage

Since the start of 2006 I have stopped using the Torque Game engine. But I've always kept an eye on GarageGames. The interaction between a game and a website has always interested me, so I've watched their web portal InstantAction since the closed beta version. It seems that web integration for games is very popular these days, and not only for traditional casual games. I'm impatient to see what the next QuakeLive will be. Currently the web part of these projects is mainly related to game account, player profile, chat and game lobby. But I'm sure some new features will start to appear with this different way of playing games.

After asking the GarageGames team about InstantAction technology licensing I learned that their new Game Engine Torque3D will support basic web publishing options. Playing a Torque-based game inside a web browser with easy web interaction is plenty enough to convince me. But there are lots of other interesting features. The videos from the last Game Developers Conference have finally convinced me. So I've decided to take a more dept look and I've pre-ordered Torque3D.

One of the things that has really pleased me while coming back to the Torque community is the presence of 3DRT.com. I've always been a fan of Max Shelekhov 3D modeling, and I've purchased several models from him in the past. Seeing his interest towards Torque game developers was very cool. All his recent productions are available on DTS format. Having high quality models directly on the native animated models format of Torque Game Engine is a nice additional advantage. That probably predicts a future interest on my part.

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