GarageGames Brings the Torque Game Engine to iPhone
posted by Blake Patterson on August 1st, 2008 12:09 PM EDT in Development Tools, NewsGarageGames, a technology provider for independent developers around the world, has recently announced the addition of iPhone support for its Torque game engine.
With eight years of development and hundreds of games under its belt, the Torque Game Engine is the engine that shook up the industry. Large commercial companies like Vivendi love TGE because its quality and feature set rival engines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Successful indie studios like Pocketwatch Games choose TGE because they can make a great game and never pay a dime in royalty fees. Even research institutions like NASA use TGE because they can quickly prototype large-world simulations.
iPhone developers can now utilize Torque's 2D and 3D toolsets for game development. Torque for iPhone is based on the the company's Torque Game Engine and Torque Game Builder and provides a complete game development platform for the device.
Torque for iPhone allows the creation of iPhone games on a PC and includes a WYSIWYG realtime editor, integration with various 3D modeling packages, a scripting language, and iPhone-specific functionality such as: multi-touch input support, touch screen gesture recognition, iPhone optimized texture compression, and advanced character and shape animations.
As Inside Mac Games reports, GarageGames is very excited to be supporting Apple's new mobile games platform.
"We've already seen enormous interest in the iPhone within the Torque community. Game developers want to make games for the iPhone and this is a natural step since we're already a very good choice for developing OSX games," said Brett Seyler, GarageGames VP of Business Development. "Apple has been great to work with in the past and the very polished iTunes Store as a marketplace for games should encourage developers to continue pushing boundaries on the iPhone without worrying about the usual publishing and distribution difficulties involved in making a successful mobile game."
A sample of titles created with Torque:
- Marble Blast Ultra (XBOX 360)
- Screwjumper! (XBOX 360)
- Protothea (Wii)
- Dreamlords (PC)
- Blockland (PC)
Uh, hello Mister Advanced Gaming Authoring Tool — why not upgrade your iPhone there.
If their iPhone build feature is as "solid" as everything else Torque has pooped out over the past few years, this might just qualify as more of a warning than a post.
My advice, and I know you all want it: save your money for the upcoming Unity iPhone build option (http//:unity3d.com). Based on Unity's track record, it'll have one key feature I'm not counting on from GarageGames: it'll work.
on garagegames' site you can download a walkthrough of the capabilities of the engine on SDK. but if devs used all the abilities they show, i imagine battery life being several minutes. but i guess its just showing you what the engine is capable of.
That's great… but… uh… the iPhone hardware isn't *that* good. There's a reason the current crop of games look like high-poly PS1 games.
@ Crastic
that's fine with me. i think its amazing to have something thats ps1 or dc or even ds quality on a tiny thin little handheld thats with me all the time, that i can get new content anywhere and devs can fix bugs and update over the air 24/7
No doubt. That's not my issue. My issue is they resized nice smoothly lit and anti-aliased Marble Blast shots and fit them to the iPhone screen. That's dishonest! In reality, you'll be cutting geometry detail down a crap ton, texture detail, you name it. I know it's good business to look better than your competition, but I don't think it deserves praise until they can demo it.
Not to mention, the mysterious licensing costs. A percentage? A whopping flat rate? This announcement is intent, nothing more.
it looks a whole lot like super monkey ball
Ok, so I'm all over the GG website, where's the download for this thing if it's available? I've emailed them twice with no response yet.
@ BeyondtheTech
top menubar of the site. downloads -> development demos -> then choose linux mac or pc. its a .exe file that shows the capabilities of the engine on the sdk
That's all fine, I picked that up and I'm playing with it, but where's the export, settings, or customized input controls (Multi-Touch, accelerometer) for the iPhone? I think they only posted a generic version of TGB or TGE.
You're not going to be able to do an iPhone build until you "negotiate" with GarageGames. That's right, iPhone titles have to be blessed on a per-title basis by the GG Gods.
Still interested?