I've been a fan of GarageGames for a while. Back in 2004 I picked up a license for the Torque Game Engine and started
teaching myself to use it. Before long they released the Torque Shader Engine (later renamed Torque Game Engine Advanced) and I jumped on that. It traded cross-platform
compatibility for a pretty darned slick DirectX rendering system.
Then they announced "Torque 3D," and it was to be a new generation of Torque engine. When it came out in 2009 I bought it and continued to tinker with the engines.
I picked up Torque 2D along the way as well - The latest version of the Torque Game Builder. That was very fun because the editor was very powerful and easy to use.
The new "behavior" system that was introduced with both Torque 2D and iTorque 2D (the iOS version of the engine) was very flexible and easy to use as well. Between
the editor and behaviors it became very easy to prototype games very quickly - especially after you had developed a large library of behaviors.
It is said "with great power comes great responsibility," and it's true here. The engines are all pretty good as they stand and you get the full source code with the
license, so you can extend or alter them as you wish. The down-side is that there is a pretty steep learning curve to the whole package and there is a very broad
stretch of topics to be familiar with to boot. You have to know at least a little about practically every aspect of game development to get the most from these engines.
That said, I think they're well worth it.
Now some things have changed. Torque 3D went open source under the MIT license in September of 2012 and is available on GitHub at
this location.
All you have to do is fork the repository and download the master branch via either the zip file option or your favorite Git client.
The documentation is also available on GitHub. This documentation does not include the internal engine
documentation, but if you download doxygen and follow the directions in this forum post you can
generate the engine docs from the engine itself.
Then in February of 2013 Torque 2D was released under the MIT license as well. Additionally, the open source release
is the culmination of features and improvements to
iTorque 2D; it supports Windows, Mac OSX and iOS out of the box! There have been many improvements driven by the development of GarageGames' Three Step Studio project
(which appears sadly to have been mothballed indefinitely) and they include full Box 2D physics integration, vastly accelerated rendering, the addition of TAML (an
XML derivative for simplifying data files) and improvements to the behavior system that allow behavior instances assigned to a particular object to signal one another.
Now both engines are under the control of steering committees who will guide their future development. This is a very exciting time indeed - two great engines are now
available to all for free. Now anyone with the skill and the will can create their dream game using professional grade tools. Well? What are you waiting for?