http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d
(there is 4 of em, click the thingys on the right to download them)

anyone else ever played around with these? I used to play around on instant action back in the day and I have to say that the engine has improved vastly.

*sigh* why don't these guys get more people using their engine? SPAZ was an awesome game and it used Torque 2D ...

A few years back there were several indi games that used the engine. I actually had a multiplayer mech game that used it. I didn't much care for the game though. That was before they added in all that fancy pixel shader/bump mapping stuff. I don't think I have seen a game that used the engine since the big engine upgrade.

it was called Lore: Aftermath (the mech game) and much like Legions it still lives on (sort of) after the implosion of InstantAction.

you can get the lore client here:
http://loreaftermath.com/portal/content.php?115-Aftermath-version-2.0.3.9-now-available-for-download.&s=7e11b8aedc5971c4da4953b4ef645b8b

and the Legions: Overdrive (as it's called now) here:
http://www.legionsoverdrive.com/

... I knew about Legions being continued, but I myself just found the lore client last nithgt as I was messing around with torque's site.

I'm guessing that the main reason no one has touched Torque 3D is because the big melt down with IA scared everyone away from investing in it, more's the pitty since it's looking like a really cool engine. sure it's not crytek cool, but for what it is and what it costs it's pretty damned good.

There's also a larger selection of engines now that are available for use for free. Ogre3D, Blender and don't forget about Cube. They aren't on the level of Torque 3D, but they have the advantage of being free to use and that's a big thing for small developers.

Commercially people seem to be using other engines as well these days.

yeah, bottom end of the high quality engines but top end of the low grade, getting stuck in the middle sucks ... I really suggest that everyone at least try out the "Pacific" demo, it's got some of cool physics (just remember, right button is the grenade launcher).

Actually, the one I had was Dark Horizons: Lore. An earlier game in the series perhaps? I looked at some gameplay footage, and Lore: Aftermath looked way better. I probably would have liked that one a lot more.

Unreal Engine 3?

Probably, I don't pay as much attention to those games as my powerful computer is a triple core 2.1ghz AMD and can't run a lot of the newer stuff.

From what I read, Epic gets 25% of your profits beyond 5,000 dollars if you go the free route. So its really only free if your not going to sell what you make.

25% share is fair in my opinion. Epic put a lot of work into the engine and it is a really good one. If you don't want to pay a share to them, you can also licence the engine which is only a one time fee :)

Hey, I know GarageGames! :) MarbleBlaster, etc.

I've heard that building with Cinema 4D and importing into Unity 3D is one of the easiest game-creation routes to take (albeit not a free one).

Torque is only $179 - $199 for independent developers (less than $250,000 yearly income) and something like $500 if your company makes more than that, I can't find the exact listing atm but I know I found it the other day.

now that is per person you will have working with it (so if you have 5 people working on a game you will need 5 licenses, but you don't need to buy a 6th license for your girlfriend/secretary), but after that it's all yours with no royalties.

with the UDK you can use it for free while developing your game, but before you launch you have to pay the $99 (single fee no matter how many developers you have on staff) to essentially buy a publishing license. after that you get a royalty free limit of $50,000, but after that you are required to pay 25% off of any and all money you make from the product: so if you make $250,000 from your game, you will have to cough up $50,000 to Epic (($250,000 - $50,000)/4 = $50,000).

no clue what the cryENGINE costs, since they make you fill out a NDA first, but you can download and develop for free.

Unity is a bit more simple in that they charge a flat $30,000 per project.

I kinda think Torque and Unity are the least shady in that they don't try to rope you in with "free" development kits who's purpose is less about being accessible and more about getting you in too deep with your project to switch to something cheaper when the reality of paying up kicks in.

That really depends on your sales. But then again if one is licensing an engine one really ought to have some idea what the sales are going to be like. iD used to license the Quake engine for 6 figures and all they provided was a CDROM with the engine on it. Granted it was a pretty amazing engine, but still.

In this case 25% is a touch call, if you're only expecting to sell say $20k worth of games,it's probably a good deal. Sell several million dollars worth of games and it's probably not a good deal.

I personally know some of the founders of GarageGames, which used to be in my town. I always wanted to work for them as a kid, but then they went under new management and moved. I think they expanded quite a bit.

expanded, then contracted: after starting up that "InstantAction" service of browser based Torque built games, Garage Games was somehow absorbed into it's own subsidiary and InstantAction then became the parent to Garage Games and the Torque engine.

but then InstantAction went to shit after shutting down "temporally" to transition over to running it's games through a "OnLive" like streaming service .... but it never came out of shut down mode and eventually it's investors tried shit can the whole operation.

thankfully the guys at Garage Games banded together and reclaimed the GG/Torque side of things (InstantAction and -most- of the games hosted on it were sadly lost) and have attracted a new set of investors that support them in their Indi-centric game engine efforts (the last set of investors was more interested in milking the game protal than developing the engines).

I'm pretty sure they are based out of Vegas now ...