Torque 3D Game Engine Going Open-Source

Torque 3D, the game engine that's been in development for more than one decade and premiered with the Tribes 2 game in 2001, is being released as open-source by GarageGames.

GarageGames is going to be releasing the Torque Game Engine under an MIT license. The company claims, "Torque 3D as the best open source game technology in the world. Once again, GarageGames will be changing game development."

The Torque Game Engine is already supported on Linux along with Mac OS X and Windows. Aside from the Tribes 2 launch title for the game engine, it's also powered a vast variety of other games like Frozen Synapse, Blockland, and even Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.

GarageGames describes their premiere 3D game engine as, "Torque 3D is the best full source, low cost solution out there. It is also our flagship engine built on the core strengths of our Front Line Award-winning Torque Game Engine Advanced. Torque 3D has been re-architected for maximum flexibility and performance across a wide-range of hardware. Torque 3D comes equipped with a full suite of tools to allow your team to excel and produce high-quality games and simulations. Torque 3D supports Windows and Browser-based web deployment out of the box."

With the full encode source-code being available under a permissive license, GarageGames will be offering a variety of support / custom engineering / training services as their means of profiting from the open-source code-base. They also have long-term goals to make innovative uses out of this game technology.

As far as what they will be providing, "The complete Torque 3D 1.2 source code, along with the four starting templates, will be included in the GitHub repository. A separate repository for reference documentation will be set up. Other items, such as the FPS Tutorial template, will be part of a separate download to help keep the main repository to a manageable size."

More details can be found from today's press release plus this community blog post. Below is a video demo of Torque 3D.

Torque 3D already had low-price option for indie game developers, but it will be interesting to see if any good projects (with worthwhile art / game assets) are born as a result of this game engine being open-sourced under the MIT license.