Torque Advanced Technology

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Torque Game Engine Advanced
This screenshot shows off many graphical effects such as Bloom, normal mapping, and cubemapping
Developer:	GarageGames
OS:	Currently only for Microsoft Windows, in development for Mac OS X, Linux
Platform:	PC
Use:	Game Engine
License:	Indie License available for individuals and companies who made less than $250,000 in sales the previous year, and Commercial License available at a higher price for individuals and comapines who made more than $250,000 in the previous year
Website:	Official Torque Shader Engine Product Page on GarageGames Website

Formerly known as the Torque Shader Engine or TSE and also Torque Advanced Technology orTAT, Torque Game Engine Advanced is a video game engine being developed by GarageGames as the second version of the Torque Game Engine. Torque Game Engine Advanced is still an alpha, or as GarageGames calls it, "Early Adopters".

Despite this relative infancy, Torque Game Engine Advanced has been used to release a game on the Xbox 360's Live Arcade, Marble Blast Ultra.

In developing Torque Game Engine Advanced, GarageGames created an entirely new terrain rendering engine, the Atlas Terrain Engine, which is a substantial improvement over the blended terrains of TGE. This is intended to make the engine competitive with the Source engine, which implements displacement map terrain. Also added was a brand new water renderer with full reflection, refraction, and Fresnel reflection.

The entire rendering path has been revised to support high level shaders, as well as other improvements.

The current release of Torque Game Engine Advanced only has Direct3D rendering. The full release of TGEA will contain both Direct3D and OpenGL pipelines to allow TGEA to support Macintosh and Linux platforms as well as Windows. There will also be TGEA compatibility with Microsoft's free new game development program for the Xbox 360, XNA Game Studio Express.

[edit] Atlas Terrain Engine

The Atlas Terrain Engine is used in the Torque Game Engine Advanced to generate images for the background terrain.

It was developed specifically for TGEA. It is unknown if there will be a stand alone version, that game developers can "stitch" onto their own game engine, released.

It allows vast terrain, theoretically capable of 8.3×10e+152 Miles; and water effects, powered by shaders.

[edit] See also

• Torque Game Engine
• Torque Game Builder
• GarageGames

[edit] External links

• Torque Shader product page