Has anyone used the TorqueX Engine?
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I was looking through it recently and it sounds very cool - a C#-based engine built on top of XNA meaning you can run games automatically on the 360. XNA itself is quite a cool set of libraries, TorqueX promises quite a lot of stuff on top but is it actually any good? It seems in some ways like it's quite 2D biased without advertising this properly, collision detection reads like it is 2D only for instance.
There's no question that the 2D support is a great deal more mature than 3D support in TorqueX, but you can do both.
There is a built-in physics engine for 3D as well, though it's not exactly as high-performance or feature-packed as you might like. It's enough for simple tasks, and could conceivably be replaced by another (like jiglibx or PhysX.net) if you find that it's not all you had hoped it would be.
I'm enjoying TorqueX tremendously, though I have to admit that I've been fairly frustrated with it from time to time, and there's next to no help or documentation available. There are three or four helpful folks on the GarageGames forums, and that's pretty much it. The 3D documentation is for all practical purposes non-existent.
If you want to make use of the built-in 3D animation, you need to use the GarageGames DTS file format, which is a little frustrating as it complicates the asset pipeline somewhat. There are exporters for Max, Maya, XSI, etc., etc., but it's not completely straightforward how to set everything up initially. You could probably use more standard model formats like FBX in combination with one of several managed XNA animation libraries, I suppose, though I haven't tried that.
Probably the best thing you can do is download the free binaries and play with those. The free TX binaries are not limited in any way, the only difference between the free version and the 'for pay' version is that you get the source code with either the Indie or Commercial licenses.
So, with all the caveats listed above, I'd still recommend trying it, as it seems to be the most complete game engine for XNA that I've run across so far. It's got a pretty nice component-based architecture that is easily extended and obviously made by people who've actually released a game and maintained an engine over time, or at least it seems so to me.
[Edited by - Takuan Daikon on December 27, 2008 8:13:26 PM]
There is a built-in physics engine for 3D as well, though it's not exactly as high-performance or feature-packed as you might like. It's enough for simple tasks, and could conceivably be replaced by another (like jiglibx or PhysX.net) if you find that it's not all you had hoped it would be.
I'm enjoying TorqueX tremendously, though I have to admit that I've been fairly frustrated with it from time to time, and there's next to no help or documentation available. There are three or four helpful folks on the GarageGames forums, and that's pretty much it. The 3D documentation is for all practical purposes non-existent.
If you want to make use of the built-in 3D animation, you need to use the GarageGames DTS file format, which is a little frustrating as it complicates the asset pipeline somewhat. There are exporters for Max, Maya, XSI, etc., etc., but it's not completely straightforward how to set everything up initially. You could probably use more standard model formats like FBX in combination with one of several managed XNA animation libraries, I suppose, though I haven't tried that.
Probably the best thing you can do is download the free binaries and play with those. The free TX binaries are not limited in any way, the only difference between the free version and the 'for pay' version is that you get the source code with either the Indie or Commercial licenses.
So, with all the caveats listed above, I'd still recommend trying it, as it seems to be the most complete game engine for XNA that I've run across so far. It's got a pretty nice component-based architecture that is easily extended and obviously made by people who've actually released a game and maintained an engine over time, or at least it seems so to me.
[Edited by - Takuan Daikon on December 27, 2008 8:13:26 PM]
I played around with the engine briefly when I was deciding whether I should use it for my current project (this was ~6 months ago). I don't know how much it's changed, but back then the documentation for the 3D stuff was sparse (read: nearly non-existent) and there were some bugs I ran into. I got the engine to crash by playing around with a few of the settings, for instance. It also for some reason would output its final full-screen pass with the texture improperly aligned with screen pixels and also with bilinear filtering enabled, which made the entire output blurry.
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