Torque Game Builder 1.5 Now Available
The long-awaited version 1.5 of Torque Game Builder (formerly Torque 2D), GarageGames' 2D game engine, is now available. For details, take a peek at this announcement:

What's New with TGB 1.5 (Include bug-fix list)

The biggest changes seem to be in the addition of Behaviors for objects. This is actually pretty dang cool. This provides an extensible library of behaviors - responses to game and input events - that can be attached to any object. For example, there's a behavior to make a UI object grow when the mouse hovers over it, and another behavior to make the object respond to Asteroids-style controls.

For a programmer-type guy like me, this may not seem like a big deal. But for game developers with less programming experience, this could be a very handy thing. The behaviors allow a lot of basic game functionality to be developed without the need to write any code. I predict lots of old arcade-game clones appearing out of the community in the next few months. This is also useful in a team situation. The programmer can create some more game-specific behaviors, and pass it off to a designer and let the designer play with the logic using a simple GUI interface from that point on. Who knows? New behaviors may also be packaged into content packs (yay! We programmers can contribute!) to further extend the "out-of-the-box" standard game types available for rapid development.

The behaviors aren't going to do away with the need for programmers writing plenty of game-specific code, but it may make prototyping much easier (and give new game developers a little more to get started with).

They've also done some nice ease-of-development stuff like allowing the game directory to be ANYWHERE instead of off of the TGB install directory, and a reduced (compressed?) executable size. There are also the usual array of bug-fixes (no word on whether some of the video fixes required by casual portals of TGB-created game made it in).

While TGB had the usual issues on release, it seems to be rapidly growing into a mature (and very useable) product. While arguments still abound concerning its ease-of-use and other issues, it seems to be evolving nicely into a powerful game development tool.

(Vaguely) related doofiness:
* Torque 2D Game Builder Quick Review
* TGE Plus: Two Game Engines In One!
* Forrest Gump Meets the Avatar of Virtue
.

Labels: programming, Torque

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:23 AM (Permalink)