Yesss, the thread I've been waiting for! Every day I see a bunch of posts pondering
Unity and UDK and lamenting that we don't have more choices for Rift development - guys,
we do! The Torque 3D team is frankly doing an obviously better job of Rift integration than the Unity team (Dave, they could apparently use your helping sorting out their own
deferred rendering implementation
), and all for
zero dollars and with the
source code yours to fork, spindle, and mutilate. Don't like UDK's licensing terms and lack of an asset store? The
MIT license Torque uses allows for totally unrestricted use
for free, forever, and the
Torque Store has more high-quality art packs and special effects tools available all the time - you can even create your own content and submit it for sale (just
contact Derek Bronson).
I'm still not sure if UDK or Torque 3D is right for my game projects, but I'd be an
idiot to not thoroughly explore the totally free and open option (and the one with serious procedural generation possibilities, OMG
). There are only two questions I haven't been able to fully answer that are holding me back:
Is there any latency mitigation stuff UDK is doing that Torque 3D can't or won't be exploring? 16 milliseconds per frame is
damned impressive, under even the ideal latency
Abrash suggests is necessary for VR to feel really good, and I was thrilled to read this line in the announcement: "Two strategies that I think could be put into Torque 3D include preventing GPU buffering, and view bypass." Carmack goes way over my head with stuff like that
blog post, so even after muddling through his discussion I'm left wondering: Is "view bypass" the same thing Epic mentioned in KS Update #25, "sensor update on the render thread"? Is Torque 3D on the verge of being the
lowest-latency engine in existence that features drop-in Rift support?
Also, what's the deal with the
FPS Tutorial? It appears to be one of the most elegantly constructed tutorials I've ever seen, but that warning about it being out of date has kept me from diving in. The
steering committee notes suggest there's only one chapter that still needs reworking, and it's been on the verge of completion for a couple weeks - are all the other updated chapters already live on the website, or will the whole tutorial change once chapter 8 is finished? Can you give us any kind of ETA?
To Gnometech and the rest of the Torque family,
thank you. It's entirely clear from my conversations here that UDK and Unity simply were not enough options for us prospective Rift devs, and Torque's features and licensing terms are beyond impressive. I greatly look forward to experimenting with your engine, picking apart some code, and seeing what you continue to add to it and what everyone else cooks up with it.
Somebody with a Rift go download the Rift Valley demo and report back!
