I own licenses for all Garage games Dev products and have not used any of them in ages. I'm particularly interested in the advances to Torque Game Builder and was wondering if anyone else here uses it and how it compares to BMax.
I suppose I could try it but it's been so long since I used it that I've forgotten everything about it.
So who uses TGB?
I tried a sample game (with the airplane where you had to bomb tanks or something) and the performance was poor. I never looked at it again.
Tourqe 2D has made lots of progress. But it's not the tool to use if you're worrying about getting good performance on legacy machines. Now you can port to Wii, Xbox 360, etc, and the performance is getting better and better. It's definitely a tool worth keeping an eye on. Download the latest games and demos here:
http://garagegames.com/products/torque/tgb/Yes, I'm personally using Blitzmax for now, but I'm fairly certain I'll be using T2D in 2009.
Lighting issue is TGE are killing me. I make my maps properly, and lights leak at the seams. I know it has nothing to do with my lightmap resolution or anything because I tried importing a map with no lights and lighting it inside of torque and it still gives me light leaks. I even tried simply making a single room with a walkway, and light from above the walkway shows at the seam where the walkway is against the wall, even with snap-to-grid on.
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed the focus of this topic is on TGB, not TGE.
I'm using TX (Torque X), which is Garage Game's XNA/C# version of TGB. Only doing it for the 360 though (since windows deployment is rubbish). The ease at which you can get something onto the screen and actually playable is very valuable for prototyping. Of course there is a slight learning curve (as with any engine). They recently are going under a huge documentations overhaul, which is a good thing.