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Thursday February 23rd 2012

When game engines die

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According to a post from the management (Eric Preisz ) InstantAction will be closing down their shutters . This is  a real sad news as competition in this mid range game engine segment lead to healthy growth and end users had a choice to follow the best engine based on their needs and always benefit from it.

We remember having a die hard fan of Torque in our own team and recently was getting cranky because of the beta being extended for Torque forever and no genuine competitive feature set in the upcoming release ! All that said it was an amazing engine and the list of games developed using the engine proves the fact !

From the site ( torquepowered.com ) :

Today, InstantAction informed employees that it will be winding down operations. While we are shutting down the InstantAction.com website and Instant Jam game, Torquepowered.com will continue to operate while InstantAction explores opportunities with potential buyers for Torque. We thank all of our past and current customers for their support. read more

- Torque Management

Hope that some buyer comes along soon and saves the day for us all !!

Now the lesson to be taken from this is ?

What about all those game developers who have spent thousands of hours and dollars learning Torque X 3d and 2d ?

Hmmm… If you think about it , its more or less like  people learning a language instead of learning how to program ! If you learn how to program it doesn’t matter if a language dies or is obsolete.. You still have the problem solving skills that you acquired and move on to the next best thing.

Similar to a programming language if you have spent time understanding + writing good code and know the core concepts in 3D like camera , texture , shaders, animation, physics engine etc you would have a good safe path ahead of you. If you are among people who have  instead  depended on the developer forums where you pop-in your question and got by with code snippets ,you are in for a ride as porting code in this case across engines would be a bit complicated.

So to look at the brighter side; get your foundations right . Moving between engines should be a breeze then…

Think about it , we have gone through this twice and are still writing good code for a lot of games till date ( engine not being a pain point ! ).

Have fun and happy foundation building ;)

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Related posts:

  1. Torque 3d engine
  2. Torque beta
  3. Torque X 3.1.5 Beta – now available
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