InstantAction Closing its doors, Torque Engine on the Market

VThornheart

Holy cow, I wasn't expecting this:

http://www.torquepowered.com/community/blogs/view/20495

InstantAction, the company that acquired the Torque engine after the dissolution of GarageGames, is calling it quits. Apparently they're looking for a company to sell their IP off to as we speak.

Regardless of what happened with InstantAction, I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Torque as an engine... hopefully someone will pick it up and run with it. It's been the core behind many games over the years, including On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness.

I've personally been using Torque X for a while now with my friends at our little game studio as we've tried to make a game for the XBox 360... we actually just recently started to consider moving away from it due to long standing bugs in the closed-source level editor that were going unresolved... unless a company picks up Torque and Torque X and runs with it, I suppose that maybe will be turning into a definitely.

Was anyone else here using one of the Torque-derived engines to make a game? How will this affect your development, or will it at all? Discuss!

GnomeTank

I used Torque when it first came out, way back in the day. At the time it was the best engine you could get for the price ($150 bucks).

Unfortunately, I think it just got left behind. They tried to do some things with the Torque shader version, and then Torque X, but others seemed to have a better, or more timely, solution. Things like Unity came around and really started to eat in to their market.

That said, if Torque does disappear, I'd be very sad. It was one of the first really accessible engines for indies, and it would be a sad thing if it wasn't around anymore.

VThornheart

Aye, very true... though it is hard to find an engine as accessible as Torque X for 360 development at the least. As buggy and broken as it is in some aspects... the community effort to fix the broken engine helped a lot, though I wonder if that has a future given these events.

The other nice thing about Torque was the fact that it let you hit so many platforms. UDK for example provides a much more robust toolset, but you can only really hit PC platforms with it if I remember correctly. It was definitely great for indie developers... hopefully an indie friendly company will pick it up and perhaps help to modernize it without it becoming indie inaccessible.

Al Baron

I wonder what Iron Tower Studios and DoubleBear Productions are going to do if Torque does go away.

VThornheart

Aye, it'd be interesting to know their plans. Will they keep going with the version of the engine they have until they release?

My guess would be that they'd try to keep going if they've gotten far enough with it, especially if they're using the more stable Torque PC engine (as opposed to Torque X for example).

Viscountalpha

This makes me sad. I wish fallen legions came back to us. Actually, I was craving that and alot of us were sad that it didn't come back.

Poison

Viscountalpha wrote: »

This makes me sad. I wish fallen legions came back to us. Actually, I was craving that and alot of us were sad that it didn't come back.

To whom it may concern!

Quote from the new site where Legions will be rereleased:

Over the past few months we've been working with InstantAction to bring back Legions, and today we're ready to announce - Legions is coming back!

A team of dedicated community members including new and old faces have been given the source code and permission from InstantAction to continue developing and distributing Legions as a standalone game. No browser will be required! The game will be free for everyone to download.

Progress is well under way. Check out the site

http://www.legionsoverdrive.com/