Modifying and Extending Torque

If you sign up with GarageGames and buy a developer's license for their Torque Game Engine, you get all of the source code. Every single bit of it.

Stop and think about that for just a minute. Not only do you get the capabilities already described in this book—features you've been learning how to use to make your game— but you also get the access to the core engine code, with the right to change it as you like to make your game do absolutely whatever you want it to do!

Earlier I'd pointed out that Torque is not really designed for massively multiplayer games. With access to the source code, you could change that, adding the missing bits and modifying the existing bits to accommodate your needs.

How about huge, I mean gigantic, game worlds? You could do this by modifying the Terrain Manager code to accommodate paging terrain, where the game only loads the terrain in the immediate and viewable area of the player. You would probably need to make a special world creation tool for managing large worlds—a tool you would create with Torque.

If you go to the GarageGames Web site (http://www.garagegames.com) and click the Make Games button, you will find a user community that is large, active, and thriving. Several of the retail games made with Torque are included on the companion CD for this book. At the GarageGames forums you will see the developers of these games in continuous conversation with people designing and making their own games—every one of them an independent just like you.

As you browse around, make your way to the Resources postings, and you will find a whole slew of code modifications submitted by members of the community to enhance the core capabilities of the Torque Engine. In fact, you will find that a substantial number of the features that Torque now has that it didn't have when it was first released were added as submissions from the user-developer community.

In addition to extending the core capabilities, another reason for modifying the engine would be to move the more CPU-intensive parts of your game scripts into the core engine in order to improve the execution speed and sometimes even the memory footprint (how much memory your game uses). To do these things you will have to learn how to program in C/C++ or at least obtain the services of a competent C/C++ programmer.