What has your experience been with Torque products?

I'm most interested in your experience with Torque-X, the Managed XNA version of their engine.

• How did it perform in your use case? (also info on your use, would be helpful)


• What was the usability of the tools?


• What did you build with it? 2D, 3D, both?


• Did you find any "gotchas" that you had to work around?

If you have used both Torque and Torque-X, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts contrasting the two engines. On the website, there are some pretty amazing screensshots for the Torque engine; yet the screenshots of Torque-X look kinda cheesy. At this point I don't have the 3D artist expertise to build some of the amazing 3D scense they demoed, but I'm wondering if this would even be possible on Toreque-X engine.

As always, any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Answer

I am a licencee of most Torque products. Don't let the screenshots fool you, it's indeed the art that sells it. As for the engine - you can make games with it, and decent ones at that, but not without putting in a lot of blood, sweat and tears. That holds true for most engines though.
Would I recommend it? Hmmm, hard to say. It has an editor, it has documentation, it has support and it's affordable. The code is reasonably structured - you could do worse.
Would I use it? No. As with most engines I find it easier to write it myself so I know what it can do and how I should do it without having to grasp someone else's philosophy that is bound to clash with mine.
However, having the source and seeing how they approached certain problems is always nice. It's also a full game engine, with pipeline, as opposed to a lot of engines out there.
Bottom line?
I don't regret buying it, as a learning tool. I wouldn't use it to make a game. I would definitely not recommend it to someone just starting out.