GarageGames has announced a new license for Torque. The last one was something like "$100 per programmer seat; if you and your publisher combined make more than $500K a year, you must pay a $10K flat fee".

The problem was the and your publisher combined part. If your game gets published by Real or whatever big portal, you'd have to pay the $10K license even if your game didn't make that much, because your publisher did.

Not anymore. Now it's $100 per programmer seat until you make more than $250K, and then it's $495 per seat.

I think this is excellent news for all of us.

NOTE : I have no affiliation with GG, besides owning a Torque license.
MODS : I thought of posting this to the Game Development & Technical forum, too, but I didn't want to cross-post without asking first.

I'm NOT a Torque owner, but once my current project is finished, I'm planning on becoming one (I just don't have the time to spend figuring it out right now).

This is pretty good news, no matter how you look at it. First of all, Torque isn't just a cross-platform 3D engine, it's a fairly complete gaming architecture used in major retail games. Secondly, this move positions Torque in a unique spot in the industry. They are pricing Torque as a TOOL for game development - buy once, use often - just like Photoshop, Maya, Lightwave, etc.

So, theoretically, a lone programmer with a commercial seat of Torque could basically contract his services out to anybody for game development using the engine. Rather than the license being tied to a project (like engines with royalty structures), or to a company you might be doing business with, the new license structure seems to reinforce the idea of "independence."

Which I guess was the whole point. I'm fairly interested in seeing what happens from here.

I've had my eye on the torque engine for a little while now and I'm planning on buying a license as soon as my next revisions of werlin are released. I had my reservations about the joint developer and publisher clause before and I'm pretty happy about the new one. Maybe we could even start a Learn Torque Together thread here (eventhough they have many learning threads over at GG).

Well I hope they have added a LOT of help and documentation to the code.
I was so stupid to buy a license of Torque when it was just released, then spent one month trying to figure out what I could do with all that stuff, then quit it and bought Blitz3d.
Now I'm using PTK to have the advantage of porting to Mac.
Since I won't make a 3d game (they need too many resources to be affordable for me), for now a cross-platform 2D lib like PTK is enough.

p.s. I am NOT a skilled C programmer so maybe you can use Torque in 10 seconds ;)

and yes lwjgl (http://www.lwjgl.org) is 0$ per seat ( hi cas! :D )

pat

Ive been using torque for a while now (since before it came out), its a complex beast, make no bones about that. But it pays off to stick with it.

There are plnty of people who will help you out on the IRC as long as you listen and do a bit of leg work.

I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to get a complete game framework/architecture in place.

Its definitely not a newbie engine though.