They are currently shopping around for buyers. Employees were all let go.

You can read more here.

There were some really amazing developers working on it. I hope all those effected find work. Guess InstantJam turned out to be a flop.
Jimmg wrote:
They are currently shopping around for buyers. Employees were all let go.

You can read more here.

There were some really amazing developers working on it. I hope all those effected find work. Guess InstantJam turned out to be a flop.
I actually thought that InstantAction was a pretty cool concept; too bad it didn't take off. Sad I wonder what this means for Freebuild...?
no more torque = no more freebuild?
Dontar wrote:
no more torque = no more freebuild?
I seriously doubt that. No more Torque means possibly no more engine updates other than the optimizations and fixes that Elfprince and the rest of the Freebuild team can implement themselves, but I don't see why the project would need to stop using the engine.
perhaps this means Torque is or could become free/abandonware?
KermMartian wrote:
Dontar wrote:
no more torque = no more freebuild?
I seriously doubt that. No more Torque means possibly no more engine updates other than the optimizations and fixes that Elfprince and the rest of the Freebuild team can implement themselves, but I don't see why the project would need to stop using the engine.


Ideally because Torque sucks and they should have moved on to a better engine that is being kept up to date and uses the latest and greatest tech a long time ago.

Alternatively, for non commercial purposes, Free Build could move to a full, professional level suite in the form of the Unreal Developer Kit.
how would freebuild work on a different engine? (if gonna be using better engine, use one that has good physics and good mod-ability)
Dontar wrote:
how would freebuild work on a different engine? (if gonna be using better engine, use one that has good physics and good mod-ability)
It would require more or less building the sandboxness, the art and model and vehicle and map assets, and everything else more or less from scratch.
KermMartian wrote:
I seriously doubt that. No more Torque means possibly no more engine updates other than the optimizations and fixes that Elfprince and the rest of the Freebuild team can implement themselves, but I don't see why the project would need to stop using the engine.

This.
Quote:
perhaps this means Torque is or could become free/abandonware?

Unfortunately IA will probably just try to sell it to another company. Maybe the new owners would be more amenable to licensing extensions for old tech, but who knows?

Kllrnohj wrote:
Alternatively, for non commercial purposes, Free Build could move to a full, professional level suite in the form of the Unreal Developer Kit.

UDK doesn't allow for engine modifications, unless I am misremembering things significantly.
elfprince13 wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
I seriously doubt that. No more Torque means possibly no more engine updates other than the optimizations and fixes that Elfprince and the rest of the Freebuild team can implement themselves, but I don't see why the project would need to stop using the engine.

This.
Quote:
perhaps this means Torque is or could become free/abandonware?

Unfortunately IA will probably just try to sell it to another company. Maybe the new owners would be more amenable to licensing extensions for old tech, but who knows?

Kllrnohj wrote:
Alternatively, for non commercial purposes, Free Build could move to a full, professional level suite in the form of the Unreal Developer Kit.

UDK doesn't allow for engine modifications, unless I am misremembering things significantly.
I think there's something around a quarter of a million dollars and a massive amount of NDAing and business proposal review that's involved if you want to modify the engine.
KermMartian wrote:
I think there's something around a quarter of a million dollars and a massive amount of NDAing and business proposal review that's involved if you want to modify the engine.

Exactly, and a commercial license for engine modification isn't what's usually meant by the UDK.
Part of what makes a muliplayer computer game popular is being able to run it on a ridiculous range of hardware, like WoW, so you can run it at home, at the office, or anywhere else if you have a netbook. That's not to say there isn't a market for the kind of high-end MMO Kllr is describing, but that market doesn't come close to the 11 million players of Warcraft.
elfprince13 wrote:
UDK doesn't allow for engine modifications, unless I am misremembering things significantly.


So? You don't need to alter the engine. I doubt anyone here could really work on the engine anyway.
Kllrnohj wrote:
elfprince13 wrote:
UDK doesn't allow for engine modifications, unless I am misremembering things significantly.


So? You don't need to alter the engine. I doubt anyone here could really work on the engine anyway.
Actually elfprince has been making major modifications to the torque engine including upgrading the OpenGL rendering to use OpenSceneGraph.
TheStorm wrote:
Kllrnohj wrote:
elfprince13 wrote:
UDK doesn't allow for engine modifications, unless I am misremembering things significantly.


So? You don't need to alter the engine. I doubt anyone here could really work on the engine anyway.
Actually elfprince has been making major modifications to the torque engine including upgrading the OpenGL rendering to use OpenSceneGraph.


More to the point, he's making modifications with the goal of integrating LDraw support, which would be *awesome*.
TheStorm wrote:
Actually elfprince has been making major modifications to the torque engine including upgrading the OpenGL rendering to use OpenSceneGraph.


There is a huge difference between torque's code complexity/quality and unreal engine 3's. Likewise, there is a difference between hacking on features and actually improving the engine.
Kllrnohj wrote:
TheStorm wrote:
Actually elfprince has been making major modifications to the torque engine including upgrading the OpenGL rendering to use OpenSceneGraph.


There is a huge difference between torque's code complexity/quality and unreal engine 3's. Likewise, there is a difference between hacking on features and actually improving the engine.


True, but try adding LDraw support to Unreal...
DShiznit wrote:
True, but try adding LDraw support to Unreal...


LDraw appears to just be a file format. You should be able to support new files without altering the engine. Also, LDraw doesn't appear to have been designed with real time gaming in mind. A stand-alone converter might be the better solution.
Kllrnohj wrote:
DShiznit wrote:
True, but try adding LDraw support to Unreal...


LDraw appears to just be a file format. You should be able to support new files without altering the engine. Also, LDraw doesn't appear to have been designed with real time gaming in mind. A stand-alone converter might be the better solution.
LDraw is not natively designed with real-time rendering in mind, hence why elfprince13 has (if I recall correctly) designed simplification routines that strip out a lot of extraneous information and polygons from LDraw models before importing them.
Kllrnohj wrote:
There is a huge difference between torque's code complexity/quality and unreal engine 3's. Likewise, there is a difference between hacking on features and actually improving the engine.

OpenSceneGraph and Bullet (which I'm also working with) on the other hand are probably an order of magnitude more complex than equivalent components of the Unreal Engine. Certainly OpenSceneGraph is, since it is designed to work with the optimized rendering of geometry databases on the terabyte scale and has clustered rendering capabilities. I could trivially make an LDraw->whatever format Unreal uses converter, but I wouldn't have direct control over the geometry caching mechanisms or the graph structure needed to build and merge models in game. I still haven't seen anything that suggests Unreal is capable of dealing with hundreds of thousands of scene objects or makes use of the newer and more sophisticated culling algorithms I'm planning to make use of.

Also, last I checked, replacing the physics and graphics subsystems of a game engine count as actually improving the engine, and not just hacking on features.
  
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