The Great Games... Experiment?

I joined the Great Games Experiment (GGE) this week and have to say I'm extremely impressed. The site seems focused on sharing game betas and demos for feedback and constructive criticism. And provides just the right amount of discussion and ranking of retail and home brewed titles to promote the social networking aspect of the site – hey, everyone wants to meet people with similar interests.

GGE is very much a LinkedIn for gamers and game developers – with friend lists, rankings, lists of games you've played, email/IM like personal messages, and a profile that provides as much (or as little) information as you want.

But unlike other social networking sites you don't have to sort through thousands of people to find the one or two gamers or game developers, who may or may not share your interests. Instead finding people with similar interests is as simple as commenting on a game you like or joining a group you're interested in.

You'll definitely see me on GGE – and I'll be happy to tryout, comment on, and rank any games you send my way.

Back to the title of this blog: “The Great Games... Experiment?”... Experiment? No – this sounds like a sure thing to me.

-John Kabus

The End of an Era

Three years after the concept was originally discussed and two and a half years after its initial release, the Torque Lighting Kit (TLK) has completed its life-cycle.

With last week's release of TGE 1.5 and today's release of TLK 1.4.2 (the final release, not including any necessary maintenance releases), TLK is no longer available (though it's still supported).


Leading the Pack (er... rather the Kit)

Originally named the Lighting Pack,TLK broke new ground when it became the Torque Game Engine's first code expansion pack/kit, and after three years it's still Torque's only third-party code pack/kit.

In that time nearly every TGE based game produced used TLK to streamline level creation, and improve and customize its lighting and rendering - including several IGF finalists (TubeTwist, Venture Africa, and Lore to name a few).


TLK Lives On

Synapse Gaming's lighting and rendering technology is now integrated into all Torque engines (except TGB), making it available to everyone using Torque, and easier than ever to use. This means more users to customize, adapt, experiment with, and create awesome resources for the technology.


Moving Forward

I've received a lot of questions over the years about the business side of TLK, and how things evolved, business and technology wise.

Ideally I'd like to do a postmortem of TLK's entire history, from non-Torque tech to today's lighting and rendering systems. And I'll likely do that someday, but the evolution is still underway, and a lot more is still to come...

TDN Growing and TSE Evolving

Well it's only two weeks since the Torque Lighting System TDN section went live and already it has grown into 20 some articles and received over 1500 unique hits on the main page.

The TDN section covers Torque Lighting System features, customizations, performance tuning, and optimizations. The articles are broken down into product specific groups (TSE, TGE 1.5, TLK, ...) to make finding information easy. The most recent additions to the section are TGE 1.5 lighting system articles and updates, and TSE performance tuning articles.

With TSE 1.0 on the horizon a lot of our development time is focused on wrapping up features, tuning performance, and squashing any bugs that pop up. TSE's development has been running full steam for quite a while, but now that MS4 is out and we've been doing semi-weekly code drops, the community gets to see the progress in near real-time.

The TSE community has been extremely helpful in the process, offering suggestions, finding any issues, helping to identify them, and in many cases issuing fixes. The community is running full force with MS4, already working on the next generation of Indie games - many with hopes of getting their games onto Xbox 360. I can't wait until these games start being shown publicly!

Synapse Gaming Lighting System Used in Torque Game Engine 1.5!

GarageGames and Synapse Gaming are excited to announce Synapse Gaming's Torque Lighting System (the Torque Lighting Kit) is integrated into the upcoming Torque Game Engine 1.5.

Torque Game Engine 1.5 will include all of TLK's advanced lighting and rendering, and offer all of the same key features and tools TLK owners are accustomed to, and several new features including improved dynamic lighting performance, blended terrain dynamic lighting, and higher detail terrain geometry and textures.

For more information check out the latest GarageGames development shot: Torque Game Engine Gets a Huge Upgrade!

TSE Milestone 4 and Lighting System TDN Section Go Live

Both the competed TSE milestone 4 and the TSE Lighting System TDN section were released today to the TSE community.


It'll be interesting to see what the community does with this latest TSE drop - there are a ton of new features to work with like dynamic and static lighting and shadows, HDR/DRL with Bloom and Tone Mapping, cinematic lighting filters, high performance relighting tools, and much, much more...