Customer Reviews

The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine (GarageGames) (Garagegames S.)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book could have really been excellent with a little more work. It contains all the elements you'd want. A programming overview, a Torque overview, sections on the architecture of Torque, sections on torque script, really nice large reference sections, a step by step game project in torque, and lots more. Sounds great right? Well, it would be, except for the really poor organization of the book. Fully half of the book is not in the bound softcover book, but rather on the cdrom that accompanies it. To me this largely defeats the purpose of buying a book, since if I wanted to rely on online references I could always just go to the garagegames website.

The other part that really frustrates me about the book is that the book and the cdrom don't seem to be ingegrated well together. The book constantly references "the appendix", yet there is actually no appendix in the book. There are adobe acrobat documents on the cdrom named "appendix" yet they don't always contain the things that the book is referencing. Also the game project which is at the very heart of the book is also very disorganized. If you try to read the book and do the project, you won't be able to, because many of the steps needed are written about only in the appendix, and the book does not point those out.

So what's the bottom line, is the book worth getting? That is a tough call. Given that it is so disorganized, and carries such a high price tag, I'm tempted to say "no". But there really aren't many alternatives, and it does contain useful infrmation if you have enough patience to dig through it. You might check out the book: 3D Proramming All-In-One, which is also written about the torque engine. That book is much better organized and professionally put together, but the problem with that book is that it's based on an ancient version of Torque, and doesn't have near as much treatment of the Torque script language as this book.

One additional thing to be aware of: This book is certainly not aimed at those new to programming. If you are new to programming, I don't think this book will be of much use to you. If you are comfortable with C/C++/C#/Java, or something similar, you can get something out of the book if you try hard enough, but be prepared for a lot of frustration.

Given that the documentation of the Torque Game Engine is spotty in many places, especially in the C++ section, I bought this book to fill in the gaps. Sadly, it doesn't. It doesn't mention the C++ side at all, and only gives a brief mention that Torque can do networking, but doesn't go into anything about how it works, or how you'd do interesthing things like network dynamic fields on class instances.

This book goes through the steps of building a single-player item-pickup game, and that's pretty much it. It has a few asides (such as a chapter on the built-in vehicle classes) but not nearly enough depth to be more useful than a simple keyword web search. There's nothing in this book that you couldn't learn by just following online tutorials, and doing simple a keyword search in the C++ engine.

Given that this is "the official guide" I expected a lot deeper information, as the surface information is fairly easily accessible on the garagegames web site and various game development sites on the web such as gamedev.net. I don't mind the occasional typos and non-working code samples (every book will have those), but I do mind that the book cuts out large swaths of subject area by simply saying "... but we won't cover that in this book."

If you are planning to start writing games in TGE (Torque Game Engine), it would be beneficial to you to start picking up a book on TGE since the documentation on the website regarding tutorials and references require sometime to find and some may be alittle outdated.

Regarding books on TGE, there are 3 books on the market, which are as follows:
3D Game Programming All in One, Second Edition
by Kenneth C Finney

Advanced 3D Game Programming All in One, Second Edition (Paperback)
by Kenneth C Finney

and the book above that I'm reviewing.

For the books from Kenneth C Finney, it is modelled more as a tutorial, in which the beginning book tried to cover the whole game development process, which oddly includes even about 3d modeling making the book rather bloated and not very useful for programmers who need a deeper coverage - but it covers all the topics a newbie game developer would want to know. A number of topics not covered in the first volume is covered in the advanced book which supplements each other.

In regarding The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine, this book approaches TGE in a different perspective. Though written as a mix between a reference/tutorial, in my own opinion, this book serves better as a reference guide. The tutorial material in the book and the accompanying CD is not that easy to follow along if you are a new programmer, but it has many goodies and code base references that can be extremely useful in your TGE project. I've merged a number of examples into my current game project and it works well! The true value of the book lies on the point that if you need any reference on different parts of TGE, this book probably has the answer. This book can potentially save you a huge development time in this regarding if you are a new/intermediate developer, or an advanced developer who might not remember certain obscure features that are needed at that instant in your project.

On a hindsight there are a number of issues with the book which could be improved. The index is unfortunately not that comprehensive. There are a number of mistakes in the text. Anyway, these are small issues that are solvable and pales when considering the value of the book. On my opinion, I recommend this book to other TGE developers.

On a short note, I would recommend buying the 3 books in question :P

At $100, the Torque Game Engine (TGE) is quite a deal. It is a sophisticated engine that provides a great deal of assistance in handling the basic operation of a game while leaving you the opportunity to create the design and concept you want without undue restrictions.

This book is an interesting cross between a reference text and a tutorial. Most of the book is in reference style. That is it talks about the various features, what they do, how to use them and so on. It is aimed at the individual developer or the small team, or it could be used by a newcommer in a larger organization.

Finally, after the software is described in this reference format, the author goes into a tutorial mode to lead the reader through the writing of a fairly simple game. In this section the reader finally gets to see what the various parts he has learned about actually do in a real world (although simple) application.

The CD included with the book includes some additional information as well as a Torque Demo Installer.

This book is pretty much useless to those starting out in Torque. First off, the index is a mess and you can't find anything because of the way its grouped. For example, if you want to find out how getChild() works, you can't look in the index under the letter "g", instead you have to search through each page of the index until you come to the "Console" section, then in there you will find it. Very unorganized for those just starting out.

The book is also lacking in supporting basic functionallity such as templates and clones. Clones are essential in Torque. There is no reference to clones anywhere in the index or appendicies on the CD.

Like I said, this book isn't really usefull.

I thought this book was great until I needed to an indepth description on how to do something. It jumps around far too much, one minute I a was learning about creating faded blocks then suddenly it skipped to a whole nother topic, the lesson finally continued some 40 pages later. This is was quite frustrating. If you think logical which most programmers do you will get ticked off wasting precious time scaling back and forth through the pages to piece together the info. It never just simply shows you how to do something from the most basic level and it misses many important steps for you to just go and take a small portion and develop the rest on your own.

it's logic is best explained like this - I used an automobile as an example

page 1-3 building an engine
page 4-10 building seats and trunk
page 11-15 building front window
page 16-20 building an engine (Continued)
page 21 - 22 Filling tires with air
page 21-22 building seats and trunk (Continued)
page 23-26 building front window (Continued)


To sum it up it is non-continuous and will get you confused even if you know what your doing. Not a good reference but is the only updated book available to choose from.


*** Stars

If you are looking for a general reference for the Torque Game Engine then I would strongly recommend that you keep searching. The book does not touch on any of the internals of the engine focusing primarily on game scripting. However its approach to scripting is incredibly scattered, jumping from topic to topic without giving any subject any of the depth that it deserves. Worse the author will revisit topics later in the text. Compounding this sin, the index is sparse enough to be next to useless.

As a "tutorial" for writing your first demo game using TGE I would say this title may approach adequacy, if you read it straight through from cover to cover. As a general reference, skip it.

This has a lot of great material and would be a great reference. However, I just don't think it adequately shows a new developer how to start creating a game from scratch. The author discuss each topic, but inter-mingles some actual game making tasks. The sad thing is, a good amount of this game creation work is coping files they've created into your development location and changing a few items. You're left wondering what all these scripts and resources are actually accomplishing and how they fit together. I would have preferred that the main part of the book actually started you off with a blank game level, then walk you through the creation of each needed component. Then, the second part of the book could have been more detailed, serving as the reference portion. As another reviewer cites here, the book jumps around too much. This is not in regard to topics, but in basic hands-on teaching. I didn't learn anything from copying a directory of files from one location to the prescribed prototype locations and testing the result of that! The sad thing is, there are good examples, but they just aren't tied together with a single purpose. If you to prefer to learn by completing all the steps to create simple game, then you will probably be disappointed with how the author's approach. Torque comes with a lot of tools! Still, I would say that the author gets caught up in trying to present all tool details, rather than getting through all the basic steps, then return to the details.

The copy of the book I purchased was used and I had a bit of a problem with the CD, so I use the provided links to try to find errata and such, but both were of no help what so ever. Any body purchasing this book should go to [...] obtain errata and any updates to the software the author provides (or Google, "GPGT errata").

I'm thinking about placing an order for the "3D Game Development All-In-One, 3rd Ed.", which is to come out this Oct. which has to be more up-to-date with the current Torque 3D software.

This reference has LOTS of details on how to use the individual editors that are a part of Torque's game engines, and this guild to using Torque scripts is a great introduction to another reference manual for writing in C++ ("Multiplayer Gaming and Engine Coding" -skip to this if you don't want to use scripts in your game design, or if you already know about using game scripts).

Where the manual could use a little more user friendliness is in having the examples of code used in short modifications of the demo included on the accompanying CD to help people know what the script should look like in short examples of just the details being described. (Audio mouse-over scripts for the main menu for example)

The book is very well written, and while it may be confusing at times, re-reading the instructions after you've met with a failure usually clarifies what you should do.

Any game programmer working with the Torque game engine must have The Game Programmer's Guide To Torque: it teaches everything needed to design your own game, using experiences of game makers and industry veterans well versed in Torque technology. A Torque Game engine demo is included on an accompanying cd while step-by-step examples tell how to use it. Its focus on all the basics makes for an exceptional coverage for all levels of game programmer.