The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine (GarageGames) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Edward F. Maurina III (Author)
Key Phrases: lesson kit, maze runner, engine overview, World Editor, Controls Chapier, Percent Step (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The author takes readers on an in-depth walkthrough of the Torque Game Engine—one of the most popular, powerful, and easy to use game engines available today. With clear explanations of how to use Torque to create your own games and detailed discussions of the engine’s inner workings, this book is a must read for any programmer interested in making games for fun or profit. It offers

* Step-by-step examples,
* Detailed system descriptions,
* In-depth references,
* Practical tips, tricks, and more

that will provide readers all they need to understand the Torque Game Engine.

About the Author
Ed Maurina is a long-time Torque programmer and trainer. He currently works as a Senior Engineer for Intel and earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Oregon State University. He is a Co-founder of Hall of Worlds, an independent game studio and developer of educational tools for game engineers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: AK Peters, Ltd. (March 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568812841
• ISBN-13: 978-1568812847
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #137,063 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, but still worth a look, September 17, 2006

By	GameMaker (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

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.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Only Covers Basic Scripting, October 23, 2006

By	Jon Watte "hplus" (Menlo Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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."

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Reference for TGE Programmers, August 14, 2006

By	Pisal S. (Thailand) - See all my reviews

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