The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine

by Edward F. Maurina III (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-1568812847

ISBN-10: 1568812841

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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 provide readers all they need to understand the Torque Game Engine. See the Support page on the author's website for a revision of Chapter 15 (Torque Lighting). A CD is included with the book.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

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. -Bookwatch, August 2006

About the Author

Edward 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 co-founder of Hall of Worlds, an independent game studio and developer of educational tools for game engineers.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ A K Peters/CRC Press (April 15, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 600 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1568812841
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1568812847
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,265,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,988 in Game Programming
- #3,335 in Computer & Internet Game Strategy Guides
- #3,545 in Computer Graphics

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23 ratings

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Tony

Middle of the Road

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2010

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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.

Helpful

Jon E Watte

Only Covers Basic Scripting

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2006

Verified Purchase

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."

24 people found this helpful

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Flawed, but still worth a look

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2006

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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.

43 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Hapyy Freedom

Torque Tech Gems

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

A tome of secrets. Might not be for Torque 3D but the TorqueScript is still useful for Torque 3D. I am happy that I got this book back then.

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The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque: Under the Hood of the Torque Game Engine

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