About.com C / C++ / C# - Torque 3D Engine Going Open Source

"One of the earliest game engines to be sold commercially, eleven years ago, is now going to be open sourced. GarageGames will be licensing it under the MIT license which is very permissive.

The engine is coded in C++ but doesn't need you to be a C++ programmer to use it, though Torquescript which is used for scripting is like C++. Current paying developers had access to the C+ source code and could tweak the engine to suit their needs and once it's open sourced, anyone will be able to do that.

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GarageGames - The Future of Torque 3D is Open Source!

The big news coming out of GarageGames today is that Torque 3D will be going open source under the MIT license. This is huge, and something that we’ve discussed internally for a while. Eric has just posted a blog talking about why Torque 3D is heading in this direction and a little of the history behind the decision. If you haven’t yet read Eric’s blog please head over there and read it first.

How will the open source version work?

We’ve chosen GitHub to host the Torque 3D repositories. GitHub has taken on the role of the location for Open Source projects on the Internet. It allows for great community interaction, encourages the forking of code bases, and easy merging of changes. And if you’re not yet into git (GitHub for Windows and Mac are tools that really help), GitHub supports both Subversion access and automatic Zip archives of all repositories.

Anyone may have Read Access to the public Torque 3D repositories. You create your own fork and do your development work there. You can merge updates from the master branch into your own as they become available. And if you have changes you wish to share with the community to be integrated back into the master, you create a pull request and someone with Write Access can review the changes and merge them in.

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What will be included in the open source version?

The complete Torque 3D 1.2 source code, along with the four starting templates, will be included in the GitHub repository. A separate repository for reference documentation will be set up. Other items, such as the FPS Tutorial template, will be part of a separate download to help keep the main repository to a manageable size.
There are other, closed source components of Torque 3D that I would like to open up following our launch.

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GarageGames - Torque 3D to be Released on Github under the MIT license

"Eleven years ago, The GarageGames founders did an incredibly innovative thing when they sold a full source game engine for $100. We are excited to continue in their footsteps by announcing that we will be releasing Torque 3D as the best open source game technology in the world. Once again, GarageGames will be changing game development.

Why are we doing this?
Nine months ago, we realigned the goals of GarageGames; making Torque 3D available via a permissive open source license is a strategic move towards fulfilling the company vision. Our first goal was to use iTorque to build a new product we call 3 Step Studio. We envisioned a game development tool that requires no programming at all and began to build it. This product is available today for free, but it’s very, very, early in development and we expect to iterate many times before it is a commercially viable product. Our second goal was to build a service division. I’m happy to say that we’ve already booked our first million dollars in service work and we expect the growth trend to continue as we make Torque 3D more accessible. You can visit our services site at services.garagegames.com. We are very well prepared and staffed to provide support, training, and custom development.

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Is this version different or a subset of T3D?
We've split off some modules as separate downloads and we've removed some art to bring down the payload size. Other than those changes, the versions are the same.

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Nice! As far as I can find the source isn't on GitHub yet, but I'm watching for it and when I find that it is I'll let you know (and it's very likely it will make the Coding4Fun blog too).