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.

"The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" 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.

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.

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.

Simplemente magnifico.

Ameno, con mucha informacion tecnica de uso inmediato para el desarrollador. Unos magnificos apendices con la referencia del engine, etc. Vale su peso tanto como el engine. Un tandem dificil de superar.

Seriously Flawed - But a Necessary Evil

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

On the whole a disappointment

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.

Impossible to review

Impossible to review because after a month i have not received the book that I bought!!!!

Excellent Introduction and reference book

I have owned the Torque Game engine licence for over a year now, and until I purchased this book I was unable to make any real headway. No matter how many forum post and web based documentation I read I still felt confused and very quickly my enthusiasm drained. This book however has not only clarified a large amount of issues I had with the game engine but given me a much needed boost in my enthusiasm. I am now currently throwing together my own simple games and exploring some of my own ideas for game play. This book is an excellent reference and is already littered with bookmarks through use. But it doesn’t just stop there, the CD comes with a wealth of additional information and everything you need to start using torque with excellent quick reference pdfs.

Put simply if you need that ’click’ moment when working with torque game engine or you want to get into making your own games get this book.

I promise you will not be disappointed, roll on volume II.

By far the best book on Torque

I can’t recommend this book highly enough, i have read all the docs and the website information plus the other two books on Torque but this one just shines. You can open it at random and learn something useful from every page. The Appendix contains the documentation that Torque lacks

Good Reference!

I liked very much. The book is a great idea for game developers discover and program games with Torque. Showing the way....

not a casual read

This is a good book to get if you are thinking of getting or have a copy of the torque engine. Be aware that you need some decent knowlage of OOP (object oriented programing). The more programming background the better. It does not make the best refrence book. It is however a good tool to learn the torque engine.

A complete reference...

I wanted a reference that would allow me to learn and use the TGE. I was traveling and often didn’t have a solid internet connection to view the online resources. The guide allowed me to move forward despite that... #1 book on the shelf when using this engine.

Only Covers Basic Scripting

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."

Deeply flawed, but still worth a look

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, reference sections, a step by step game project in torque, and lots more. Sounds great right? Well, it would be, except for the horrible organization of the book. Fully half of the book is not in the bound softcover book, but rather on the cdrom that accompanies it. That might not be too bad, except that sections seem to be just randomly distributed between the cdrom and the softcover book, and the book doesn’t actually reference the cdrom at all. It makes references to an "Appendix" which doesn’t actually exist. Some of the things the book references in the "Appendix" are on the cdrom, and some of them aren’t. You’re just supposed to know when to constantly skip between book and cdrom I guess and try to piece things together. Working on the project, which is at the heart of the book, is particularly frustrating.

The book seems very much "half baked", as if the author got half of it done, and the publisher just decided to ship it.

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.

Excellent introduction to the Torque Game Engine.

This is a well written and laid out book that steps into the Torque Game Engine in a logical and easily followed manner. This is essential reading for anyone new to the engine, as the Garage Games own documentation is lamentably awfull for newcomers.

Even if you are not new to the engine, this book will prove valuable, not only as a reference, but it will also teach you a few tricks by virtue of its bredth of coverage.

Well worth getting.

"The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is invaluable

"The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is, in my opinion, far superior to any other Torque book available, including "3D Game Programming All In One". I own both books and definitely prefer the newer book (GPGT). It not only helps you to learn Torque and understand various concepts (datablocks for example), but also acts as a great reference document as well (I found myself skimming through sections that go into great detail on setting up sun/water/other things that weren’t immediately important to me during my first read through and referencing them later).

The pace and organization of "The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is excellent.

I generally don’t like "programming books" (I’ve read dozens over the years, either through courses I had to take while I was in school or personal purchases I have made). There are only 3 programming books total that I could ever recommend at this point: Deitel & Deitel’s C++ How To Program, Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming by Robert Vieira and The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque by Edward F. Maruina III.

The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque has been invaluable for me.

"The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is invaluable

"The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is, in my opinion, far superior to any other Torque book available, including "3D Game Programming All In One". I own both books and definitely prefer the newer book (GPGT). It not only helps you to learn Torque and understand various concepts (datablocks for example), but also acts as a great reference document as well (I found myself skimming through sections that go into great detail on setting up sun/water/other things that weren’t immediately important to me during my first read through and referencing them later).

The pace and organization of "The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque" is excellent.

I generally don’t like "programming books" (I’ve read dozens over the years, either through courses I had to take while I was in school or personal purchases I have made). There are only 3 programming books total that I could ever recommend at this point: Deitel & Deitel’s C++ How To Program, Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming by Robert Vieira and The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque by Edward F. Maruina III.

The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque has been invaluable for me.

Great Reference for TGE Programmers

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

Great Reference for TGE Programmers

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

A must have for Torque users

I found this book to be invaluable in learning how to use Torque to make games. Its helped me out numerous times. A must have for anyone interested in learning game development, whether your doing it for fun or for a living.

TomFeni

A must have for Torque users

I found this book to be invaluable in learning how to use Torque to make games. Its helped me out numerous times. A must have for anyone interested in learning game development, whether your doing it for fun or for a living.

TomFeni

An exceptional coverage for all levels of game programmer

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.

An exceptional coverage for all levels of game programmer

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.

Another great Torque related book

Great reference material and should always be next to you when you are working with any of the Torque Engines.

Another great Torque related book

Great reference material and should always be next to you when you are working with any of the Torque Engines.

Great book but...

This book is great for people who have worked with the torque scripting language. The only problem I have with it is that it, like the books before it, goes too fast thru the basics.
Without a good, solid understanding of the basics, the rest is just a foriegn language.
It’s a great book, easy read, and packed with useful information tho. I would recomend it to everyone.

All You Need to Get Started

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.