Unity vs Torque game engines and IDE environment

Question

I want to get people's opinion of Torque and Unity and their IDE tools.

You build Torque games using one of their engines (I'm currently interested in the iPhone engine), and Torque Game Builder (the whole thing...engine plus TGB is ~$1000).

You build Unity games using Unity (I think this is only ~$400).

Would people with experience building games in these engine give me a pros/cons of the engine? I'm a newbie and don't know what I should be looking for. I've downloaded them and are trying to play with them now.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Torque:

• Option of 2d or 3d engine (seperate products to purchase)
• 3d engine based on TGB (Torque Game Builder) which is absolutely ancient. Possibly appropriate for the hardware it is targetting, but still.
• Level editor tools I think are clunky - they are built using the engine itself (like a menus of a video game would be) and it seems their skills are not really in GUI design.
• The only option for scripting is Torque's own TorqueScript language. It's useable, but like UnrealScript or any of these languages game developers come up with in a pinch, it's something extra to learn, comes with little documentation (compared with, say C#) and just feels a bit cobbled together compared to mainstream languages. It also relies or a 3rd party tool for editing and debugging.
• On the plus side you get the sourcecode so you can make changes. However, don't overestimate the usefulness of this - it's production-ready code and as such is pretty challenging to follow.

Unity:

• Has a slick level/project editor tool. It seems more comfortable on MacOS (which is to be expected as that's where it originated).
• Engine is 3d only, but you can of course make a 2d game with it if you want to - there are tutorials on their website explaining how.
• Scripting can be done with Javascript or any of the .NET languages (they embedded the Mono runtime). This is a pretty big advantage in my eyes.
• Downsides are you don't get source; the pro version is rather expensive; the minimum build size of a game that uses Unity is over 10Mb which will mean less downloads (apps >10Mb cannot be downloaded via 3G).

Answer 2

We just did a demo using torque, the experience I took away from that is that not only do you get the source for it. But you will have to start modifying the source very quickly. I don't that you can do any thing but a strict fps shooter with the torque 3d engine without changing the source.

And while there is a large community for torque out there, they are not really set up well to convey changes to the source. I.e. most of the source changes don't post patches but unwieldy instructions on how to change the source.

I don't have a comparable experience with unity but before I would commit to Torque I would probably run Unity through some tests.