A few days ago, Garage Games released version 1.5 of Torque Game Builder. If you already own the previous version of it, you can download the new version for free.
So, what are the new features in this version? Quite a lot of bug fixes. I haven’t been using the software for too long, but I have already stumbled on a few bugs. Nothing too serious, and it doesn’t interfere with the functionality and performance in any way, they were only minor annoyances.
One of the most prominent new features are behaviors. These are small pieces of functionality that can be assigned to objects without writing code. This is similar to the actions in Game Maker. In my opinion, this is not really that useful. I have used Game Maker for a while and I rarely used the drag-and-drop actions, preferring to code most of it in script. Might be useful for small, simple games such as Breakout clones.
What I’m the most excited about is that you can store your game files anywhere on your system. In the previous version, all projects were stored in the program directory itself, buried quite deep in Program Files, and there was no way to put them somewhere else. For me, this was quite annoying because I prefer to keep my documents on a separate drive (in case I have to reinstall my OS, wich happened a few days ago). Luckily I always kept a copy on my documents drive! Also, if you work in a team it’s useful to keep the project files on a shared network drive.
Another major update is the tick based physics system. In the previous version, if the game slowed down for some reason, so would all movement. Now all physics is framerate independent, so everything will always move at the same speed. Cross-platform support also improved. You can now use OS-specific dialog boxes, cursors and menus.
Porting games from the old version to the new one isn’t easy though, mainly because of the new physics system. Depending on the game, it can be either a piece of cake or a nightmare. I decided not to waste time on this and just finish Gridblaster with the old version. I’ll use the new one for my next game.