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GarageGames Provides Affordable Next Generation Game Technology with the Release of Torque Game Engine™ Advanced

Powerful new game engine now accessible to everyone.

Eugene, OR February 15th, 2007 -- GarageGames, the leader in powerful, affordable game development tools, is pleased to announce the long-awaited release of Torque Game Engine Advanced.

The 3D Torque Game Engine Advanced (known throughout development as Torque Shader Engine) takes full advantage of modern hardware technologies. Features include:

TorqueNet: Strong multiplayer networking foundation built into the code. TorqueNet uses both UDP and TCP, with key features including support of multiple data delivery requirements, partial object state updates, ghost management, packet stream management, and an optimized Notified Delivery Protocol. Allows hundreds of players to connect to a single server within demanding FPS game lag and response requirements. TorqueNet is the award-winning, industry-leading client/server architecture developed by GarageGames that is being used in commercial games such as Vivendi's Tribes 2, by NASA for Mars Rover simulations, and more. Torque Lighting System: Introducing multiple shadowing algorithms, self-shadowing objects, bloom, specularity, dynamic range, and more. Flexible in-game lighting editors and tools support significantly increased game atmosphere and design efficiency. Light objects can be configured as static or dynamic, omni or spotlights, and are capable of illuminating multiple interiors, shapes and terrain. Procedural Generation of Shaders that support bumpmapping and normalmapping, detail maps, specular, cubemapping, glow, refraction, reflection, texture UV animation, and fog. Custom Materials: A powerful custom shader interface allows easy integration of custom shaders and effects. Users can drop in shaders from demos or tools such as FX Composer and RenderMonkey. Also included are exclusive fallback hooks that allow full control over how a custom material looks on all hardware platforms. Modern Scenegraph and Batched Rendering for creating complex scenes with huge numbers of polygons. Puppeteer Mesh Animation System: Allows the use of animated multi-bone skeletons for dynamic, flexible character actions with a high level of detail. Fully supports motion capture data for ultra-realistic animations. GeoTerrain: Featuring multi-pass texturing and lighting, and layered volumetric fog, the portal-based interiors -- with detail brushes and animated lightmaps -- are able to connect directly with the environment-mapped terrain. GeoTerrain can easily be created using an alpha-channel height map, then edited within the engine to customize levels. Doorway: Seamless integration of interior and exterior rendering. Atlas Terrain Generation allows for limitless, dynamically paging terrains, taking full advantage of modern hardware for efficient rendering. Water Renderers: Easy to use Waterblocks with limitless size ocean bodies, normal map reflections, refractions, and perturbed surfaces. TorqueScript: Torque's own C-Like scripting language is byte-code compiled and easy to learn. Easily add C++ functions and objects, then call them from TorqueScript. 3D Toolset: Edit every aspect of your world, including terrain attributes, weather and fog, configure objects, set triggers, and mission logic all in the WYSIWYG Mission Builder. Build fully scriptable interfaces, write custom controls, edit, and test without exiting the GUI Builder. Includes mesh exporters for Maya, 3D Studio Max, LightWave, Blender, MilkShape and more. Gaming Objects: Customizable FPS, and third person game objects such as characters, vehicles, weapons, projectiles, and simple AI. Networkable Physics: Lightweight systems allows for hundreds of players with collision detection, rigid body, and vehicle physics. Xbox 360 Portable. Create your game with Torque Game Engine Advanced, and port to Xbox 360. (Requires separate license to Torque 360 game engine) Battle Tested: TGEA has been used in several shipped titles including our own hit Xbox Live Arcade title "Marble Blast Ultra". Source Included: The C++ source code provides near limitless ability to modify and improve upon the engine. Incorporate custom-built AI code, optimize the engine to suit a particular game's needs, or simply use the resources that all of the other Torque Game Engine Advanced users are creating and contributing to the community.

"We are very pleased with the release of Torque Game Engine Advanced," says GarageGames CEO and CTO Josh Williams. "This is another big step forward in our effort to make top-notch development tools available to anyone who wants to make games. Even though this engine will best serve advanced developers, it includes many tools that will make next-generation gaming effects easier to create and much simpler to manage. Through our Early Adopter efforts, the GarageGames community has been vital in making Torque Game Engine Advanced an engine that rivals the top-tier 3D engines at a fraction of the cost.

Torque Game Engine Advanced is available at a substantial discount to Indies and hobbyists. The Indie license is available for $295 and, as always, license holders will have access to the full C++ source code and never pay any royalties, ever. For larger developers, the Commercial license will be available for $1495 -- also with the source code included and without royalties. All products can be purchased through the GarageGames website.

GarageGames is located in Eugene, Oregon and on the web at www.garagegames.com. As the makers of Torque Game Builder, Torque Game Engine, and Torque Game Engine Advanced, they have been providing game development tools and technology at an affordable price since 2000. Torque Game Engine was the original technology behind the Tribes series of games, and has been used since to develop countless games on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Xbox 360, notable among which is GarageGames' own Marble Blast series of games.

GarageGames

Website: http://www.garagegames.com

Contact: tgea-support@garagegames.com

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