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.

Our long term plans are to focus on innovative uses of game technology. Currently, all GarageGames employees have the option to work on any project on Fridays. We are working on some really great projects under the initiative and it’s our hope that we will be able to invest in several of these projects as they evolve. We’ve encouraged our developers to open source these projects. If you think you have what it takes to be an innovative developer using game technology, consider applying for one of our open positions.

Dave Wyand will be leading the T3D open source effort and he has posted a blog describing the details around how we will run the development process. But before you dive into the details with Dave, I’d like to leave you with answers to some expected questions:

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.

Is this just a way for you to dump Torque 3D?
No. We've been using T3D internally for service projects and we expect that to continue. In some cases, our service work will directly benefit the core code base.

I recently bought your engine, I feel ripped off.
We will be offering refunds for T3D purchases that happened on or after Sept 1st but before this announcement.

What about other GarageGames engines?
We are starting open source efforts with T3D and learning from this experience. For now, the other engines/products are not available via the MIT license.

Let's hope all the experienced coders use their magical powers to find Freebuild hidden away in a calculator website.

numerous projects had their start on other programming forums before moving on to their own websites.

Dang, should have waited just a tad bit longer to get mine. hahaha. Ah well, money went toward a good company.

That being said, I've been so busy with work I haven't really been able to contribute, like, at all to this awesome project

numerous projects had their start on other programming forums before moving on to their own websites.

Then why has no one showed up?

That would be a sad prospect, if the appraisal were even remotely accurate. Fortunately for us, this isn't simply a calculator website, but a programming one, with a number of child projects spread across multiple platforms. They even did some adorable model rocketry at one point(keep in mind I've launched rockets taller than I am so I'm a bit elitest on that particular subject). I should remind you that TBM used to be a child project with its own section of another forum, back when we were on Mix-networks.com.