This guide will take you step-by-step through the process of creating and running your first Torque project. If you've never used the engine before, then this is the article for you!
Introduction
Downloading the engine
First things first - head on over to the downloads page and grab the latest version of the engine source (~200MB). Once it's ready, unzip it somewhere. I'll call this unzipped directory Torque/ in the upcoming sections when I talk about files.
This step is the same for all platforms. While we only provide Windows binaries currently, the engine source code is provided in the download, and we'll use it later to compile the engine on other platforms.
Folder layout
When you've unzipped the engine, you'll see a folder that looks something like this:
There's a lot of stuff in here, but you can ignore most of it. The only things you need to worry about are the Project Manager.exe, the Templates folder, and the My Projects folder. The My Projects folder is currently empty, because you haven't made any projects. Inside Templates, you'll find some ready-to-use starter templates we'll use to create a new project.
Navigate into Templates/Full (there's also an Empty template, which isn't really empty, but we'll ignore it for now). This is the structure of a project - when you create a new project, it'll end up looking just like this.
game contains your actual game itself, and is what you'd distribute when you send your game to players. source contains new source code you want to add to the engine and compile into the binary, and buildFiles contains all the project files and temporary artifacts used when compiling.
Create a new project
A project in Torque is simply a folder in the My Projects directory - but tools like the project manager expect it to be in a particular format or structure. Funnily enough, it's the same structure the templates have! Creating a new project is almost as simple as copying one of the folders in Templates into My Projects and renaming it.
If you are on Windows, you lucky thing, then you can follow this guide to generating a new project with the Project Manager executable in the Torque directory. In future releases, we intend to make the PM available on all platforms.
Unfortunately, on platforms other than Windows, you'll need to go through the process manually for now. Have a read of this tutorial to set up your project without using the Project Manager.
Once you've done that, your game folder should look something like this - that is, if you named your project 'New Project'!
Run your project
You'll notice that the Project Manager copied across a binary for you from the template folder - if you're on Windows. If not, you'll have to compile the engine yourself. We've written a whole page on doing that, so go have a read. You can also read about compiling in Windows if that's your thing.
After going that, you can run your game by double-clicking the binary (in the picture above, New Project.exe). Once the engine initialises, you should be looking at the main menu of the Full template.
Great!