   A year and a half, wasted...?
  So in theory, I've been a game developer (in the sense of "developer who works on games in his spare time") for a bit over a year and a half now. In practice, whenever I wasn't doing something else with my spare time, I've been working on a game engine. Engines, as most of you know, have very little to do with games. And of course, grandiose planner that I am, my engine was completely overkill for what it was, which was (er, is) an SDL-based fully-scripted 2D sprite engine, written in C++ with Lua for scripting. You can completely change the content of the game itself without writing a line of compiled code. Game objects are collections of animations and associated bounding polygons, tied to a Lua script that governs the object's behaviour. Swept polygon collision tests are run (after doing quadtree pruning and bounding-box tests, of course) and detailed collision information is returned to each involved object. All very nice and neat.Now that it's reasonably close to feature-complete, though (the only glaring omission is sound, because SDL_mixer doesn't behave nicely on Intel macs yet), I'm running into one big problem: the thing's just not especially fast. On my old 1.4GHz Mac Mini with 512MB RAM, I couldn't get more than 50 or so sprites onscreen without experiencing slowdown. I started working on optimizing the collision-detection routines a bit, but I'm really rather tired of working on engines all the time. I'd like to make some actual content, y'know? And the Torque "Indie" license is only $100; that's the kind of thing I have a day job for. So I have this game engine sitting on my hard drive, clocking in at 4289 lines (3052 code, 743 comments, 494 whitespace), and no real plan to use it any more. What do I do with the blasted thing? I could open-source it, but I've no real interest in maintaining it if I'm not using it myself. I can always send it back to college; we have a game-development course and it could come in handy for the first phase (when teams are learning more about the content side than the engine side anyway). And at the very least, it can serve as an object lesson for implementing a variety of basic game-related constructs (quadtrees and scripting, mostly, though how not to implement file parsing is also in there). Any thoughts?I may as well also ask a question about Torque while I'm at it - one of the things I was doing with my old engine was the content-agnostic thing. Torque itself is already content-agnostic; is there any reasonable way I could basically make a system for making games that used Torque without just putting a wrapper around Torque itself? I imagine the fine folks at GarageGames wouldn't take too kindly to that.Edit: minor grammar fixes   
  Do what I did and port your SDL engine to OpenGL using orthogonal mode and quads. You'll get an enormous performance boost and the opportunity to use shaders and the latest of graphics technology.   ;  SDL's sprite drawing is most likely done in software. So, what Ravuya said.   ;  Well, thanks, but my main point is that I've mostly completed a game engine only to discover that I don't really want to finish it (and then go to the work of maintaining it). I'm fairly certain that whatever my engine can do, Torque can do better; after all, they have a team of dedicated developers working on it, and I'm just one guy doing this as a hobby. So what do I do with a functional, if not industrial-strength engine?   ;Quote:Original post by DerakonWell, thanks, but my main point is that I've mostly completed a game engine only to discover that I don't really want to finish it (and then go to the work of maintaining it). I'm fairly certain that whatever my engine can do, Torque can do better; after all, they have a team of dedicated developers working on it, and I'm just one guy doing this as a hobby. So what do I do with a functional, if not industrial-strength engine?Start making something with it? You know like a pong or something.;Quote:Original post by DerakonWell, thanks, but my main point is that I've mostly completed a game engine only to discover that I don't really want to finish it (and then go to the work of maintaining it). I'm fairly certain that whatever my engine can do, Torque can do better; after all, they have a team of dedicated developers working on it, and I'm just one guy doing this as a hobby. So what do I do with a functional, if not industrial-strength engine?If you wrote your engine relatively cleanly, you should just be able to swap out your sprite drawing routines, etc, for OpenGL equivalents (which really aren't that hard with SDL around to help out).I'm not saying you have to overhaul it, just swap the guts out from underneath your nice clean interface and you're off to the races.Either that, or actually make something with the engine.   ;  Do what real game developers do. Instead of "finishing" the engine, start making something with it, and fix bugs/features as they pop up.  I ditto swapping out the SDL thing. If it was designed right, it shouldn't be more than a couple hours of work, depending on your experience.  I think what everyone is trying to say is that you already have what you need, no need to pay money for Torque.   ;  I once spent a year and a half wasted...   