Already been messing with it. Here are some screenshots from a small demo game I am whipping up.

It's pretty cool! You get probably the coolest built-in particle editor I've ever seen in a game engine. It also has a built-in tilemap editor. (That's still a little rough around the edges) And finally, it contains the standard Torque GUI system, including it's own build-in editor. It's all driven by well-documented C++ source (yeah, you get the source to the engine) and Torque's built-in C-like scripting language.

There are some caveats to using it, however. For example, since it's OpenGL (with DirectX support through an emulation layer), you just can't use any ole sprite sized. Your images have to conform with standard 3D graphics card rules. (Power-of-twos for best performance, and so on.) You can load non-POT images, but it wastes video RAM as the engine will scale it up internally to the next largest POT. There is a large/non-POT bitmap support, which lets you load images of any size or resolution, and it behaves like the other sprite objects -- except that it cannot have individually animated frames. You're limited to just animating it inside the engine (rotating, scaling, physics).

But, well, if you've ever dabbled with 3D-accelerated 2D game code, those restrictions are nothing new and unique to Torque 2D itself.

The screenies I linked to are the result of about twenty-four hours of me playing in Torque 2D. (Of course, I already knew Torquescript and modified the included demo, so I had a leg up in that respect.)

I agree with Paul, T2D is still in development, but once it's done, I suspect it might end up being the best 2D/hybrid 3D game engine available. It ain't free, though.

Don't worry, I'm not giving up Allegro.

David, did you get a demo of the actual engine? Or have you bought it already? (All I see is a game demo)

Torque 2D is looking pretty awesome and would probably cut dev time for high quality game drastically. The deal would probably look most attractive to new indies looking for an engine to use (it takes awhile to program a decent engine, and 80$ looks to be quite reasonable for one of this quality/capability).

So.. should we take Allegro down this route?

David, can you tell us a bit more about that physics engine? What can you do with it? How well is it documented?

Have you played around with it? The screenshots and the texts sounds great, but it leaves so many questions unanswered...

Also, does the mapeditor handle iso / and / or hexmaps? Geez.. I think I want that baby

Sure thing! I'll gladly handle the $80 per copy.

Spellcaster: You can set their density (determines inertia), enable constant velocities (for gravity, wind), set friction (for contact with tilemaps/other objects), restitution and relaxation (for spring-back and deformation), and damping.

I haven't actually experimented with how objects behave when they collide, but they can either act as physic force givers, receivers, or both, so you should be able to make some pretty complex effects. (Such as a ball bouncing around in an arbitarily-constructed tilemap.) Collision zones are defined as convex polygons, which can have number of points. So it's possible to cover large/irregular objects in a fairly efficient manner. The collision system is REALLY fast and it's easily possible to have many hundreds of objects onscreen at once, all rotating and zooming and so on. Here's some technical information. Unfortunately, at this time it doesn't do isometric/hexmaps, though I saw Melv talking about it in the private SDK forum, so I'm sure he's aware of how bad people want it.

Paul: Right now, it only deals with sprite-based primitives. You have static/dynamic sprites, and tilemaps. (Check that link for more detailed info.) Currently, there's no support for such things as lines, rectangles and so on. But it wouldn't be hard to add them in. (I wrote a GUI control that used OpenGL calls for things like simple lines and such, so just apply that to Torque 2D. Make it based on SceneObject2D, which is a very lightweight container class for all T2D ingame objects.)

Ashteth: The rendering code is entirely OpenGL based. (Which is then translated into DirectX calls by Torque's emulation layer, if you tell it to use that.) It's pretty easy to integrate stuff via source. For example, I've added a simple fullscreen blur function that works on the Torque framebuffer. I haven't popped the .cc file into my T2D project yet, but it should just work without modification.

As for Allegro -- I dunno, I think Allegro is entirely unrelated. Allegro is a library, with zero actual game enginey type stuff in it at all. Heck, look at how pure the interface has been kept over the years, despite people's request for native handling of PNGs, MPGs, OGGs, etc. Of course, that isn't stopping someone from making a T2D-style game engine using Allegro. It wouldn't be that hard, even. There's a lot already there for that sort of stuff (such as a collective datafile object, which Torque does not have and I sometimes think about adding). Give it a Lua backend, throw in some ogg/mod/png/video libraries and blam. The problem with Torque is it requires some sort of 3D graphics card. (Though, to be honest, with the way things are these days -- even crap builtin 3D cards being common in cheapie PCs -- it wouldn't be such a huge hit to support only that market.)

I love things like Allegro and Torque 2D -- because they are multi-platform and that's what really counts in my opinion.

Yeah, I also just noticed that popcap released their framework. I hear from a very reliable source that its easy to use and quite excellent. Anyone wanting a tested and true, commercial quality engine for windows should give it a look.

Unfourtunatley, I will probably not touch it due to it not having a mac port.

I bought t2d and I must say it's sweet
The only problem I have right now is that I don't want to code a shooter, and that I have no idea what other fx rich demo I should try to code