The change to the Torque engine is obviously a big step towards a more refined and better game, and your team indicates they were 100% for the change - Has this impacted your development time in any regard?

Yes, and rather drastically I might add. In the last 4 days one (just one) of our guys has managed to get semi-working versions of the Badger attack buggy, a Herc, and human infantry in game and running. I’ve posted a few pictures in regards to this in my journal on our website.

By way of comparison, we worked on getting the Badger implemented in T:V for almost a month and it still only had half the features of the version we just put into Torque in one day.
Needless to say if we can keep this level of development going, and at this point I certainly think we can, we’re looking at a huge decrease in overall development time compared to the speed we were moving with T:V.

Please dont hurt me

How is the team progressing with the port to the new engine, have you encountered any problems thus far?

No problems whatsoever. The engine is hugely flexible and has tons of documentation and other resources available for it via the GarageGames website.
Our coding and level design teams have been able to easily find answers to any question we’ve had.
The engine is a true pleasure to work with, both in terms of its capabilities and ease of accessibility.

Will there be some form of community features (ie, in-game chat or forums) like what Tribes 2 had?

Of course there will be in game chat, that’s a given with any multiplayer game. Forums? No. Too many liability issues associated with that sort of thing. IRC? Almost certainly. Voice chat? No, there are already plenty of free third party options available for that, we’d rather not clutter our network code with that sort of overhead.

We do plan on including a “bulletin board” type news option that can scan news items posted on our website which are then displayed in the in-game GUI. This is similar to the news updates that MMORPG’s often use to alert players to important issues. At this point we are also considering having some kind of player and squad/clan profile registration setup that’s kept on the master servers that’s very similar if not identical to what Tribes 2 has.

We are also spending lots of time on the observer functions. It is our outlook that having robust support for shoutcasting and other forms of in-game coverage is important to the longevity and overall health of the community attached to the game. Just recently, before we switched to Torque, we had a discussion with some experienced shoutcasters on our forums and got feedback from them on what features they would like to see made available for observers. We got quite a few replies, and we will be compiling an initial list of features to give to the coder in charge of implementing the observer functions based on this info. We will also be holding a “roundtable discussion” via Ventrilo with some of these guys sometime in the near future for even more feedback.

[Link to discussion: http://ccforums.mechnex.net/index.php?showtopic=7444]

And one other thing I think I should mention, and this is not so much a “community feature” per se but something that is important to the longevity of the game and peace of mind of its players. We are working on making sure that server operators have strong (emphasis on strong) security and banning tools at their disposal to handle troublemakers and miscreants. As some of us have run game servers in the past (including myself), this is a serious concern with us and something we are spending a lot of time and effort on.