It’s been nearly three years since the last Torque2D release (EA2.1, May 2023). Not because the engine has been sitting idle — quite the opposite. The development branch has been steadily accumulating changes: 79 commits, a full GUI Editor rebuild, new rendering features, build system improvements, and a long tail of engine fixes. EA3 is all of that, merged to master, tagged, and available right now.
What’s in it
The headline is the GUI Editor. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up: new inspector with persistent panels, tree view, frameset layouts that stack windows into tab books, a proper color picker, save/load dialogs, theming, control nudging and reordering. Asset Admin has been rebuilt on top of the new frameset system. The old Gui Editor Toy is gone and nobody will miss it.
Underneath that, the rendering pipeline picked up complex color support and a `FadeToColor` screen fade system. The engine got zoom on mounted cameras, SceneWindow event pass-through, `GuiCursor` inspector support, and a pile of smaller fixes. On the build side, there’s an initial CMake pass — the start of a larger migration — along with updated VS 2019/2022 projects, a macOS Xcode refresh, iOS fixes, and a CI workflow that actually reflects current reality.
Why now
If you’ve been on `master`, this is a big jump. If you’ve been on `development`, most of it is already familiar. What’s new is that it’s *the release* — everything has been merged, tagged, and packaged. The reason for the move now is simple: there are more changes coming this summer, and nobody wants to build on top of nearly three years of unreleased work. Cutting EA3 clears the deck. EA4 is targeted for July.
Try it
If you’ve never touched the dev branch, grab EA3 and poke around. The GUI Editor is worth the update on its own, and the build system improvements will matter more as the engine modernizes.
Thanks to everyone who filed issues, tested builds, and kept the project alive while the work piled up. On to the next one.
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