DeleD Community Edition

[John]

I've been looking at getting a license for the Leadwerks engine once I save up enough cash to buy Lightwave or Modo. Seems like a pretty good engine for the price ($200). Does anyone have any positive or negative experience with it?

http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/page/products/_/tools/leadwerks-engine-r3

[Grandmaster B]

While the engine looks professional from the outside it will probably never be used by professionals for several reasons.

The engine is tailored for showcasing itself and has little to no values in a real production. There are a few engines that are made by professionals that know what a game engine needs to have and how to implement it. This is not the case - and not the target - here. Besides, the author is known to be very arrogant to his customers.

Save your time and money for something that deserves it!

For example, the Esenthel Engine is much better in any way. You are also better of with open source engines like Irrlicht or Ogre.


May i ask you what you expect from a engine?

[John]

In order of importance:
1. Good documentation that does not have gaping holes in it.
2. A healthy community.
3. An engine that I can code in C++ without a vertical learning curve.
4. An efficient, well thought out graphics pipeline that will take Collada format.
5. Modern graphics with shader support (does not have to be bleeding edge, but I want normal mapping and post-processing at a minimum).
6. Basic physics support.
7. Simple particle effects.
8. Support for sound (doesn't have to be terribly elaborate since I'm not doing an FPS).
8. A single user license cost of less than $500.

The plan is to start making a sort of battle-checkers game with animated pieces (I was thinking Tachikomas) with AI and all sorts of eye candy in order to teach myself how to use the engine, then make an isometric 3D RTS once I know what I am doing.

[CC]

I would like to suggest an engine called Shiva3D.
It uses C++ and or the Lua language. I belive it goes for
somewhere around $235.00 U.S.
Of course there is always the UDK engine which you can license for
$100 and don't have to give them any more money until you reach
the $50,000 dollar mark, then I think its something like 25 percent.

[trucker2000]

[Grandmaster B]

[moraldi]

Are we talking for a graphics engine or for a game engine?
For a graphics engine I vote an open source engine.(it is not important to mention any particular, because most of them are very capable and it is a matter of personal taste)
Thinking about a Game engine, so far there is no an engine with AI built-in module. This is, for me, the most important missing feature for a rapid game development

[adr]

[Grandmaster B]

Panda3D is a good engine but i had some issues with the compatibility of ATI cards. When they introduced shaders they didnt really test enough. Shader shadows basically were unusable. Also, like many other engines the scene mangement is lacking advanced methods, like portals for example.

Also very impressive is NeoAxis, if you haven't tried their demos, do it! The engine has a big framework which intends to get you a boost in development, if only the framework and engine had better documentation! Another flaw is that it is written - and only accessible - in C#. Which is a cool language but slow to work with and somewhat bloated, like most things Microsoft makes.

In my personal conclusion its best to pick something simpler and build around that, its not that hard to extend an engine if the groundwork is not to solid. Try to avoid bloatware and software with bad design choices. Evaluate everything you can get to make up your mind, you probably spend several years dealing with the engine.

PS: Also try 3D Game Studio A8, they improved this engine to a enormous extend! The tools are still crappy but if you stay mostly in Lite-C coding its such a pleasure! Its nothing like the kids-toy engine it was. And the documentation is outstanding!