Finding the right engine

[Vamediah]

I want to make a 3d game. I realize that its a difficult task but by choosing to make a simple game with simple graphics and fairly basic gameplay it might be possible for one person to churn out a decent product.

What i want to make is a 3d rail-shooter. It's fairly basic in terms of both gameplay and level-design. And I'm hoping to make 3d art reminiscent of the late playstation 1 era. so that beats the complexity down allot as well.

So what engine is good for this? I've looked at the Unreal 3 engine and the Unity engine. The unreal engine is very powerful, perhaps too powerful, i also don't need most of the advanced features its offering, but since its free its an interesting candidate.
For the unity engine i would have to pay a bit to give it decent functionality but otherwise it seems pretty good.

Maybe I've missed some amazing engine that could be perfect for making a rail-shooter with simple graphics. what do you people think?

[JBaird]

First off do you know any programming?

[Vamediah]

Originally Posted by JBaird

First off do you know any programming?

I know the basics regarding variables, if statements, loops and so on, but i haven't used any language extensively.

That will most likely be the biggest hurdle, especially since its for 3d, but because of the type of game I'm expecting that the programming difficulty of AI, targeting and so on will be greatly reduced.

[JBaird]

Alright, was just curious. Yeah since it's on rails it should narrow down the amount of complex programming a tad. Anyway I can't think of any engine that would be better than using the Unreal engine besides maybe the Source engine. Both of those engines have really large mod communities which will help a lot when you run into any problems.

[urgaffel]

I think Unreal would be a good choice since it's based around shooting and you could probably do a lot with scripting in Unreal instead of having to program. I don't know how good Source's scripting is but it's worth looking into. Unity is supposed to be really easy to use as well but I guess you could say it's a bit more all-purpose and might require a bit more programming. Good luck!

[McGreed]

Yeah, I would most definetly say Unreal Tournement 3 engine, because you can do a lot without any programming at all, but just using the engine. And if you are in need of doing something specific, there is most likely a VTM about it you can download, I know there is a load of them made by 3D Buzz.

[midwinterdreams]

I thought I'd throw in some advice about Unity. I have had no programming classes yet I have been able to program a lot for a RPG style game. There is a lot of good documentation for Unity scripting (javascript) and a lot of pre-programmed stuff that you can alter to fit what you need. Also good for newbies because it accepts PSD files and 3ds Max files (and other types) and allows you to open them from unity and save them.

[Zapper]

Unreal development kit is interesting (free, no trial, documentation on udk site)
You vgot cry engine aswell, Half life engine, quake engine.

[michi:be]

You also should give Leadwerks Engine a try. Evaluation is free and there are nice updates.
You can script in .lua and the community is nice and helping out fast.
I licensed leadwerks for my shop and visualization projects so I use it in a production environment.
Leadwerks also develops fast and made great progress the last 6 months.

[Murder king]

I would reccomend source engine, or blitz3D.If you choose source engine, you probably won't need to do any cosing, since you can find almost anything on valve developer wikia, you would mostly need to learn creating the maps, wich has a specialized tool for it( hammer world editor), creating main models like characters and vehicles, since source engine has a lot of models already created. If you choose blitz3D, you would need more programming experience.