Game Engines

[Talon]

After working with TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced) on a few freelance projects... it appears to have numerous shortcomings and glitches as well as just being generally a pain in the arse to build and export stuff for. I wouldn't really recommend it.

It IS cheap, but I think you'd end up saving yourself time, headaches and possibly money in the long run by taking something a little further up the chain.

[ScaryJack]

The Ogre Enigne sounds very well to me.
I am looking for a 3D Engine to create a 2d jump´n run game. I thought alot about writing my own engine with openGL, but right now I am to busy for that...
I think I will give Ogre a chance...until openGL 3.0 gets released

[benclark]

List of free game engines, and libraries...

Free Game Arts

[irishlostboy]

although not free, doom3 engine i find good to use. its easy to get custom assets into it, and it supports proper unified per pixel lighting, so your normal mapped models look class. good for modding, and bound to be made open source in the next year or so, as is the habit of Id.
i have also used source and unreal engine 2. they are ok, but both work on the principle of lightmapped world and vertex lit non-static meshes. i dont like that.

another option is dx studio although i have yet to get stuck into it, we will be using it a lot in college this year. its cheap. about fifty quid for a pro licence if you are a student. and their free version works, but watermarks the release until you save it though a pro version.

ogre is just a rendering engine, and needs serious code skills that i dont have.

[benclark]

does Doom handle regular tangent space normals? I was always put off using that engine because I heard it used special normal maps

[Talon]

I believe Doom is just your regular tangent-space normals, except that the green channel is inverted from what's generally considered normal.

I've not played with it, just going by what I've read.

[Yin]

My opinions...

Ogre3D: The material scripting sucks, I very much got the feeling it was made by programmers for programmers - people who think a single diffuse texture or a chrome effect is nice ;P
I had lots of problems trying to make some things work. I asked on the forums, and I searched the forums(some questions I had was already asked, but they were never solved...), and I searched the net, read the wiki and read the not-so-good documentation... And I still never got specular maps or normal+alpha to work good. Also the normal maps looked like crap.
We had schoolprojects using it, most of the artists was very frustrated... At least the ones in charge of learning the material system. In the end, my project used only diffuse maps.
Ogre seemed great for programmers, but I think they forgot the artists.

GLScene: A set of components for Delphi(or the free clone Lazarus, though it's not 100% working there). I have to say, they're great. It's so easy to use, even I can program for it with my random pascal skills. And the result is great. Only problem I had was recently, couldn't mix normal(normal maps that actually look good) and alpha. But someone on the newsgroup quickly suggested a solution... But by then I had already remade it with geometry, but good to know that it's not impossible.

That's my experiences with free 3d engines ^_^

[irishlostboy]

doom 3 normal maps are bog standard, straight frm 3dsmax type normal maps.

[CrankyTulip]

Put me down for another 'don't get Torque unless you enjoy cheap things that don't work very well'. My school has just switched to it(...from unreal :S) for some insane reasoning, and, we've had nothing but problems with it since day one of using it; everyone in the class, including the teachers. The thing with Torque is that it has an included 3DSMax-wannabe bsp 'modeling' app called Constructor, which may seem like a good thing at first, but then you come to realize it's very, very limited, and has an export crash about 1 out of 5 times. To me, it's an engine created to be intuitive, quick, affordable to small game companies, and robust, but missed all the targets except the low price. I have not used Torque Advanced, nor do I want to... The Torque Forums have also not been as helpful as one might expect a game engine forum to be.

Yes, I've always been a fan of unreal(ever since the first game came out), but don't let my 'bias' interfere with your engine judgment. UE3 is just gorgeous! Contrary to the horror stories, lawsuits, or outdated licensee version releases you may have heard about, I believe the engine's functionality, pipeline, and final product are cumulatively very near the best out there, if not the best. No, I haven't used Epic's UE3 UED, just the RoboBlitzEd, but most of the main features are still there, and it is very smooth! And no, it doesn't have 'MegaTexturing' like iD does...(atm)or an incredibly dynamic connection to Maya like ZootFly does...or a separate BSP modeling app like Torque does... But, if there is an easier way to load & browse your game content package files, create and edit shaders, or make entirely visual no-programmer-needed game scripts, I'd like to see it. (Obviously,) a single artist can now create an entire, production-quality, functioning level himself. Downsides, in some ways, are that there is aparently no light radiosity, which would improve lighting setup time & render quality, and license cost is roughly 1 million US dollars...which is definitely bad for a small 2-person game dev company, and the perfect compromise for engine dev time & cost for bigger companies. I can't wait to get my hands on UED4 in November(Hopefully) with UT3!

Some of my favorite things about UE3(too many to recall):
-Additive OR Subtractive BSP worlds.
-Instantaneous Play-in Editor window.
-Ability to be 100% artist-driven, absolutely no programming knowledge needed.
-The Generic Browser
-Kismet Editors
-Multi-platform
-Scalable(performs decently on my old ~$1900 Dell M90 laptop)
-If there is not a desired feature in UE3's base engine code already, there is a high probability that it can be implemented by your programming team.
-Similar editor UI layout from all previous Unreal Editors, now much improved.
-Ability to see file sizes & memory usages of ALL assets used in a level.
-Overall stability

From my future career standpoint(as level designer)& learnings, no one has ever gotten a job from having used Torque, but many, many have gotten jobs from having used Unreal. Unreal has been used in movies, animated shorts, various types of games, the military...so it must be decent at least, heh.

[Mr.Senator]

I use the Crytek Engine at work and it is really awesome

Welcome to Crytek

Of course this bad boy is around $600,000 dollars =P