Game Engines

#1

Howdy folks,

I have NO clue if i am in the right place or not, if I am not in the right place, can someone please point me in the right direction?

Basically I just want people opinions on game engines and where i woud best research this information.

I would like to attempt to make a FPS RPG type game. I have heard about the Q2 and unreal engines being GPL and stuff, but does using that old of an engine hinder what graphics you can use, etc?

I really have no clue and this is the first place i thought i would start researching this project.

Can anyone help me find a good engine or atleast point in my right directions on what things i might look for in different engines?

Thanks,

Ashe

#2

hey there! i’m sort of in the same boat soo i’ll share my experience ( little that i have ) thus far.

try out http://www.devmaster.net/engines/
there’s a really nice listing of commercial / free game engines, what their capable of/ how much they cost/ and links to get them. which you use will all depend on your goals and your abilities.

me personally? i was hearing exciting things about the cipher engine (www.cipherengine.com)
however…due to an oversight and serious lack of sleep / coffee, the fact that all of my C programming was all just theory didn’t sink through my thick skull till after i had made the purchase.

char_t me = “pwnd”;
Learn from my experience! :wink:
just fyi i begin my first C Programming Class today. Weee!
i’m hopeing that some time in december i’ll be able to really get my head around cipher.

#3

just as an afterthought… you might want to try out www.garagegames.com check out the torque engine. ( its basiclly the tribes engine)

the up side is that your game can run on pc and mac.
the down side is that its an older engine soo not as pretty.
( however they do have an updated shader engine in the works. no eta on that though)

-good luck
let us know which you choose.

#4

If you’re considering programming a game that you would like to nurture and custom from the roots, then I would suggest middleware programming languages like BlitzBasic (what I use, very stable … not the fastest, but stable, lol) or DarkBasic (tried using this … wasn’t very compatible with a lot of the systems I tested easy apps on.) They allow you to focus on content creation a lot more, and they pretty much break programming down into shorter code that achieves about the same results. Hope that helps a little. (Oh, and it’s probably cheaper than licensing a game engine O_O in case you want to sell it.)

#5

Might I suggest Acknex 6 (www.conitec.net). Their engine started out as a incarnation of the Quake2 engine, but the entire architecture has been rewritten some time ago. The next release will be fully directX 9. It’s got pretty good graphical capabilities, a very nice physics system and it’s very, very easy to make a FPS/RPG(It actually contains sample code which you can use for such things. The downsides to this engine are the sorta weak network/internet capabilties and the BSP rendering engine(if you want to make big outdoor levels it renders kinda slow, but it will soon change with the implementation of dynamic LOD and Octree Culling).
Prices range from USD 49,- to USD 899,- Pretty good price seeing as your free to publish your games.

#6

If you are not going to do a commercial project, the Quake engines that have been released as open-source can be used for free and they still do quite nice graphics.
Take a look at http://ufo.myexp.de/?id=media to see what you can do with only some tweaking, even though the engine itself is several years old. The sourcecode of this demo is available on the site as well.

Following that, most open-source software you use, specifically software under the GPL licence, requires that you make your own software built on top of it open-source as well. This is probably not what you want for commercial projects.

#7

I’m currently using the Torque Game engine and it’s very affordable, $100 bucks licensing and etc., they are constantly working on it and upgrading it for more specs, there are new games that have been developed using the engine and the Xbox has picked up those games, also they are trying and striving hard to catch up with the unreal engine, which seems to be the best and almost industry standard, you can download demos to see what works best for you and what direction you want to go, I’ve been working with torque for 6 months now and using Maya software for modeling, but they do have a upgrade of the engine which it the Torque Shader Engine which allows more graphical input, and they have a very strong communicative based community at garagegames.com, I would love to use unreal engine 2 & 3 but I can’t afford it but if you would like to download the demo checkout unrealtechnology.com, Good Luck

#8

Graphics designers/Programers/Game designers/Animators needed form all backgrounds begging to advanced for mor info conect to irc.freenode.net and goto the channel #GPGADesign

#9

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