Hi all,

I dont know if this is the right section of the forum to post in, but I am hoping someone will help me decide if I need the commercial edition or if I can use the extra.

1)My game has lots of world to explore so will I need the "chunked terrain feature" of the commercial edition?

2)My game world will be large terrains so I dont anticipate using shaders as I would imagine they would take more processing power away from my other game elements. Is that true or can shaders work with a large game world?

3)I will have these rotating spot lights from the top of buildings, is that something I need to use "beam effects" for?

Thank you very much for any responses I might get. I am sorry if I have ignored something obvious in the manual, I still haven't read all of it yet, and I have only read small parts of the wiki and magazine.

Thanks!

Professional, or if you cannot afford, Commercial

No I definitely cannot afford professional. I might be able to afford commercial, but I would have to make some sacrifices in order to do so. That is why it is so important that I make the right decision. I don't want to buy extra if it will not be sufficient for my game needs.

I would say that if I had to make an absolutely crucial priority it would be the size of my outdoor levels. My game is going to be a mechwarrior type game so I would need lots of room.

Thanks for the reply. I can see that you have been using the engine for a while so I can trust your experience.

no reason not to use shaders on large levels.

chunked terrain is theoretically a nice automatic optimisation, but i've never used it. commercial is leagues ahead of extra. pro has a few advantages, and i wouldn't sell a game that wasn't made with professional, but when you reach that stage you'll be planning on making up for the cost of pro anyway.

buy comm.

i wouldn't use a beam effect for rotating spotlights. i'd probably program an extremely basic volumetric shader, if it really needed to look great. or an animated model with an alpha channel.

julz

OK thank you very much. I am realizing now that there really are so many more questions that I could ask, and that I probably can't figure it out without just diving in and beginning to develop. So therefore I think I will just continue to hammer away with the free lite c edition until it becomes clear to me which way to go. Thank you very much for the information.