hmm, i dont see any need for further editions

@broozar: My question was, where did you get that it doesn´t make a difference for professionals to choose between 700,- and 3000,- bucks...?

jcl said,

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Commercial and Pro don't differ much in features. They mostly differ in the target audience. Pro is, as the name says, for professional users, meaning that they earn an income with Gamestudio.

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if PRO is really designed for users who earn an income with 3dgs, they have to pay for so many else, e.g. their employee's income, tools like 3ds max and the licenses, energy, the bureau etc. in times where professional game development goes up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it shouldn't matter if a game costs 500k or 503k. for aaa games it goes up to millions. they could get full support and royalty-free publishing.
for the average user here who wants to publish commercially, i intended the indie +publishing license (which equals the nowaday's PRO, around $800). the advantage: users who don't want to publish commercially get all features in a $200-package. i find this a fair deal, as most of the users release their games for free or just play around with 3dgs.

You don´t need to be "aaa" to be professional.
Here you can see a definition of "professional":

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profi

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Ein Profi (Kurzwort, abgeleitet von professionell) ist jemand, der im Gegensatz zum Amateur eine Tätigkeit beruflich, insbesondere gegen Bezahlung, ausübt.

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So please don´t confuse professionalism with waste of money.

i knew this comment would come. i won't repeat for the 3rd time what i mean.

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if PRO is really designed for users who earn an income with 3dgs

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Atm I earn my whole income with 3dgs. (No, I´m not involved in so called "aaa" titles)

My.income = my.turnover-my.costs

And even big aaa teams are not throwing away more money than really needed.
They even look for open source alternatives.
Take Havoc as example. Many teams are using ODE insteat of it.

Well let'S stay focused on the topic:
It's no use to suggest a real new edition as this request was denied for numerous times. My suggestion did not interfere with that as the Pro-Edition itself remains untouched - it's just all about the service pack you are forced to buy. I think only few people will need that and well let's face it: It's worth more than 400$ from which you can buy the Com-Edition twice!

In addition to that with Lite-C the SDK now might have lost some of its importance as you now can do many more things than with C-Script...

Maybe this is the time for the Pro owners to come in:
So let's do a poll - I'm pretty interested in the result...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

To the Pro-Edition owners: Do you... multiple choice, up to 2 choices
	... not use the 12 month support you bought?
	... use the 12 month support or plan to do so while you still can?
	... not use the SDK and probably won't do so?
	... use the SDK or plan to do so?
Votes accepted starting: 10/09/07 15:44
View Results

With the SDK and 3rd party plugins available today, you can have all the features of the Pro edition (except for Conitec support). So I'm not sure why you'd want that removed.

So you try to say that I shall just buy the SDK and get some plugins and I'll get:
- fluid physics for 3DGS' physics
- unlimited players with the 3DGS multiplayer system
- BSP
- multiple vertices per bone
- a file packer
- trial mode function
- auto terrain LOD

And even if I would get all this via plugins I still would have to fear that with a new version change this or that plugin won't work anymore. You're right that I could get some of these things via plugins and especially Lite-C might set up a new wave of plugins. You also could say that I shall go and code what hasn't been offered but let's face it: When someone can code such this things and enjoys it or even has a small team he most probably won't use 3DGS if it hasn't to be done really fast. That's because featurewise 3DGS isn't the best around but it's easy and intuitive to use and does a damn good job at this point...

With that said I now don't want to start any engine vs. engine discussion - it's just a suggestion to not include the service and SDK into the Pro bundle. There surely are lots of hobbyists who won't really need that but the features of the Pro edition and I think especially artists are those kind of people. People who don't want to mess around with much coding (especially not handling with plugins) but want use the advanced features of Pro and especially a file packer so nobody just can grab their work...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

i think filepackers are overrated since everything ends up unencrypted in graphics ram anyway and there are many capture tools for getting textures, shaders and models out again.