Hiya.

I've had RC for about a year now. I originally bought it because they said that RC2 was "just around the corner". Now that I've been involved in the PRIVATE forums (yeah, you have to buy the program before you can get access to the forums), I think that the developers of RC live on another planet, because there is obviously some sort of time-distortion going on. In their eyes "Soon, probably next week sometime" is a real-world equivalent of "Soon, probably in about 6 months". So, as long as you understand that their estimated times to get something released or fixed can (and almost always does) vary by a factor of 20, you won't go totally nuts.

On the engine side...RC1 is, uh, "limited and finicky". It's like the program has 'small print' for everything. What I mean is that it's tools interfaces are "non-standard" with odd and sometimes outright baffling hot keys. Normal windows standards would have one left click to select something, and right click to move or 'activate' whatever is currently selected. In most RC tools, you have to do a few things before anything works; so, you would have to switch to some sub-menu (say, "Models") if you want to place some item (lets say a model of a wood box). Then you have to right-click to place it in your scene. To move it into position, you have to open another sub-menu to activate 'move', right-click on it and drag. To rotate it a bit you have to open a different sub-menu and pick 'rotate', then right click on your model and rotate it. To move it again? Back to the sub-menu, choose 'move', right click and move. This is only one example, but the whole program and it's tools seems to have been created by different people from different languages with only minimal consulting between them. In short, it is VERY inconsistent.

Capability wise, it's got promise, I'll give it that! To potential for RC to be a DAMN fine product is waaaaay up there...if they could just figure out a clear production path and stick to it. The program allows for a fair amount of change, but you really have to know your programming to make serious changes. The tools, as mentioned, have a sort of "high-school quality" to them; they mostly do what they are supposed to, but the interfaces are NOT based on window API's and whatnot. They tend to use bitmaps for menus, buttons, etc. The whole look and feel gives it a very "unprofessional" feel to it, unfortunately.

File system. Oh god, don't get me started. The short version: expect to do a LOT of copy/pasting from on windows folder to another, then importing into the game editor (in the correct place, of course, or it doesn't work). Forget about importing your 9 trees with 18 textures in one go. You have to do each individually (that would be 27 individual imports). Oh, did I forget to mention that each time you import from a folder, the next time you go to import a file you have to start from square one? Basically, you have to click through your computers file structure to find the next file you want to import. That can be a LOT of clicking. Of course, this assumes RC1 keeps your partitions straight; usually it doesn't. That is, if you have something on "F:/" drive, the next time you click on up to what is listed as F, it might actually be "D:/" or any other of your partitions. The path remembering and partition stuff is, IIRC, fixed in the RC2 beta version...but it's beta, so it has a lot of other bugs.

Anyway, the bottom line:

"RC is a promising program. If and when Solstar gets what they promised out the door and as bug-free as they can get it, it will be a program to be reckoned with. Alas, right now, it's only real use is for general screwing around and playing with. Don't even think of actually producing a fully working, bug-free, game that can be called a MMORPG. If you want to buy it, buy it for two things: playing around with and 'getting in on the ground floor' of a potentially awesome game creation tool."

EDIT: Oh! I almost forgot something HUGELY important! Documentation. There is none. Well, that's not true..."Good Documentation", there is none. The documentation reads like a parrot. In other words, if you go to find out how the "Import" button works (what you can import, how your files need to be, etc.) you'll find something like this "Import: This imports a file." Worse is when you get to something that is specific to how the game system runs. Basically, it doesn't tell you how things work or anything; it just says "This Button: This button, not the other one".

Double Oh!. In RC2, the documentation is all online; so if you loose internet connection, you're SOL. If they loose connection, you're SOL. If they update their web page or server, and the link(s) get screwed...so are you. This is, IMHO, A *horrible* 'documentation' set up. That said, IIRC, they did say they were working on new documentation of a more 'standard and useful kind' for the gold release of RC2 (now "RC Pro").