questionable. normally, you start with playing games, you get inspired, then you say to yourself, "hey, i wanna do a game like quake/halo/WoW/crysis", that's the way it starts. you begin with a visual experience. that's why the mod/mapper scene is so big and popular: the game mechanics are already there, scene management, tools. now you can alter the look of it by transplanting your own model creations. the scripting work that must be done is more a burden to most users/beginners than a wanted feature. they just want to drop in.

but that's all not the topic. if i buy an engine, i expect a ready-to-run, easily accessible, intuitive toolkit that does all work for me that i do not want to do. i do want to do: artworks, game mechanics/gameplay, tell a story/provide entertainment. i do not want to be forced to modify the toolkit for months to fit my needs and demands in terms of graphics, speed, feature xyz.

@phemox: what you don't tell, games don't write themselves. well, i want to make games. not just fiddling around with a toolkit that happens to provide me static shadows on models with a 2nd uv map by a 3rd party plugin by a very experienced user after the next release of the engine has already arrived.

@tobias: wicht, frank and i are no fanboys. we have followed 3dgs for a rather long time. we watched it grow... more or less. but too little happened in the last few years. we set our trust in this toolkit, in jcl, in the development staff. but there comes a point when you can't hold back your frustration, when the limits become a burden to you, when adjusting the model to the 3dgs requirements/limitations needs more time than the actual designing and creation process.