Thats why in my previous post , I said

"frankly speaking I dont see that advantage in terms of visual quality"

Sometimes ago in Leadwerks forum a member posted two screen shots of the same scene
Which one do you prefer ? He asked
Most of the people answered : no preference , they are about the same stuff
An other group choosed the one on the right side,just a minority the one on the left side

Useless to say that the best shot was supposed to be , can you guess it ?
Of course the one chosen by a minority of people

Leadwerks demo run, at least on my moder PC , about half speed than the Unity demos
On my 2 years old portable computer it does not even start while Unity demos are still a rocket

I wonder whether it is really wothwhile developing such advanced rendering features

Thats why in my previous post , I said

"frankly speaking I dont see that advantage in terms of visual quality"

Sometimes ago in Leadwerks forum a member posted two screen shots of the same scene
Which one do you prefer ? He asked
Most of the people answered : no preference , they are about the same stuff
An other group choosed the one on the right side,just a minority the one on the left side

Useless to say that the best shot was supposed to be , can you guess it ?
Of course the one chosen by a minority of people

Leadwerks demo run, at least on my moder PC , about half speed than the Unity demos
On my 5-6 years old PC at about 3 fps, on my 2 years old portable computer it does not even start
Unity demos are a rocket on all the three PC's ( and 3dgs demos are not that bad , too )

I wonder whether such advanced rendering features are really needed

I can understand this point of view especially between programmers. The same probably applies to casual gamers. My wife also would not see a difference between lighting and rendering techniques. But core gamers are different. They recognize a lot of differences, otherwise there would be not such a success of games like Crysis and Mafia2. So it really depends on the target audience you are aiming to.

Well, to be honest: If you target core gamers, you should use a proven AAA engine like cryengine, unreal or source.
Just because they are optimized for one genre.
Oh, and you should at least have a big pipeline with a lot of good and succesful projects, otherwise you won´t get the needed money.

If you got a budget of >5.000.000 usd, then you won´t fiddle around with indie authoring systems.

Yes, your are right in some cases. But just to show you that there are indie fps shooter games also available:
http://www.alpha-prime.com/

This had a much lower budget and I personally enjoyed it very much. They did not use any of the big engines and they licensed some middleware for tasks like AI. But it is a very good game with lots of additional gameplay options like controlling vehicles, cameras, remote control of many objects, indoor and outdoor scenery and some modern visuals especially at the time of release.

So I am sure it is doable. Yes, it needs some very ambitious people, time and at least a decent budget. But it can work even without the budgets you mentioned.

Alpha Prime != Crysis, sorry.
There are worlds between HL2, Crysis, Stalker and Alpha Prime.
Which showed up at the same time. I was indeed speaking of AAA games, though I hate this term.

There are a lot of reason that the most developer studios are either using their own engine / toolset based on Ogre for example or they are using an approved industrial standard.

You probably did not get my point. I did not talk about AAA games. I just want to express that there is a difference of technology to use depending on the target audience. And Alpha Prime is an example that targets core gamers and no casual gamers although it is not a Crysis or HL2, it still is not a casual game.

And I agree with you that it makes sense to use dedicated tools like UDK to make games aiming to core gamers. But indie technology like Unity is getting closer. With the current toolset it works very similar (occlusion culling, static and dynamic lightmapping, realtime specularity and normal maps even when using static lightmaps, deferred renderer, unlimited number of lights, ...).
Leadwerks and C4 are also tools going into the core-gamers directions. Thus it makes it a bit harder to address casual game developers who are going with Unity or Shiva (more platforms, better scalable).

To come back to Torque: It also tried to go that way. The Instant Action platform was advertised to address core gamers and thus the technology should become strong enough to support this concept. But it grew too slow. And there are just way more casual developers than core-game devs.

I personally checked a lot of these tools in FPS scenarios. And at this moment I would probably start a FPS project in UDK, it renders just faster and still looks amazing. My second option would be Unity. The new toolset is very good and flexible. The workflow is even better.
But I have read in some forums that Crytek wants to offer a similar license like UDK. So I am really looking forward to check that out as an additional option.

A part from AAA games the point is an other in my opinion

Everybody can download Unity and Leadwerks demos
It is about the same scene, an island

Can anybody seriously claim that Leadwerks graphic quality is much better than Unity graphics ?
I dont think so, but leadwerks demo run at about half speed on a modern PC in comparison to Unity demo
Not to mention on old hardware and portable computers

In conclusion I wonder whether the game engines new trend does really make any sense

Does it make sense to put some esoteric graphics features which just a minority of people can appreciate before engine key feature such as fps ?
In my opinion it is simply ridicolous

Unless it is smply a matter of software optimization
Nothing to do with graphics feature
Unity has a huge team, leadwerks designer is a lonly wolf

If so it is a shame because I definitely prefer Leadwerks engine architecture

I understand you perfectly. And because of that I always admire the amount of optimizations they put in to still render fast even with nice graphics enabled. I already mentioned how Unity switches between dynamic and static lighting, how it switches between pixel, vertex and hs lighting. And then there is occlusion culling to only render what you see. All this allows to scale, to render fast even with nice graphics enabled.

The same counts for UDK. I mean they use static maps for almost everything. But those maps contain the direction of light to influence normals and specularity. It is a very old-school technique, just like old Quake lightmapping but with some tricks to look modern.

The Source engine from Valve is similar, it uses lightmaps, zones and portals and still it can render tons of polygons and graphical effects in each zone, it supports modern post processing effects and it scales very well, it runs on PC, Mac, old and new hardware.

So from my point of view there is absolutely no problem to include modern graphical features, if it scales good. I realized that modern engines all use Ambient Occlusion and it really renders fast today. They optimized it a lot.

It appears Torque is back and Torque3D full source license is $99 for limited time.

iTorque 2D, Torque2D licenses are also $99.

It also appears that they sorted the weird eulas. Single eula rules all engines and it's quite about general stuff, there is not too many tiny details. Seems like it's pretty much same as the 3dgs license, buy once, make games no royalties.