Long time ago the price was too hight for indies developpers !
Just found today the really affordable price for indie devs.
150$ to publish one commercial game is good (Are you sure to finish and make a really good quality game to sell ??)

Esenthel overview

Just try soem demos :
demos

Features :
video features


I just tried their RPG 2 demo , and it runs incredibly smooth like some 99 FPS, well smooth as hell with deferred lighetning and good buch of effects, shadows , trees on terrain and very far distance view !

But the level was not so full of polygons, the buidlings where some basic, not high polygons with LOD !

But not bad !

I did not try Esenthel but it looks like really impressive
Ratchet claims that it is even fast
So, it comes the question
Why should we pay 1500 usd for Unity while Esenthel,C4,Leadwerks, DXstudio cost 150-200 usd ?
Attention...I am not ironic
I am pretty sure that marketing played a key role but it is hard to assume that it is the only reason of the Unity tremendous success
I sincerly want to know whether Unity actually provide some substantial advantages over the above mentioned engines

Has anybody been using on extensive basis Unity and one or more of the other engines ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback

Esenthel Script looks pretty interesting. From what I read, it seems to be a Lite-C++ (note the ++): http://www.esenthel.com/wiki/index.php?title=Code_Editor

That's lovely... OOP is a feature I'd love to see in 3dgs

When it comes to the Esenthel engine, it is not $150. It is free to try. The Personal Edition is $150, but you can only make one commercial product with it. You'd have to pay again for each one after that. The Company Edition is $750 and, once again, you can only publish one commercial product with that. And the price just goes up from there.

As you can see, with engines like Unity and GameStudio, you pay once and can produce an unlimited amount of commercial products.

Will you really make some gorgous 3D game and sell it (stema or other cannel ...) ??

If you succeed , if your game should be selled 20 Euros for examples, and if they are 200 people buying it, you win already some 4000 Euros no ?
I think you can spare some 150 Euros on that money to buy another license no ?

So where is the problem, for your next game if you reach to finish it, you just buy another license for 150 Euros !
I find the deal very very good

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In fact it uses a simplied version of C++, no headers to declare they are managed by the speacial editor !
After digging, it seems really esay to use on some parts like
animation for example !

And when you load a level, you load the entities and all stuff, no need to load entities by code, so yes it is more
near some 3DGS , Unity or Torque 3D in this way.

But well, indeed with Unity big sucess, they understood their
previous price was unaffordable for indies game makers !

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It was just to point that engines becomes a real affair for some 150$ , like torque 3D now going for 99$ !
And Esenthel offers Iphone 3D games now !

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Like i said , i just pointed it out.
For me 3DGS remains the king of easyness to pickup , you put your models, the script is easy, so you can produce some prototype in no time , before polishing it
It's fun and the community is great ! what else ?

(I hope a lot 3DGS to bring Iphone support, if it keeps some Lite C as easy as now, it will be a big success !
And it will be lot of people making some money with little games)

First of all, it's US Dollars, not Euros (for the price). Secondly, if I was using another engine (one that did not force me to have to fork out more money for each commercial product I make) then I could pocket that extra $150 instead of purchasing a license all over again. True, it's not a large amount, but every dollar counts. Also, please consider that that is the price for the PERSONAL edition. For a company it is $750 for each title. Some companies are quite small (like mine) and so $750 is money I would rather have in my pocket, frankly. And if you purchase the Professional version, then you are to pay $4000 upfront and another $6000 after earning $150,000. If the company's income the previous year was over $150,000 then the price for the pro version is simply $10,000 ... and is only good for one product.



Whereas with some of the other engines you don't have to purchase anything and you can just move on to creating your next game. I don't like having to license the same tools over again, frankly.

Well ,I can not really believe that in your opinion Unity and Eshentel are equivalent engines as far as cost is concerned
Please consider that you can publish up to 10 commercial games before matching Unity price
Unity must supply something more in term of feature to justify such price gap
But what ?
According to my tests , Unity should be much faster than other popular engines but I did not test Esenthel and Ratchet claimed tha it is fast,too
I read somewhere that Esenthel is quite buggy
Did anybody test it on extensive basis ?

@AlbertoT :
Just go on their site and download for example the RPG 2 demo!
It really can put lot of characters at same time !
And like Unity it is some prooven engine with Chinese Mmos using it !
And it has lot of features like Streaming, big terrain management in the editor etc ... just read the featuer page.

For bugs , all Indie engiens have bugs here or here !
Now the question is : are the devs fixing them ?

I don't say it is best than Unity or better price.
But well for an indie Lonewolf ready to produce a title 150$ is not that expensive compared to Unity Pro or UniEngine indeed !

Well just my taste
I like A8 , and i use Esenthel , some people won't like it
and that's like that !

I have seen the C++ code and it's really clear and simple commands ! so why not !
Even more i use the free edition, only the day i would create some solid game to sell, i'll pay the 150$ !
This is a really good deal also. And the trial give you access to all functionnality (only source code is not accessible) !
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Some developper has bring cloth physics already in the engine, he said it was not hard at all !

Cloth Physix

Some of us are in the Company or Professional arena. As such, you would only need to publish TWO (for company) or be instantly over the price of Unity (with the Professional edition).