HI HeelX,
I am going to disagree to some extent with some of what you have said above. No hard feelings, I hope.
First of all, no one here has said that you cannot create anything with GameStudio nor has anyone said that retail games and professional products cannot be created with GameStudio. But let's look at this statement of yours for a moment:
What almost anyone is missing is the fact, that games in particular require a huge amount of work and for most productions, customized in-house tools are an absolute must-have, not including the tools to create art, audio and everything else you need. Plus talent and effort and blood and sweat and tears - and not fancy soft shadows from outer space.
Yes. Exactly. But the people who have the ability to build customized in-house tools are also capable, if they so chose, to use just about any engine out there from free ones like Ogre to something that costs thousands of dollars. These types can make choices because they can create what is lacking if they need it. But most of the rest of us do not have this choice.
GameStudio is not billed as a game engine for professionals (it was certainly not developed by id
). It is promoted as a studio for people to make games, even if they have little to no skill in the making of games. That is why it comes with WED, MED, and templates for things like making a shooter game, RPG, etc. But it is also an engine that professionals use as they can indeed develop their own DLLs, can extend the engine to some degree, make their editors, etc.
So a person or a company that is looking for an already created engine to use may select GameStudio for a variety of reasons (and you've mentioned at least one of them). But that does not mean that the engine is not dying or being neglected by the developers. Nor does it mean that GameStudio is what it should be. I am an artist. I don't mind using the template code or developing some simple code, but I just want to create stunning environments and move through them (or allow others to move through them). I can certainly get things going in GameStudio, but it is a pain in the butt to use this engine if one is not a programmer. I am forced to use WED to some degree and to deal with its issues. And the engine is very limited when compared to others (and, since I am not a programmer, I don't have the option of adding on to it via a custom DLL, etc).
Talk is cheap and I seriously doubt that most of the people are really constrained in how they are progressing with their game (if there is even something in development) because feature X and Y are missing or platform Z is not supported.
Maybe. Maybe not. However, it is not the missing features that get me. And I have rarely complained about missing features. I don't really need cool new features for most of what I want to do. But I do complain about the terrible tools, the bugs, the lighting errors, the times when WED will not compile a level right during a build or won't compile the level at all, etc. These are not "new features" that I am talking about, but getting the engine to simply work smoothly.
And build times, though faster than previous editions, are still too long in some scenarios. It's just feels like this engine has too many hooks into the past ... as if it is somehow still a version of the Quake engine with a bunch of really cool add-ons. Yeah. I know that this is not the case in any way, shape, or form. But this is the impression I am sometimes left with. Maybe it comes from staring at WED too long.
In my eyes it is more important to ask "what can I do?" than "what can I not do?". And if you really think that there is no way to do what you want to do --- you are always free to change technology.
I agree. However, that is not the topic of this thread.
I am just wondering if I am going to be FORCED to change technology because GameStudio is dying in the eyes of the developers.
). To my mind this sort of was the finishing blow to a somewhat sub-par engine as it badly needed quite an overhaul back then and today even more as the other engines leaped ahead...
