I would be really interested in your (I mean in plural) opinion about what other game engines are worthy to be tried/used beside/instead of 3dgs, and for what type of games/applications they are really practical. Taking into account 3dgs commercial as a maximum price. And must be suitable for one person development (i.e. not needed to be professional neither in graphics nor in programming).
- I tested Unity free - simple, but no shadows, too messy project handling, not good for my purposes;
- atm I'm testing the Ogre based Neoaxis - it offers a lot of example projects, including 2 pathfinding systems, but its workflow is not too smooth at all, so probably I'm uninstalling it soon;
- DXStudio - said to be really slow in fps;
- Torque - the Pacific demo also shows very low fps on my pc, its scripting seems to be not so simple as Lite-C, but anyway it might be not too bad;
- UDK - seems to be fine, free (plus royalties), but atm has too high system requirements for me;
- Esenthel - seems to be fine, but atm has too high system requirements for me;
- CryEngine - seems to be fine, free (plus royalties), but atm has too high system requirements for me;
- HeroEngine - seems to be fine, free (plus royalties), system requirements are achievable.
So until now 3dgs seems to be the best option to keep system requirements at the lowest possible level, achieving an acceptable graphics quality by utilizing some 3rd party tools too, and last but not least it has a simple scripting language. Please share your experiments. Maybe it would require to create another thread?