Very nice lighting, very nice textures, amazing details ... This is the look I am aiming for in a future fantasy armor package

To the guy saying that the pricing is right because they worked hard on it ect.. , how about Matt's Sphere plugin for gamestudio ? He isnt selling it for a million dollars , or a couple hundred grand , or even a grand, it's $39.99 , and brings gamestudio pretty close to those million dollar engines. See the difference ? So here's another big [censored] you to the project offset team from me , and my respects to matt.

where do you get these screenshots from?

@why do i die
why do you even talk sometimes? the sphere engine is nothing compared to other engines, does it include any kind of culling no, does it have any systems to reduce quality for slow and old computers? no, do it have its own collision detection? no, you have to have at least comm to use it which is 200, matt didnt make the sound collision entity management, or networking features,or physics or any of that. on top of that, where are his editors that make a good content creation pipeline? wait no he didnt create them did he! whoa what a revelation, they are all dont by conitec, and the content creation pipeline for 3dgs is a little slow, because its indie priced. dont get me wrong matts a great person, but you just cant compare sphere to a whole engine or to especially any next gen engines. which by the way, paul l ming didnt say PO was offering it for a million or a couple hundred k, he said 1k-2k, which is an incedible price for this engine, its about the same price as 1 computer than can actually run any games made with it so if you want to do great work on a free or under $100 price then do it yourself because your not going to be getting hand outs

The shots look great, but I personally like the environment of Crysis much more. Then again, all these new engines kinda look the same with the HDR/Blur/Softshadow look. I'm having a hard time seeing what the major visual difference is between them all...

About engine pricing: One could probably make the argument that in the next 10 years, game engine prices will eventually level out. Because once the engines look very close to real-life, and computers are so fast culling and the such isn't as big of a deal, what's there to seperate the engines? After all, while one might say 3dgs is a year or two behind the Graphical side of things. Eventually it will catch up when all the $500,000 engines become stalled at "real-life" graphics. At this point you'd have the $500,000 dollar real-life looking engine, and the $800 dollar real-life looking engine.

@lostclimate , PO is not 1k-2k , where did you get this from ? It's aroudn $500,000 , I would love them if it was $2000 , even if it was $5000 I would think it was awesome , but $500,000 is a slap on the face. At matt and Sphere , I never said matt made gamestudio , I stated it was a PLUGIN not engine , but Sphere IS pretty close to those engines , give Sphere to the Epic team and see what they'll do with it , you have to open your tiny little brain up , and realise all that those engines have are shaders , normals mapping , specular mapping , and bloom or hdr are the ones used the most , and guess what , SPHERE HAS THEM TOO. Of course , you still need someone to make all those insanely good and high polygon models and levels and all that neat stuff to be able to take advantage of the shaders. But since we still cant crank out quake 2 quality models , well you can imagine how [censored] we are trying to create gears of war type models. But that doesnt mean Sphere isnt on par , it really does bring gamestudio pretty close , and by pretty close I mean , you can make a game and it will be called next gen by anyone , and thats all you really want right. Here's another example , there's another engine , cant think of the name right now , it's like gamestudio , but a lot worst , it cost aroudn the same , they were bringing out a shader version of their engine , and guess what , they were saying it was going to be around $11,000 for the shader version , see what I mean now by saying matt didnt charge $1000 for the plugin. Have you ever seen what top notch plugins can cost ? Third party softwares like Havok physics engine to integrate into your game , it's all very expensive , let's put it in perspective again, hold on , let me paragraph , people here always critizime abouit that.

With sphere , you can at least do Doom 3 quality, with that said, you dont need any more to be considered next gen and not the past , so you have to give the plugin it's respects. Just look at the Wii games , none of them are next gen , and nobody gives a crap , they're good games , and people are more than happy playing them, and developers making money, while your here downplaying a great engine (gamestudio) and a great plugin (sphere) , for engines that cost half a mil to a mil for them and engines you will never in your life be able to license , EVER . If I was conitec I would void your gamestudio license and wish you good luck with with project offset engine and or crysis engine. Void his license conitec , we should get rid of all this ingrates on here.

William wrote:

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Because once the engines look very close to real-life, and computers are so fast culling and the such isn't as big of a deal, what's there to seperate the engines?

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I think there will be still room for price differencies. Look at the current situation:

There is the PO engine, Unreal 3, Crytek, Source and much more. All can create very good looking stuff.
But currently more than 100 projects are based on the Unreal3-technology. And this decision is an expensive one.

There was an article in the magazine "Gamestar" this month. The developers told that they license U3 because of the proven technology, the option to port to consoles and the great documentation. The manual has more than 1000 pages. The support is superb. You can even create games without any programming with U3. There is a visual script designer included. You just connect actions and triggers with each other. Cars, AI, physics - everything works right from the beginning. They have a professional template system.

Besides that they have tools for everything. And everything reacts in real-time. You can move a light and you see shadows, lighting, coloring instantly. You can calculate your normal-maps directly with the U3-tools. You can test particles, physics, AI in real-time.

This work-flow is worth the money. And this plus a stable engine in its third generation makes it so successful.

I hope you see why there is a price difference between engines. And WhyDoIDie can see why Sphere is not an Unreal3 killer.

Nevertheless I am a big fan of sphere. I bought it and use it often to check my textures and models with parallax mapping. Thanks to Matt for this oportunity!

why do i die:
I never said that you said that matt wrote a whole engine, that was my point you cant say "well matt put in that much effort and isnt charging half a mil", because matt simply didnt put in that much effort, there is a lot more to a game engine than visuals, a lot more. Also its not on par with at least doom 3, because you can ask matt himself and he'll tell you, it has almost no optimizations, you cant even run it on an fx card because he made the lower cap at shader 2.0, without fallbacks, i can run doom3 on my ancient geforce fx 5200 well, on the first sphere it gets litterally 3 frames per second on the out door level, also again, he has absolutely no scene management in sphere, its all calculated whether visually or not.

to answer your question about the cost, heres the direct quote from paul_l_mings post:

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Suddenly, they say, "Well, the price is going to be a bit more expensive, but that's 'cause of all the work we've put into it". (fans/supporters guestimate $1k - $2k)

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so that begs the question.... where did you get 500k from?

from their site
" The team has recieved a lot of interests from other companies for licensing the engine. In february 2006 they licensed the OE to Red 5 Studious for an coming MMO, but they are looking into more licensing options with other developers. They are being very selective on whom they license it to though, as it is important for them to believe in the company and the game they are developing. "

That doesnt really sound like an engine that's priced at 1k-2k for anyone to buy , however , I'm not sure where I read the $500,000 , maybe it was an estimate or something , but they dont even mention the engine in their webpage anymore , so it's easy to see it's not something for most people , so I'm sure it's really expensive , or they would be advertising the price , the only people who hide the price is for the really expensive engines.