No direct experience but B.V. has a bad reputation for bugs
Maybe some old B.V. users can provide you with some more information

the new GC RC2 rocks^^ i had found smal bugs and the download for BV members with serialkey is a trail, the developer had upload the wrong setup for GC2, end of this week comes new update. UDP network is nice and the new splittshadowmap technique. the gc rc2 is now user friendly. ok the developer have not realy good docs but when start the final version say mike is all complete with a lot of tutorials. next features screenbased ambient occlusion and maybe pointlight with cubeshadowmap rendering and a lot more. GC go "now" the right way.

Christian_Ger

I am an old BV user
The WYSIWYG editor is great to use, I don't think stability has really been an issue. It's the lack of certain features, tutorials and documentation that's the big hurdle. Basically the engine is relatively new and things needs fleshing out. GC seems in a bit of a 'Catch 22' situation where it really needs a communnity to support it but noone wants to be first to join.

Can you make some examples of missing features ?
Are you speaking of graphics features, maybe ?
As far as the game play is concerned it seem ok, GC supplies more than 700 commands

No tutorials ok, but documentation does not look so bad, considering , as you said , that it is a relatively new engine

About the bugs

I am little surprised of what you said

Many end users complained that you can not even finish a simple casual game in B.V

I remember for example that the fps was progressevly slowing down in a period of time
Entities passing through the walls
Problem to import even the most popular file formats
Crashings any minute of two

Many people left B.V. normally this happen because of serious bugs

As I said however I never used B.V., just repeating what I read
Actually I tried the demo and it crashed very often

If you are right, it would be a shame because the engine sounds really good

Documentation doesn not look so bad until you try to dive into the baby. Then it becomes a disaster. You don't only have to intend the wheel from scratch but also the whole environment ...

I wait up to the point where this guy finishes at least his manual before i touch it again.

I think a lot of the bugs were actually problems with the templates, rather than the underlying engine. They needed tidying up and improving and progress on that was painfully slow. There was a problem with it crashing regularly, in fact this wasn't a problem with the engine but a problem with the copy protection system. Correcting these things was slow, people got impatient and left which is understandable. For me importing objects is one of BV's and GameCore's great strengths, although it naturally depends on your particular pipeline. Entities can pass through walls although there are ways to work around it, I don't think it's any worse than 3DGS. One thing that is worse than 3DGS is that light does penetrate through objects.

What I say missing features I mean features are there but are very basic. For example BV had 'network support' but only in the very literal sense that it could send data from computer to another. You couldn't make a multiplayer game with it because there was no server browser, no chat system, it wasn't accessible and it was basically useless to 99% of users. So you have to take some of it's advertised features with a pinch of salt, if you know what I mean. I'm struggling to think of things GameCore doesn't have, it doesn't have video support or decals which I'd like.

Well ok , documentation is an important stuff but it is just a matter of time
Same for features
unless the engine is lacking some key feature It does not seem to be a good reason to quit with it

Different story for bugs and I am not speaking of minor bugs

As far as I read with B.V you could not finish even a casual game

Maybe some old B.V. and \ or new GC user can share with us his experience

Your best bet on "documentation" for GC is to take the Game Core course. It is actually pretty good and your tutor answers questions. You are given scripts and demos to work with and tear apart. They also give you game content you can use in your own games.

Every Wednesday you got video tutorials for that lesson and course material to work with. You had your own course download page and the forums where you could ask questions about that week's lesson. At the end of the course you ended up with a working game.

Game Core Course <-- I requested that they do a game course like this for A7. Maybe if there is enough interest he will do it. I would love to see a course like this for A7 as this was excellent.

That's no GameCore course. That is a very general game design course. Which uses Beyond Virtual. The tips are this general that you already have your A7 course.

according to their web site they should use GC not BV