intellisense is a big lack of missing features.. but you are totally right... it has a great community, tons of docs and lots of features..

but I am not sure if it the right one for me..
I try to get to know A7, XNA, BLADE3D, Darkbasic (.net) and DX Studio..
Every engine has advantages and disadvantages.. and I didnt find the right solution for me...

Good physics, good coding and a browser pluging are things I need...

Same for me but A7 is the most balanced engine of the group

You cant really compare XNA to A7 in fact. If you want to compare A7 to another engine I would choose leadwerks, s2engine or shiva

Xna would be compare to the c# wrapper for ogre per example.

yes, you cant compare A7 and XNA..

but perhaps we can get some other impressions if we talk about it..
I personally dont like Shiva. Leadwerks doest not have good (C#)docs.

Thank you for some very interesting posts.

My main question was really: is A7 a serious game engine ? Personally, I love it. My critisism, bizarrely, is that it is too good. It just makes everything really easy. Surely there must be more pain ? Would an employer take me seriously ? I suppose this has been answered ( .." they would be more interested in your C++ skills ...") and so I shall shut up !

Happy New Year

Drac.

it is taken serious if a serious prototype is made and if you refer to it as a7 the engine, and your not using "3D Game Studio" the whole suite for your work, in fact. Its all about making the prototype impressive so that an employer will still trust in you skills. Although if you looking for a job, say in an actual company, unless you have some c++ skils or modeling skills, you really dont have much of a chance at much more than a qa guy or an intern.

I dunno man, I've seen some pretty shitty code when I worked as a game programmer. Probably some of the most untidy sloppy code I've EVER seen (and that was just mine)...

Seriously though. I agree on the C++ aspect, however, a half decent demo that is visually appeasing will definitely get your foot in the door. The 3d code you write in 3dgs isn't really much different than doing it in your own engine, just different function calls.

No, there is much of a difference. Just compare code written for 3dgs with code written for Irrlicht. Then you get a little hint. But if you compare to code written for Ogre the difference raises and last but not least the very well structured and object oriented code of the C4 engine is much of a difference.

The code looks completely different if you are using classes, templates, virtual objects, interpreted type conversions, singletons or other stuff that you will not find in a 3dgs code.

And there is a difference in C++, C# and Lite-C. The first 2 are supporting classes, inheritance and other modern techniques but you still have to care about pointers, references, memory leaks in C++.

You have to be a good software architect to create good, robust and reliable C++ code. It will be more easy to create good C# code even for a beginner.

And if you really want to create your own appealing demo then you might impress some friends but not a real game dev company. Such companies know about the real problems. Rendering and lighting a cube with a few OpenGL or DirectX commands are not really a problem. But collision-detection, scene-management, path-finding, dynamic shader creation on the fly, efficient shadow mapping, big terrains - these might be some impressive features.

If you come to an established company then they already use a technology. They probably need help to improve their scene-management, their shader library, their AI. They might be interested in converting a title to a game console. That is what you could offer them.

I have to support what ecg_limey wrote...
It didn´t was a big differnce between A7 and irrlicht when I tried it, other than irrlicht having some usefull features missing and also having some bad design (at least that is what I would call irrlichts way to handle shaders and those strange animators).
I think that ecg_limey is mainly talking about rendering things like water, sky, shadows, plants, ...
For which the concepts are always the same one may prefer to use a plugin for some of those things to have it really advanced but there is no big difference it is just a fluent process where you get to know more and more new stuff but you don´t really notice it as the concepts are basicly always the same.

Yes, as I wrote, Irrlicht is only a little difference. It is very intuitive and easy to understand. This changes with other engines.

And as I also mentioned: The real challenge is to code something more than just water, sky and plants. Slin, you already know this for sure. Your challenge is the shader / shadow route and I am sure this is really a knowledge that will help you later to get a job.

And most XNA developers know this as well. They have to code scene-management, physics and so on on their own.