Yes. I understand this point. But if you seriously learn a software then you always have to read manuals. I remember learning Lightwave or ZBrush. I could never achieve this without tutorials and manuals. A 3d engine even needs much more examples and tutorials.

The best engine documentation that I ever got my eyes on is the documentation of TGB (Torque Game Builder - the 2d engine of Torque). You have so well written tutorials, several small games as examples to teach you the techniques and of course a list of all functions, properties and parameters at the end plus a well working search engine.

The best documentation of a 3d-modelling application is the one from ZBrush. It also supports many examples to guide you into the insides of the software.

I think this is very important. A list of short descriptions is nice and is a good compendium but to teach an engine it needs knowledge about the insides the coherences, interdependencies and more. Little examples are the best way to do so.

I still work with Delphi 5 and often checked the later editions of Delphi. But the documentation got worse with every edition. The reason for the Delphi-breakthrough simply was the geat documentation. Almost every command came with an example in the online help. And the help always is just one key away. If I place the cursor above a command and press F1 then I get the fitting help page and an example.

The examples are often at their own pages since they fit to more than one command / function / structure. So they have links from various pages. That even helps to minimize the amount of examples.

I contacted them about a engine demo and they said that they might be coming out with one in October.

I talked to them concerning import formats and they stated that there will be an API to write your own import plugin. But at the moment they can only write files via plugin directly vom 3ds max. They tried FBX but found a few issues there.

It would be cool to find an engine proposing full Blender plugin.
by full i mean : import diffuse map , specular map, normal map,
glow map , and lightmap for levels also.

But irecognize S2 engine , is already complete working next gen !
with normal, specular , dynamic lights , soft shadows and all the rest,
all reday to use

A7 have some lot of work to reach that state of integration
(shaders, lights, shadows) and workflow.

Seems like the scripting options of the base S2 pack are really limited. Good for newcomers and Doom3-Cloners, but you need to proof me that you can make all kinds of games with it.
graphics and shadow rendering capabilities seem to be awesome, though it looks a bit hard-edged.

@expert: Then you would force anyone to use blender and build the models for the engine's requirements. I prefer a universal game model format like x or fbx, maybe collada (collada can be transformed seamlessly into fbx ad back). and the blender format is in constant motion, like the c4d files... hard work to keep it up to date.

S2 have a terrain editor system now, so we can make terrains inside of it. And perhaps will have a replication system for terrain just like torque. At least they said they can do it.
And shaders are already working.

nevertheless, things like opening txt files shouldn't be limited to higher editions. for me it seems that pulling off anything with the standard edition is rather impossible, the pro license seems the way to go. but it's 500, so you better think twice.

The price is no issue: 100 or 500 $ to realize your dream-project.
I think this is not a problem at the long run.

My problem with this tool-set is still the import-workflow. They have only a 3ds-max pipeline. And if you do not want to spend 500 instead of 100 for the engine then you also dont want to spend 5000 for max instead of 800 for Lightwave (or even less for any other modeller).

They want to provide a SDK very soon so you can write your own importer. But how many customers are able to write their own importers (with animations etc.)?