damn... i knew it

you can do simple decal shadows. not much but at least something.

i do some webdesign on the side and a lot of customers are interested in advertising games. a 3d engine with browser plugin is ideal for that. i think for advertising games it's a big advantage if they are embedded directly in the website of the company.

another thing is 3d visualizations which can also make a lot of sense on websites.

shiva still only offers lua scripting, right? does anybody really like lua? i find it a bit weird compared to most other languages.

please, never ever mention shiva and lua again
To be honest, I think that ShiVa is pretty good in terms of speed, browser and iPhone support. But the coding is just a pain in the ass, they should redesign that whole system in my opinion, as it could be a great engine then. And I think it still doesn´t allow custom shaders...

I believe Unity to be a lightweight engine, it can display stuff nicely but is limited in how much simultaneously (correct me if I'm wrong). I am less tempted to go to a lightweight one, whereas OGRE is AFAIK much more solid and heavier and (for me) provides a higher step-over factor than Unity. 3DGS feels medium, but has the ability to rapidly get things working. OGRE's library requires some C++ project setup first in order to get things running. And that's quite a time consumer. But I have yet to try OGRE or Unity anyway, so who am I to judge.

For prototyping, 3DGS is pretty perfect, and for that reason I wont leave it.

no, i don't think there is much difference in "weight" between unity, ogre and gamestudio. i guess you mean scene management? the basic scene management they use probably is quite similar. some hierarchical data structure (octree, abt,...) with front to back sorting for drawing or something like that.



ogre has the advantage that you can extend it with your own more specialized scene managers if you have the skills.

and gamestudio still has the old quake style bsp scene manager around which may have advantages for indoor scenes but is limiting in the kind of geometry you can use and results in annoying workflow.

Why everybody complains about BSP in A7?
Only pro is still supporting it, and with static meshes you can use concave blocks as well as models and light everything together...

Ok, there most likely are engines with better workflow, but I don't see A7 being stuck with BSP?

Didn't believe it myself at first, but yep it's true:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=296237&#Post296237



To be honest, I don't know of many engines with a truly better work flow. Most engines require work-arounds, double imports/exports of models, expensive additional tools to work optimal and so on.

I think 3dgs, although probably objectively scoring a healthy mid-range score when it comes to its work flow, really isn't that bad.

i didn't say gamestudio is stuck with bsp. by default gamestudio uses an abt now which is similar to the scene management of most other engines.

i just never liked to work with bsp. it's not fun. the geometry limitations and the need for compiling and everything...

Yeah, compiling medium to big levels is a pain with the old BSP system for sure.

BSP is acutally just another scene management. It just sorts things out for rendering. The way it is done in GS with automatic portal generation is easy for the user but generates way too much portals and thus it calculates very very long for bigger levels.

The lighting of blocks in GS is another quite old and weak point. Light-mapping is not always the best way to go. It is perfect for flat surfaces, simple walls and floors. But the more polygons you get the worse it becomes. You will have lots of artefacts and you need high resolution maps.

If you use models with more polygons (and this is the norm with todays hardware), then it is quite useless. Then it is better to use vertex lighting since you have enough vertices in such a model. It still is static lighting, but ist not limited to texture space, so it makes less trouble and uses less memory.

Many commercial engines and some indie engines (like Torque and C4) can support both and render your world with a mixture of lightmaps, vertex lighting and real-time lighting. Because each of them have advantages and disadvantages.

You cannot beat such a mixture of technologies with the old-school block level lighting.