thank you.. at least i have some time to get me a credit at the bank before paying more

I look forward to Unity 3 then I can complete my project, got an email about my bug report stated that the issue will be resolved with the new version, it is worth the money and the time to play around with.

Generally speaking, Unity3d is years ahead, out of question

However I am not yet confortable with its " Components " programming appproach even thouigh it seems to be the future of game programming
I still prefer the traditional "Entity" programming style
For this reason I am interested in Leadwerks
Is anybody using this engine on regular basis ?
Any comments ? bugs ?
For sure it is hard for a one man company to fight against Unity3d army

[just to all the posts that keep saying "dynamic shadowmapping"]
all am hearing is dynamic shadow mapping this and dynamic shadow mapping that. jeez come on, its not a NEED, it adds to a scene but if you cant make a scene look good WITHOUT it then enabling it is just sad, btw, most games now that support dynamic shadowmapping would still look great without it and there are ALOT of game engines that dont do dynamic shadowmapping and still look great:

unreal engine
source engine
the engine behind halo

all i see GS needing is a more professional approach to how it does work on the editors and these "updates" are quite crappy, 3 new script functions in 2 months and they call that an "update", quite pathetic, as far as i see it, graphics only come under 2 groups:

fail - ppl wont glass at your game unless it offers something truly unique otherwise
pass - quality is enough for people to make a glance, aiming above this is just unecessary for a indie because if after that first glance your gameplay didnt pull them in, no amount of shiny effects will make them love the game, theyll love how it looks but not necessarily get attached

you dont need dynamic shadowmapping to get a pass

i think this engine can pull off close to what the source engine can do, sure it may take some time and third party tools but am sure if you give a professional team 3dgs and the same basic tools we have, they can produce with it

i've seen phone games that look better than half of the projects i've seen by 3dgs

i still think all gs needs is better editors, material editors and pixel lighting

for example, my project 'scion', the only thing slowing it down now has NOTHING to do with the engine, we already sat and found the engine limits and new what needed to be done, workaround workarounds and more workarounds which is also what being a designer is about, only thing slowing us down now is probably lack of artists and my own laziness and i'm also quite sure that we'll be one of if not the best looking 'completed' projects to be done with this engine and i hope then GS will get some recognition

its more like:


so really be fair, if your going to show the limitations of the free a7 you really should show the many limitations on unity free.

you can't use c++ with unity free but your other points are wrong.

* you aren't limited to the included shaders
* you can integrate any .NET library

there are .NET libraries for networking, physics, databases, xml,...

this makes most c++ plugins unnecessary anyway and it is easier than c library integration in lite-c since lite-c isn't fully ansi-c compatible. this always causes lots of annoyances with incompatibilities in header files.



...
i have to admit though that i am no fan of physx. it isn't really better than some of the other physics engines (they seemingly aren't even able to do a cylinder collision shape :p) and it mainly gets used by AAA titles because nvidia pays the developers to use it. it is much better than ode though and at least unity doesn't need a driver since they have the source code and disabled this silly requirement.

isnt Extra now free? even if not as yet, wouldnt it be more like:

http://www.3dgamestudio.com/download.php

according to this comparison the free version is quite limited. plugins aren't even possible! but i though the free version would replace extra so i am a bit confused too...

I don't know what "pixel lighting" is meant to mean to you, but sounds to me like you need to either learn shaders, hire a shader programmer, or use Shade-C ^^
Perhaps all attempts that people are going to give away for free are missing something. You'll find that most of the best-looking games use very simple shadow systems -- from the Unity lighting demo's own completely unfiltered and low-resolution point lights to the shadow-mapping in any gorgeous PS3 game (Uncharted 2, anyone?) which is quite sneakily low in range, but the complexity and confined nature of most scenes hide it quite well.

What you miss is that render-to-texture and post-processing effects are required for some very, very simple stuff: bloom, HDR, depth of field, screen-warping effects such as heat-haze and refraction, real-time reflections, and the list goes on. And I've only mentioned the really simple stuff -- stuff that shouldn't be an issue to implement.

I think Unity has a very good balance -- multiplayer and simple shaders would be much preferred over free GS's features. And yes, "simple shaders" is appropriate, because even though you can write your own, almost any advanced shader effect needs render-to-texture. I think Extra would do very well with shaders but no render-to-texture. But if you already have Commercial, or especially Pro, I don't see a reason to move to Unity Free.

Jibb

lol.. oh whoops. per-pixel lighting, my bad.. lol, making me feel noobish and i do use shadeC, boh_havocs WIP shader package is being applied to every surface in scion, he did a great job with this pack in terms of speed

the fact of the matter is that most ppl here wont complete a game even if they get what they want, its just something i've seen, most games here dont progress pass a simple demo...