So, I decided to make this topic as I always see threads like "look at this, its made in XXX for the YYY, and then look at this A8 game. Don't you see that A8 just sucks?" (Ratchet, this is a thread for you!)

Before I start my rant against various users here, let me get this clear: A8 isn't perfect. It lacks some stuff needed to create an awesome title like Crysis, but(!) A8 is made to create games with different genres. RPGs, Shooter, RTS etc. The Cry Engine on the other hand is a pure Shooter engine. Its streamlined to serve this one and only genre, everything is optimized for this. Creating an RTS will be pure pain as you have to develop the very basic stuff first before you can even think about making the prototype.

Another thing I learned as developer: File some damn bug reports. It may sound obvious, but, as more people complaining about X or say that they want to see feature Y, as more priority gets said feature.
If only one says that he/she wants feature XY, its most likely will never implemented, even if you complain in other threads that the engine lacks those features. This counts for A8 as well as for Unity3D and even operating systems like iOS or Mac OS (there are bugs in iOS from 2.0 which doesn't get fixed because no one complains about it. Telling the press that this sucks doesn't help in any way).

Everything clear now? Fine, lets look at the topic. You want to make a game, probably you want to become famous and rich with the game so you want to make a good game.
The only problem is: A good game needs also good assets. No one will rate you game by its code, but what they can see! You may have the best looking source code (which is also very subjective), but your game looks like crap. Then your game _is_ crap!
Complaining about "oohhhh, everyone looks at the graphics, no one knows that this soooo hard work and we are just indies" doesn't help. You know that you also look at the graphic, you may see also some other aspects from the game that others may don't see, but you are a graphic whore too. Face it.

So, your very good game needs very good assets, this begins with textures and models. But where should they come from? You paid 200 bucks, so they better put some nice texture with the engine, right? Okay, lets assume that your lousy 200 bucks are worth AAA quality textures, you wouldn't use them anyway. You would says "well, they look nice etc. but everyone uses them" and you want to be different. Thats okay, because that is also a factor that sells games.
So, you need to spend another 200 bucks for some nice textures. If you want to be the only one who is allowed to use them (again, you want to be different), then you have to pay a lot. Even good artists need many hours to create something that doesn't look like 10 minutes Photoshop images made by my neighbor. You know that too, you also need time to write good code!
Think about what you would take for exclusive AAA stuff, and then think about what you think you have bought with 200€

This of course also counts for models and shaders. Someone has to spend his/her time for you stuff! I really don't know why you don't realize how much worth time is. If you think time is a god given gift, please read the awesome book Momo (german title, dunno if its also the same in english), to understand how much time is worth.

But now you say "Yes, you know, Unity3D" (and at this point I would normally either slap you in the face or stop reading) "Unity3D gives you this all for free. You know just drag the pre-built shader onto the tree and it will become a totally awesome uber tree" (I'm pretty sure you have mistaken pixie dust with Unity3D).
Yes, Unity3D has some built-in shaders, but have you already looked what Gamestudio delivers for free? Now you will say: "Haha, but Unity3D has better shaders (the one with pixie dust)". No. They don't have, you will also reach the point in Unity3D where you can't click anything together. Where you have to touch the dirty stuff. Where you have to do the stuff you won't do. You need to work to achieve your good game.

Writing shaders in Unity3D is the most fucked up stuff. I hear Slin everyday complaining about the horrible shader pipeline and how good the Gamestudio one is.

Programming with Unity3D also sucks (sorry that I always rant against Unity3D, but it looks like all of you see something like god himself in this piece of crap).
It might be easy to click some stuff together in Unity, but then you will reach the point where it just isn't enough. Where you want to be exclusive.
I said at the very beginning that everyone looks at your graphic and that you have to deliver good graphics. But thats only the half, your gameplay needs also to be good!
Take Gothic 4, it looks really nice, but its gameplay is not extra ordinary. It will sell some units because of its name, but not because it is good. And where is the problem? It lacks of great gameplay content. Just throwing textures and models together isn't enough.

And please don't post any screenshots from AAA titles or hobby projects with great assets and tell me that Gamestudio lacks those.
At first, the AAA titles have a budget. Not only 200€ from the last birthday, but much money. They can pay people for their time. You want AAA assets? Pay for it!
And what about those hobby projects with the nice assets? The may have not paid someone because its a hobby and made with friends, but as you are not a modeler and don't know anyone who can do this (forever alone), you have to pay someone. Thats it.
This has nothing to do with the engine, either you have someone who makes your stuff for free (having talented friends is the way to go), or pay someone who is able to do the stuff. Even Unity3D cooks with water, and once you realize that you can't create a game with a Palm, some Grass textures and a built-in normal mapping shader, you will see that Unity3D doesn't make your live easy at all. It just satisfies your inner graphic whore.

However, you will reach in A8, Unity3D, Cry Engine, Unreal Engine, [insert another engine here], [some more engines], [don't forget this engine], a point where the built-in stuff just isn't enough anymore. Where you have to tweak your game, where you have to streamline your work to let it perform well. The point where you stop clicking around in a nice UI and where you have to work.

JustSid: Your post reads very well and is absolutely true from the point of view of a programmer. Still I can tell you that there is a huge difference for people like me. I am creating a game level each week, importing around 80 models each week, around 100 textures each week. I worked with T3D, Gamestudio, Unity, UDK and C4 and there are huge and I mean very huge differences. In some tools I have to do a lot of steps manually, importing, material-creating, camera scripting and maybe even shader-editing.
In other tools I can copy everything into a project folder and it imports automatically, creates materials automatically (only one for each diffuse texture, so different models share automatically the same materials) and so on.

Then there comes the point where I need flickering lights and a camera movement through the level to create some nice preview for recording a video. This works fine in some tools just with an inbuilt animation editor. In other tools I had to script, to run, to see that it looks bad, to script again and so on. I would not have time any more to work on my assets.

I will not mention any names of engines here, just to not start any flames. But on my end I could save sooo much and I really mean very much time just while using the right tool for that.

Still I understand when somebody says he needs a certain feature or more performance and thus just has to live with worse tools, losing time there just to get a better performing game in the end.

But what I want to tell here is that there are advantages and disadvantages everywhere and the truth is just in the middle of what most people tell you.

Another very simple point of view is to count how many good games users of a certain tool produce per year. There must be a reason why one tool allows people to create games faster and easier than another.

Yes, are absolutely right, I wrote it from the programmers point of view. A8 is a engine for programmers and not for designers, totally agree.
I prefer a nice IDE over a good looking world or model editor, because thats where I spend the most time.

Your post ist btw really interesting because you don't focus on making a whole game but on how your models may look in a game. Unity3D is great to serve this part because it has this very nice Editor.
This is the point of view of an designer and its totally okay, I never intended to tell you that A8 is great for your kind of work or that Unity3D doesn't do the job better. It was a rant about programmers that can't face that a nice editor doesn't create automatically create great assets and games.

Oh, and I have nothing against reasonable feature requests or bug reports! I mentioned at the very beginning that filing bug reports is essential!

About counting the finished good games, we first need to discuss what a good game is. I saw a few Unity3D games on the iPhone and neither of them were good at all. You could almost feel that they were clicked together just to make the big money really quick. Yes, they looked nice, but not more. Just like Gothic 4.
I don't know how that looks on the PC or Mac as I don't play much games there.

I wasn't complaining about this. Maybe I should start right now.

[/sarcasm]

I've never seen or used Unity, but it sounds like it's just another "click-em-together" toolkit. My experience: these packages may come with a lot of nice, fancy features right out of the box, but in the long run you will find that the equipment provided is less than what you need to build a real, decent game. Essentially these tools are like "Battlefield" type games, whose reception essentially plays out like this:


Developer: Look at us! We made this great game where you can drive tanks and command troops and capture flags!


Player: Wow! This game looks so cool!


*plays for a few hours*


Player: Well, I drove tanks and commanded troops and captured flags. Is there anything else I can do?


Developer: Nope!

Yes, quality of games is a difficult point to discuss.

And I can understand different positions there. I made games in the past myself as a student. And I did not get much money per game from the publisher. So I had to make small games quite fast. That way I decided to go the fastest route each time. I programmed in a very good programming language with a powerful library at that time and I made 2d-games only. So I could sometimes finish a game on an extended weekend (Friday to Sunday).

And because of this I think it still works that way, many small lone developers have to make several games per year just to survive, otherwise it is a pure hobby. And it will be difficult to start coding your own tools and libraries for each game. They also have to get to as much platforms as possible to earn something.

I have read that Torque2D attracts a lot of people who really earn money with games, Shiva, Flash and Unity also does out of the reasons I mentioned above.

I am sure you can also earn a lot of money with a really good looking and bigger indie project, but you have to invest a lot of money in front and this will be harder.

I am dreaming myself of making a great looking shooter and I probably will make one. But it is a long time project and might never become very successful. And in this case I would probably rather use UDK even when Unity has a more easy workflow. But my tests show that I can get better looking results even render faster there.

I can read such discussions each week in other forums. T3D and C4 users claim their engine choice is the best just because they have the source code to adapt whatever they like. C4 users often write they already know Torque and C4 code is just better organized. Both suffer from worse tools compared to Unity and UDK. Unity and UDK users love their tools just because of the pure power they have at their hands. They might bounce against some walls but they help each other to solve it or just work around it. In the end it works for most of them.

First of all it is a bad start to start a discussion with "I never used but...". Besides that you will find even more "click-together" features in big engines like CryEngine or UDK. And nevertheless they produce fantastic triple-A games. A click-together-editor approach is nothing bad when combined with a powerful scripting language and enough engine functionality exposed to that language. And if you dont want that, you can only get most freedom with full source code. Then you will be only happy with engines like Torque, C4, Irrlicht or Ogre3d.

By the way: I did not complain about A8 since it exists. I am only writing about my experience with different tools here. And I tried to concentrate on the good sides of them.

yes, from a programmer's perspective open source solutions actually should be preferable.

i don't get whats supposed to be so great about gamestudio from a programmers perspective? lite-c is a proprietary c dialect. there often are compatibility issues if you want to use 3rd party c libraries. debugging is a pain. it's way more efficient to do gameplay code in a modern garbage collected language. for stuff where c/c++ would make sense... with gamestudio you don't have access to a lot of engine internals, so for every small thing/bug fix you could easily add/fix yourself (look into firoball's recent threads) you have to spend weeks of back and forth with jcl. for the most tricky parts of a game engine it also only uses free 3rd party libraries (physx,...).

regarding gamestudio vs. unity... in my opinion in a lot of ways they are more similar than many people think. unity has more manpower and money behind it and so it is more polished but i don't care much about the editors (most of my work gets done in blender anyway) or fancy features. what makes unity more interesting to me is the support for many platforms. windows isn't very interesting anymore as a platform.

edit:
hm... if you look at the most popular indie games of the recent years... most of them seem to use their own custom engines (minecraft, world of goo, penumbra, darwinia,...). why is that so?

minecraft and world of goo both come from
"indyprogrammers", that made many experiemental gameplay demos.

So they have a well funded programmer background anyhow.
Having your own engine lets you have more power over the
design and features. (no workaround looping back and forth)
But I think they are special cases.

Torchlight was done in Ogre for example.

But..that..was...my argument

The text is very well written and now I want to have A8 too, I understood your arguments and they are all very logic. I know many points of your text from Gravvix and can totally agree with them, everybody want to be different but everybody want the one tool with aio and no difference.

Actually they still want to be different but want an efficient way to get there.

What they really want is a short cut, some help to get a bit faster to their goal. This is not a bad approach.

I can tell you from experience that you can do a lot the long way. You will even learn a lot then. But you will probably not get to that initial goal. I started making games on a C64 in Assembler language. I even had to code graphics from a rastered paper into 8 bit values for each block and then typed all those value into the memory to laod them into the graphics chip later. Consider this, I had to look for 8 pixels on that paper and calculate a number from those pixels. This was the beginning. We had no debugging, no script, the program just crashed when we wrote wrong data into the wrong register.

Now the coders want to have code refacturing, syntax highlighting, debugging and instant help. They just want real-time feedback when possible.
Designers just want the same, they want realtime feedback when editing materials and levels in a visual way. This is nothing bad to complain about it is just how it all develops, how it progresses. This is the present and the future will be even better. I dont understand why we should fight against something like that and struggle to find reasons to explain why we dont need it