oh dont get me wrong, i'm by no means saying that this engine cant do great, honestly, i think i speak for everyone who has seen my game.. when i say, with the right people, this engine can do GREAT things...

however, my point was, that the change from A7 to A8 didnt bring much VISUALLY to the engine, atleast from a noobs point of view... think about it...



this is very true and one thing that i like, they do tend to add little features when asked for which is great...

but the point of this thread, is 3dgs dying, is because of the following:

lack of alot of new users [comeon now, if you were just about to start game developing and looking at all the engines, what are the chances that you'll start with GS]

lack of DECENT looking projects [alot of this is due to the dev time but i know for a fact that theres alot of games being worked on behind the scenes, mine included]

yeah that point is true, it does not visually changed at all. But how much could it change really? I mean the graphics renderer.

Revamped lighting and shaders, i think thats the main, i mean, i know they added shadows which is good ofcourse but for example i wanted to light a level...

flat shaded surfaces+lights+dynamic shadows alone wont give a great overall look, this is assuming youre using blocks and not models

If you do go the models route, then you get shadows+shaders and you lose lighting[except sun], unless ofcourse you bake, which is another thing that increases dev time.

We paused scion because of this problem, will resume when we have a secure and decent level lighting pipeline

Ofcourse this limit also depends on the game youre undertaking, not all games need alot of local lights, sun light is enough sometimes..

I think when someone hears of an engine update, the first thing that comes to their minds is better visual/immeditate speed increase...

I don't know why so many people use google analytics lately, i think it's hard to spot what's better.
My search terms would be like this:

http://tiny.cc/sn37b

I doubt anyone really searches for "unreal development kit". They usually use "udk" so you get way more requests.

Also for unity 3d, i usually never use unity 3d as term, just unity. The engine itself isn't called "Unity 3D". Just the website (i forgot why it was like this). The engine is just called Unity. (Many people don't know that actually).

There is (or was) another engine called unity3d which had nothing to do with UT (unity technologies).

As for 3dgs, i often use gamestudio and when i first tried to find an engine many years ago, i used gamestudio as term as well, and found 3dgs. So you get more counts there too.

Anyway, i really doubt 3dgs is dying. It has a lot of advantages for newcomers and you still keep hearing about it (and i'm saying this as unity user :P).

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=349759#Post349759
i just copied the link from this other thread.

of course this doesn't directly correlate to the user numbers but it isn't totally uninteresting either.

maybe you are right about the others but "unity" without "3d" is useless. it's just an english word unrelated to game engines and there is no change in the graph even before unity did exist.

Yes unity is "useless" taking it as a result, i forgot to mention that. Obviously it gets so many searches because its a common word.

But that was just my point, that i think those search engine analytics in this case are hard to evaluate.

This is absolutely true but keep in mind that a professional studio has a lot of options. They are more open to different scripting languages and to different technologies compared to a hobby user who is often afraid to learn a new technology or to learn a new programming language / sdk. So they often use the tool that fits best to their needs or they use the tool that supports all the needed platforms that are suggested by the publisher.


This is also true when you have a beginner or a small hobbyist in mind. But even advanced hobbyists or small indies will realize very soon that this actually depends on your project. When you want to make a huge indoor world then you will see that zones and portals are a big advantage. You will test a prototype and you will see that there are differences. Indoors work fine in C4 because of zones and portals, they work fine in Unity because of the Umbra Occlusion Culling and they work even better in UDK because of the great level compiler culling with the help of the good old CSG techniques. I also tested Vision3d from Trinigy and they use manually created portals as well and they even create zones automatically from the given potals.
And if you want to make it pretty you will see that you can combine static lightmaps with dynamic shaders easily in Unity, Vision3d and UDK. You need a lot of workarounds and researches to do the same in C4, Irrlicht or Gamestudio as an example.

But when you want to make a platform game, jump and run, puzzle, match-3 or and adventure on Windows only, then it is a complete different story. So it really depends on your needs and on your project.

What I want to tell: Dont generalize something like that! A team can really perform much better with UDK when they create an FPS shooter with large indoor areas. And they probably will only suceed on iPhone and Android when they switch to Unity (or when they create their own tools for that). But they can also create something great with Gamestudio when they accept the limits of it, though the same counts for everything else like Ogre, Irrlicht, Darkbasic, Neoaxis and co. And as you see from the list of available alternatives: A technology has to be competitive to attract more users than the other ones.

have you tried LightFrog?

Does not work with A8...

[This was more meant to for me, than for darkinferno ^^]

yes, but darkinferno has A7