I just found another game engine comparison table on Esethel engine site, to help your decisions (3dgs is not included):
http://www.esenthel.com/?id=compare

How so? It looks to me like it is cooling.



Wow. Really? When did this happen (and why does the home page still say Conitec)?



It's part of the plan, actually (and part of my renewed interest in GameStudio). I have the novels (a trilogy), an old school pen and paper RPG (like Dungeons & Dragons) based on the concept, and a potential video game as well. I do hold all the copyright and rights to the story, characters, artwork, universe, etc. I was very careful about this.



I am not sure that I will go the route that you suggest, though I have toyed with this for other game concepts. I want to create the world in a way that is similar to what goes on in the book. Fortunately, the book deals with the ability to travel to other dimensions/realms. So this means that just about any type of environment can be created.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.



My decisions? I am not (at the moment) making any decisions. I've been using 3DGS for far too long. However, I am concerned about the state of the current engine and its future. Thus, this thread.

As far as Esethel, I have that (and a few dozen other engines) already bookmarked.

Welcome Back Dan.

I've been checking this forum for over ~10 years now and i absolutly have to confirm you dan.. the user base never have been smaller. I think If there was a change of the forum server (like ~6 or 7 years ago), there wouldn't be much more than 100-200 users on the new server. That's really sad for an engine where the active and friendly user-base was (at least for me) one of the best "features".

If there is A9 in ~1 year (ofc without a stable / any android port) - is there really (!) anyone here who will BUY a9 professional? Are you REALLY willing to spend around 1000 bucks for an engine which is 1) outdated and 2) without any progress?
The progress of A8 just makes me a little bit sad, especially because of the extremly bad communication of jcl. How often have you heard: "I'll put this on my list"? How often have there be no response at all to certain user requests?
I asked jcl a long time ago for local variables debugging, which was an absolutly must-have feature for me. He more or less promised (privatly) the feature will be released in april 2011 (!) which is now also some time ago .
The completle communication is neither professional nor user-friendly.

I just highly doubt that anyone is really working on the engine anymore. So in my opinion the only possible "life-saver" would be an open-source 3D-Gamestudio engine which is developed further by the best programmers here in the forum. Besides that ~20-30.000 bucks have to be invested to get a good working and looking world editor.
As i do not see this coming for 2 years now, for me the engine is already dead.

Duke 3D - Build Editor. Oh yesss

Doesn´t look that bad to me. Working on PSSM, map compiler and ways to change shader properties from within an editor on a per object base.

If A9 comes with a new WED, I don´t really see a reason why I shouldn´t update, because I really like the engines approach to supply basics and offer things like shaders as some basic templates just like movement scripts and stuff like that. The only thing that isn´t yet that awesome is the way these templates are structured and can be setup. I also don´t really see a reason for an android port, except that it means an OpenGL renderer which would help linux and mac support a lot.
Also, in my opinion while WED and MED are definatly outdated, they are much easier to understand for a beginner than for example the Unity editor and I am really not sure if I hadn´t given up if I had started with Unity instead of gamestudio.
Of course you are right, about this forums activity, which was really great in the past...

The android port does not mean opengl. It means a liteC->java "compiler" (jcl stated this some time ago)

As a matter of fact, they already disclosed that they are working on an OpenGL ES renderer (which would be a perfectly valid OpenGL renderer)... Everything else wouldn't make any sense, no one buys Gamestudio just to write a normal application in Lite-C...

The problem is more than WED and MED being outdated. They do things in very strange/poor ways. Especially MED. A beginner who learns 3D, for example, via MED is really at a disadvantage as he will not be able to use much of that knowledge elsewhere (i.e. when using other 3D applications). If MED were more standardized, then I might agree with you.

Secondly, MED is NOT a good program for a beginner, imo. It makes you jump through all sorts of complex hoops to get simple tasks done. It is overly complex for such a simple program (simple meaning, it doesn't really do a whole lot). Other full-featured 3D apps are easier to understand (imo) and faster to get things done in. So, no, MED is not an ideal app for beginners (again, imo).

WED isn't too bad, but I may be saying that because I know my way around WED. I've been using the damned thing for way too long. However, WED can be one of the most frustrating apps I have used. It's viewports are slow, slow, slow. The display quality is crap. After all these years it is still not drag-n-drop for simple things like adding items, textures, etc. If we were teleported back to the days when Quake was a brand new game, then I would be singing WED's praises. But today? This is barely a Windows app and a poor one at that.

People in the know these days try their best to avoid using either MED or WED. This should not be the case with the tools supplied by and made by the people who make the engine, imo.

just my personal thoughts inspired by this discussion about the 3dgs editors:

for me MED was a good start as a simple 3d modeller, but later found disturbing it because of its missing (nearly basic) functionalities. but after MED it is easy to get familiar with for example Milkshape, Fragmotion, Sculptris, Hexagon, which are cheap or free. moreover, some other engines do not have own modelling tools at all... as an engineer who worked for years with autocad and other really different cad/cam systems, 3dsmax is the more attracting one, but too complex and expensive for a hobby user (I used and liked gmax too for modding), I tried out Maya but found not for my taste, and Blender seems to be made on another planet (but would be really worthy to learn to use). for the first sight WED seemed to be a good and simple tool, easy to make simple levels from blocks, but after a short time I totally eliminated it from my workflow (because I need outer scenes with terrain, vegetation and building models). Terrain creation is also possible by some free/cheap tools (Terragen, L3DT, PnpTerrainCreator, Earthsculptor), the offered features are really basic in MED and WED. GED always crashed, so I gave up to use it at all.

so if I would own 3dgs, I would keep MED as is, with minor updates for catching beginners to offer a complete package (because advanced users can use a lot of other tools due to their taste), and would concentrate on WED to make it more up-to-date and cool looking, and a more integrated tool, suitable both for beginners and professionals - which is the hardest task. I like Lite-C, I would keep it too. but unfortunately the development speed is really not comparable to other engines at the moment...

To my knowledge OpenGL ES + Android is confirmed. Just no date is given...