Yes Esenthel is an engine a level above and more professionnal (just see the mmos made with it).
But 3DGS is perfect for documentation, new beginners to 3D , and easy learning script and programming.

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I stick with 3DGS for my Zelda style game.
I'll have to switch only if i succeed making it and wanting ot make an Android mobile version.


sac.stand = &cskel.getSkelAnim("obj/chr/sergeant/idle.anim");
sac.run = &cskel.getSkelAnim("obj/chr/sergeant/walk.anim");
sac.walk = &cskel.getSkelAnim("obj/chr/sergeant/walk.anim");


From what program did you exported your animated character ?
BLender files ? Blender to FBX ?
Can you have any animated character with any skeleton, import it, than just call animations ?

the character is from the game Medieval Total War II and uses its skeleton and some corresponding animations, converted to Milkshape format ms3d. it can be imported to Esenthel, but previously I modified the animations in Fragmotion to be game engine compatible (mocap animations have moving pelvis, in game engines it should stay around origo).
the game model packs can be unpacked by an official tool, and they also released all animations for the modding community some years ago. I use them as placeholders. but their previous game Rome Total War is also moddable, there are a lot of tools for it. I collect many experience from game modding! earlier I used for my tests a vertex animated model converted from Age of Mythology, which is also moddable.

there is a default skeleton in Esenthel, if you apply it for your human character model after importing, you can use the default animations. I did not tested it but there is a tutorial video as I remember showing how to assign vertices to bones and how to set their weighting...

and yes Esenthel requires good C++ programming knowledge, so I stay with 3DGS to finish my developments and make my first real game, beside getting experience in Esenthel too, which has some benefits in some categories.

Well it's not pure C++ vaus their code editor runs on top of Visual C++ studio. And yes their C++ is not always easy.
The day you'll take on another engine, there are interesting little ones specially this promising one that have simple C++ commands to call :
LE3
So yes for now , i stay with very easy script and 3DGS.

Esenthel if i find the features i need not too much complicated i could go for it later for anotehr game why not ?
3DGS in comparaison lacks a lot in some areas like , Esenthel have lot of advanced big features , could it be terrain advanced terrain system and tools, graphics, powerfull engine , navmesh system, great network code etc ...

And there is some Version 3 coming that said to be lot more fast and easy to use ?

yes, its coding is much easier than pure C++, contains a lot of macros, helper functions, and other special things like memory containers for objects, that results in much easier programming. it also has its own coding environment integrated into the editor.
there is one free example game, an outdoor shooter with zombies; and there are some others for a few tens of dollars, which can worth the money to get a basic but working MMORPG or a Minecraft styled or a RTS game for Android...

...earlier I got 20-25 FPS with DX9 compilation, now I checked, the same thing runs on 35-40 FPS with DX10 compilation. it is much better!
I don't know whether DX10 is planned for 3DGS once or not...

downloaded esenthel today ,"i like it" havent gotten into coding yet just played
around in editor and reading help ,its very cool

I don't know anything abouit 3DGS future ???
For example Unity 4 already has DX11 features, and some great other planned ones ... For Esenthel that's cool they have DX10.

For the coding , i really do'nt find it easy at all compared to script.
But well ... perhaps i'll have to give it another try one day ?

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For animated models, can we import in the engine models from Blender ? or FBX ? without exporting on very old formats like MD2 or MD3 ?

What i have seen so far is fbx collada and panda (microsoft x) perhaps sivan could
share what formats there are are to import because I
have not seen a list of them yet and would like to know
also..

I used .x and .ms3d until now, both works perfectly!
info from documentation:

Esenthel Engine supports importing of following mesh formats:

3DS - 3D Studio (mesh, materials, no vertex normals)
ASE - Ascii Scene Export (mesh, materials)
B3D - BlitzMax (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton, animation)
BVH - Biovision Motion Capture (skeleton, animation)
DAE - Collada (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton, animation) - Most Recommended
FBX - Autodesk FilmBox (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton, animations)
MS3D - MilkShape3D (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton, animation)
OBJ - Wavefront OBJ (mesh, materials)
PSK - Unreal Engine Model (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton)
PSA - Unreal Engine Animation (skeleton, animations)
WRL - VRML97 (mesh)
X - DirectX (mesh, materials, skin, skeleton, animations)

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Blender
Exporting model without skeleton and animation from Blender:

The best way is to use native OBJ exporter.

Exporting model with skeleton and animation from Blender:

For Blender >= 2.50 the best way is to use built-in FBX Exporter.

For Blender < 2.50 the best way is to use Gandaldf's B3D Exporter ( exporter1 , exporter2 ).

that's cool for fbx !
For collisions can you use simple shapes or capsule for characters ?
How it is done : by pogram you code the collision , or it is some Visual Gizmo for that purpose ? (a la Unity 3D caspule editor ?)

I'm not sure to make some terrain based game for now ...
And the code is more complicated than simple scripts ... it seems i seen some memory management (something non programmers want to avoid , we're not in the old days ...)