Mhmmm...,well

1. It`s very affordable

2. Right from the beginning Conitec provided an awesome update activity, critics was taken seriously and suggestions of the customers implemented.

3. I like to be upset from time to time, when things go wrong. When the problem is solved, the way is free go on ;-)).

4. It works, once you understood how.

5. The scripting languages, because they are the best interface between the engine, the maps/worlds and the customer. I really don`t want to become a C++ programmer dealing with all the complexity of a DirectX graphic engine and Windows. I want to focus on my 3D worlds, design and gameplay.

6. Getting older and older, I cannot think about changing to any other game engine, simply because I am used to it.

7. Have a look at "Süpercan", to see what you can do with GSTD.

Uuuups... forgot George Pirveau and the AUM and all other helpful spirits, who make 3DGST a special expierience

I laugh at yout 2nd point. Although it was true 2 years ago(before the dreaded zorro showed up) but not valid anymore.

5th point is the point of using an engine, all engines provide you with an intefarce that does not require you to touch directx

V8.40 - released September 2, 2012

Almost two years since last release... ouch.

And most of the Forecast features are listed with 100%... but they're not released, and nothing is ever added to Forecast.
It's a pitty, because you can really work well with thwe engine. Just the tooling/IDE and import issues are killing it....

some of them mentioned in the beta thread as coming in next update (dll creation, and real-time generated static shadows on terrain). but the date of next update is not mentioned. they were originally said to come with new WED announced at least 2 years ago, but staying on 75% since May 2013.

so another reason beside 3dgs: immutability.

by the way A8.45 is latest version released in Feb.

Oh, thought it was still beta. Anyway, does not really matter much to the situation.

I don't use acknex anymore. I stopped for good a couple years ago when I was prototyping a very fast-paced first-person shoot-em-up game and one of the engine's most basic features (think it was the GENIUS flag) didn't work correctly. Got fed up with it and ended the project right then and there.

Having said that, acknex is not a great engine, but I might've kept using it today if that hadn't happened to me. If you're not allergic to programming, acknex gives you a convenient way to work and is actually a pretty great prototyping tool. Too bad it always lacked Linux and Mac support.

Sidenote: when I was writing Barony's engine, my exposure to acknex meant a number of little things ended up coming from the way it worked. By this point I've forgotten several of them, but a big one was giving all entities a large array of multipurpose variables named "skills".

skills: the thing that Jcl mentioned as it would not be implemented if he made the engine recently (only one pointer instead)

That would've been way more elegant, but man, they're so convenient anyway!

And when it comes to my game I'm not all that concerned with memory footprint or anything anyway. If I need more I'll just increase the size of the array, hahaha!

imo it is very good to have and flexible especially for prototyping, no need for memory handling stuff at all. but it can make me lazy and my work messy, leading to finally clearing them and moving skill parameters inside structs where they should be.

Skills have always been both: convenient and messy