Hey now, boys, play nice...

I can see what WhydiDie is saying; looking at the last year or so (as far as 3d engines go), is making A7 look *very* long in the tooth, so to speak. A lot of people who are 'getting into game making' are just folks who love the games they buy and have a creative streak in them. They tend to NOT be programmers...but just average, every day Joe and Jane Pixel who play Oblivion, Warhammer Online, or Fallout 3 and thing "That is so-o cool! But, what *I* would have done is have that house kinda falling over, with a big hole in the side where you can look in and see a big crater under the house with water in it and stuff". ... ... and that gets them hunting for 'modding' software, which leads to looking at 3d game engines. They want to feed their artistic desire, but don't want to have to spend a year or more learning how to program just to get a decent looking mud shader into their game vision.

On the flip side, I also see what Lostclimate was on about; those same folks who look into buying a 3d game engine want to do all the cool stuff in their heads...and get frustrated when they can't because it "takes too long", or because they start to realize that in order to get something to look/act a particular way, they have to learn at least *some* programming (even if it is simply a scripting language). The time they have to spend figuring out what "while i<5;i++" really does is time spent not doing the 'cool stuff' (making levels, models, textures, animations, etc.).

So, when engines that can bridge the gap between artistic desire and the technical aspects of game design starts to be affordable to Joe and Jane Pixel, they will naturally gravitate towards them. Right now, A7 has the capability to be f'in awesome...but it's NOT going to happen because Joe and Jane are going to look at the two hours they spent in A7, and the two hours they spent in Unity/Torque3D/ShiVa/dxStudio/etc...and look at what they got done; as it stands, the non-A7 stuff they worked on will likely have a good terrain, hundreds of trees, plants and vegetation, a cool-ass sky with clouds, all populated with houses, towers, carts, vehicles, animated animals like horses, cows, pigs, a flowing river (with physics), sound, background music and who knows what else... ... and their foray into A7 netted them a low-res terrain with an even lower res single-texture, a couple of colored lights and a handful of level blocks with plane textures on them. Why? Because in A7, for Joe and Jane, it was just too confusing about how to get the .x models (some animated, some not) they bought into their A7 level.

I guess the end defining factor is going to be "Initial Ease of Use". I've seen people pop open Torque3D and in the space of a couple hours have something that looks like this:


When a 'newb' can get stuff looking like that in a few hours to a day or so of just farting around in an app...that's a selling point for others. "Hey, he's new too! If he can do it, so can I!"

Anyway, I have to run off to work now. *sigh*...