Hi,

A8, hm? Very interesting. I've been working with the Unreal Development Kit lately and the difference in mere rendering power between A7 and UE3 clearly shows the need for A8 - very nice to see that you are still making your product even better than it already is to keep up with other engines.

I, too, have some questions regarding A8.
1) Quadraxas already asked that, and I think it is VERY important: will we - or will we not - get new Editors instead of WED and MED? WED is okay (it could use some additional visibility options, though), but even after using it for quite some time now, I still think that MED is by far the "weakest link" in the 3DGS development chain.
2) Also very important: will we be able to use object orientation, and if yes, will it be possible using lite-C?
3) How about lightning in general? This was one of the "weak spots" of A7. Has it been improved? UDK and the lightning system it is using ("Lightmass") can produce really good-looking static shadows with only ONE light and indirect lightning - if we wanted to have it that way we had to place many light bulbs to "simulate" indirect lightning.
4) Shaders. Applying a working shader to an object wasn't that much of an easy task in A7 - assigning the material wasn't enough, the textures had to be in place too (sometimes with alpha, sometimes without... confusing....), and in the right order to make it work. Plus, without being able to program shaders on your own you couldn't "mix" two or more effects (e.g. BumpMapping/NormalMapping and Phong). Especially bump/normal mapping is a topic of its own, in my opinion users shouldn't have to "choose" to use bump mapping, for every texture there should simply exist a "Bump map: [...]" field because it is such a basic way of shading.

Well, that's all so far, the UDK certainly has some big advantages compared to 3DGS, however, there is one category in which 3DGS simply *rules* over UDK, and this is scripting. UnrealScript is horrible and moreover poorly documented, lite-C is just awesome and easy - so keep that up ^^


Greets,



Alan