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[Schwiggy]

there's also 3DGame studio. Solid tech, used in the deejoban games.

Yeah, the 'Acknex' Engine; I have so many good memories with it from when I was just a young lad first learning game development 

[bart_the_13th]

Yep, Acknex is quite solid engine, complete with Model Editor and World Editor too... Too bad it's lack of multiplatform capability.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Is it meaningful to include IdTech1&2 when IdTech3 (ioquake3) seems to be the most recent? Would anyone developing a FPS game select the first two iterations over the third? Secondly, isn't IdTech4 about to go open-source any time now?

Does anyone use any of them for anything other than porting quake to modern OSes?

people certainly do with the Doom engine. I have to imagine there's a couple people doing something on the quake engine.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Well, tried Game Core but I guess it's dead. I tried making an account on their forums (which didn't work) after which I contacted support, and as of writing (many months after) their support hasn't answered.
Just remove it from the list, it's a terrible engine at the same price of Unity3D.

Last I heard the parent company went out of business. They were probably handling support.

[rivon]

people certainly do with the Doom engine. I have to imagine there's a couple people doing something on the quake engine.

Urban Terror, Smokin' Guns, Tremulous, World of Padman are based on Quake3 engine.
First few Call of Duty games, Medal of Honor AA and PA, SW Jedi Knight series used modded Q3 engine.
Warsow is based on an engine formerly made from Q2 engine.
Nexuiz uses Darkplaces engine which is heavily modified Quake 1. Half-Life used a modified Quake 1 engine too.

[moi]

3DRAD


DXStudio

3D visual game creators

Both are free and well worth a look

[SolarLune]

I remember using 3DRad many, many years ago, as well as fewer years ago. It felt like a MS-DOS 3D game editor or something the first time, and the second time felt REALLY restricting, unless I simply didn't know what in the world I was doing, which was likely.

[moi]

I know some people have some bad experience with it but the latest versions have evolved a lot.
It's true that the creative process is a bit forced, but if you take the time to adapt to it you can do anything you want. I've tried it for a week and it's on my favorite list.
The only problem for me right now is that projected shadows don't animate(but many 3D packages don't even offer projected shadows).
My favorite list so far (for 3d) :
-panda
-unity
-dxStudio / 3Drad
-UDK / blitz3D

[SolarLune]

Wow, 3DRad's above the UDK? What makes it appealing to you? Also, I looked at Panda3D, but the whole 'convert your mesh, even for a sprite sheet, into an .egg file' just seemed really roundabout to me.

EDIT: To convert your file into an egg file, it seems like the developers (I know it's open-source) could have included a simple function that would have just checked to see if an egg file exists or is old, and if not, convert the mesh you specify into an egg file. In release, this function would just load the mesh file.

Also, looking at 3DRad, being single-platform's a bit of a dealbreaker, too. :/

[moi]

UDK barely runs on my computer and it's become a bit too complex to mod if you're not engaged in a huge AA project.
Also the lighting model went to shit again. The lighting model was shit in UE1, a bit improved in UE 1.5 (ut2k3), GOOD in UE2 (UT2k4), back to shitty in UE3 (everything is blinding shiny and nothing projects shadows anymore)

[flavio]

EDIT: To convert your file into an egg file, it seems like the developers (I know it's open-source) could have included a simple function that would have just checked to see if an egg file exists or is old, and if not, convert the mesh you specify into an egg file.

Would you prefer to do the conversion mesh->egg during the game execution, and not offline, really?

In release, this function would just load the mesh file.

In the "release", the egg is (automatically) converted to an optimized format (bam). And the function which loads the models loads egg or bam files depending on the context (i.e. if you are in the runtime or not).

[SolarLune]

Would you prefer to do the conversion mesh->egg during the game execution, and not offline, really?

I'd think so, yeah. It seems like the more that you don't have to worry about the better. Rather than running a tool to convert my mesh file to an .egg file every time I change it and then load up that file into the engine, I could just write a function to load up my mesh file in the engine. I wouldn't mind waiting for the process - I'd know what's going on. It'd only happen the first time, and it's still faster than doing it myself.

I forgot about the bam file, though.

[flavio]

I'd think so, yeah. It seems like the more that you don't have to worry about the better. Rather than running a tool to convert my mesh file to an .egg file every time I change it and then load up that file into the engine, I could just write a function to load up my mesh file in the engine. I wouldn't mind waiting for the process - I'd know what's going on. It'd only happen the first time, and it's still faster than doing it myself.

Unfortunately, the process which converts models to the format of the engine is not so straightforward, often there are many attempts before getting an output file which can be actually used into the game. And typically an artist would like to check how the file is converted and how it will be seen into the game. So, it may be possible to have artists who prefer to have this phase in the pipeline, and not in the engine.

So, there are reasons to place this step in the pipeline, anyway you could want to automatize the step of recreating the egg file when you modify the blend one, so in your build script (for example a SConstruct file) you can define a builder which detects if a blend file is modified, and in that case it invokes the Chicken Exporter and produces automatically the new egg file.

If you want this inside the engine, you could override the method which loads the model, invoking the exporter if needed. And this is exactly what you wrote at the beginning, so my words are only a different point of view about the reasons of where to place this step.

PS We are definitely OT, sorry.

[Mikademus]

I will add most systems mentioned to the list. In particular I think that Cube2, ioquake3 and 3D Game Studio should be included, and Game Core should be removed as dead.

However, 3D Rad (Rad3D?) and DXStudio seems to be visual editors. Since I had to prune the OP to make room for more entries a while ago the sentence "this is about programmatic game engine solutions, and therefore non-programmable systems such as Rad3D will not be considered" was cut. Amusingly enough then Moi suggested 3D Rad

So the question is, should we include and cover them, too? Or should it be in a sister thread? I think we really need to move this to a wiki format soon, because the forum limitation of 20kb posts is a bit too restrictive.

@Yaio: Np, some OT is OK as long as it doesn't start to dominate the thread since it can go to show how a system is to work with.

[moi]

didn't read the whole OP,but people interested in 3d engines should definitely consider these options.

[flavio]

I "vote" for a sister thread: there is a big difference between engines and editors. Separating them will imply that each thread would be cleaner. Besides, you could link at the beginning of the thread the other one, so if a reader is looking for the other thread actually, then she will be redirected.

[OscarRPR]

Hello everyone.

My team and I are considering design videogames for mobiles, especifically Android and iOS, but at this moment we want at first go with Android, but we encounter that in a previous games we spend a lot of time design some systems that cost us time which could be expend in more gameplay features. So, we think that it's best to use a engine for this, but because of our budget we decide to go open source in that area, so Unity is out.

We already check out AndEngine and Rokon, but in some many pages we find different positions from the concept and not from the point of development, so what open source game engine for Android is the best?, based on experience?

Thanks a lot..

[zine92]

I see that jmonkeyengine wasn't mentioned. It looks quite promising with opengl as renderer and uses java for scripting. And yeah it's open source as well.

[moi]

UDK barely runs on my computer and it's become a bit too complex to mod if you're not engaged in a huge AA project.
Also the lighting model went to shit again. The lighting model was shit in UE1, a bit improved in UE 1.5 (ut2k3), GOOD in UE2 (UT2k4), back to shitty in UE3 (everything is blinding shiny and nothing projects shadows anymore)

[UPDATE] I recently  realized my current integrated video device (geForce 7025) was totally shit, it was actually worse than some video cards I used ten years ago (lol). So I bought a cheap entry card and now UDK works flawlessly and the lighting is awesome, probably the best lighting on the market.
So despite the complexity of the modding process, UDK will probably regain first place in my little palmares.

But still I encourage people to take a lok at DX engine, it's amazing , and FREE.
It's like gamemaker but for 3D, only problem is you have to search deep for documentation but it's there.

[SolarLune]

Hey, Moi, you seem to like DX Studio, which has me looking at it. What's one of the big features about it to you? I think that while there's no cross-plaform editor, there is capability to use the Player on Mac, Linux, and Android.