Any other coders on sumea have experience with the available commercial game engines, Auran Jet, Torque, Quake3?, Unreal?.
And if you have experience with it, how would you rate the engine / package?
Anyone wanting to play around with a comercial engine, without having to pay, sign NDA's or such, should look into The Nebula Device, by Radon Labs in Germany.
It's a full game engine written for a game that these guys made, Project Nomads. The interesting thing about it is that it's totally opensource.
I think the way that it works is that you can use it for whatever, just as long as it's opensource, but they can sell it with their games.
It's a good way to start looking into a game engine.
Auran Jet is mostly good. There are some really well thought out parts. I suggest looking through their docs, I based a bit of my engine on theirs, and I keep finding solutions in their code :)
GarageGames Torque I got an educational licenece for this to use while I was at Qantm, but never did. What I saw of the source wasn't as nice and clean as most of Jet is, but it is a very nice engine and has alot of good features. And there is a HUGE community writing addons and features and fixes.
Unreal is probably the best FPS engine there is. Tim Sweeny is a GOD. I found some old Unreal source and the work that Sweeny has done is amazing. I am yet to look at UT2003, but I'm sure it's only better :)
Hey there,
Earlier this year I was hoping to do some work with a company in the US but haven't heard much from them lately but they were going to use Renderware as their base engine. The guy at this company told me to drop his name to Criterion who then sent me the graphics engine to the PC version of Renderware.
I found it quite useful - there is a choice to use DirectX or OpenGL as the base graphics platform, there are plenty of examples to have a look at and a great amount of tutorial and documentation to read through - there is something like 3 volumes for the user manual.
Sam