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*...

While it may be true that Unity is the better overall package, your post still is kinda pointless.

How about listing facts what 3dgs is missing, instead of just bashing?
The other users who switched to different engines were also capable of putting together a list why they changed...

3DGS is not bad. It is just outdated. It`s 20th century, but we live in the 21st. In the end it was the stoneage workflow of 3DGS that made me switch. I hated to even touch it anymore. Meh, again a dozen mouse clicks just to find out that the shader isn`t attached, the model doesn`t show, the texture is wrong. Even starting the game is half a point n click adventure with text output. So let`s fix this and try again, let`s fix that and try again, just to find yourself in the same situation again and again ...

In Unity i have everything in one editor. I apply shaders with one mouse stroke, see the result immediately, hit play and am ingame, have even wysiwyg in the level editor, and and and. Unity is Next Gen. 3DGS simply lacks a generation.

Time is a very important issue for me. I`m a hobbyist. And my lifespan is limited. So it`s not a "being a newb/noob" reason when i want the fastest workflow. I prefer the one click solution wherever possible. Making a game is unbelievable time consuming anyways. And as a hobbyist i am happy about every hour i don`t have to spend with stuff that could be done with one mouse click instead. Hours that easily adds to manyears over the time. And makes the difference between a hobby project that is impossible to finish and a hobby project that gets finished. This counts even more the more advanced games you want to make.

See, not only Joe and Jane Pixel are well advised to use the tool with the faster workflow. And we haven`t even talked about engine features. Here i clearly see Unity in front of 3DGS too. At the latest with the upcoming version 3

@ Paul_L_Ming:
I like your post very much! I started the same way, as an avid gamer (and I'm still an artist looking for the easy way for a lone wolf to get things up and running for potential clients/ideas), with 3DGS.
I see it as a monument, a pioneer of the evolution of game engines.
I stopped using it many years ago, but i still respect it and lurk here from time to time.
I think that an engine can be judged by its forums... its very easy to sense the general energy around the user base and very importantly the gallery and the WIPs... Unity3D's forum and gallery speaks for itself... we can flame all year long, but what we see and play there is a fact.
I was a big SEGA fanboy and when it died as a major console player i felt very bad... but i cant close my eyes to the 360 and the evolution in gaming. I'm saying this to illustrate that fanboyism doesn't help us... and the engines are just tools.

Btw, the workflow we consider bad actually is, what 13 to 17 years old users like the most about gamestudio, as you instantly understand their basics while they feel overwhelmed with those "next gen editors".
And in case you consider me fanboyish, I just don´t like people stating that gamestudio is bad and the worst thing one could work with. It is just that Unity is better in some ways and gamestudio is still a good tool. There is in my opinion no reason not to download Unity and start working with it (what I currently do, btw). And I also don´t get why people think that one could only use one engine and not several ones for different purposes. I love gamestudio for experimenting with shaders, but if I develop an dapp for the iPhone I am using the iPhone SDK and if I want to create an a bit more complex game I use Unity. Everything is great in its own way and I have equally much fun with all of them.

Just wanted to also express that Paul L Ming's post is not only very diplomatic, but quite true as well.

I was going to pop in and ask people why they even bother responding to Why Do I Die's posts anymore, but you handled it quite well.

From the beginning of my desire to get into game development, I wanted to be able to do as much of it myself as possible. I didn't want to re-invent the wheel, of course, but I didn't want my game playing and looking like just any other game. But when someone writes (for example) their own shadows in A7, they aren't re-inventing the wheel. Shadows are done in so many different ways, for so many different purposes.

As an example:
Shadowmapping goes hand-in-hand with good SSS. But if you want to use SSS in Unity, I'm pretty sure you'd have to write your own shadowmapping anyway. And this doesn't exclusively apply to fancy-pants SSS that only the latest computers will run -- such a method could be used for some VERY simple but gorgeous SSS that'll run silky smooth on any computer that can handle shadowmapping.

I know it doesn't suit everyone. But it suits me -- that's the way I like it, and I'd say that's probably how anyone else who knows how to write shaders likes it.

Jibb

Okay, then:
My specs are: Ati Radeon X300 (Shader 2.0), 1Gb RAM, Pentium 4, 3GHz
Any chance to achieve it for my system?

I've never had an ATI card, but I think it wouldn't have any trouble Just to be clear -- there's a difference between fancy front-scattering that'll put a lot of pressure on most systems, and some straight-forward back-scattering that'll look great for obvious things like foliage and light coming through the back of peoples' ears.

The back-scattering side can be done effectively with very little extra effort, while good-looking front-scattering requires a lot more shadow samples to be taken (although scattering on both sides would benefit from the extra samples).

Jibb

Unity rocks, but that is my point of view, considering I am not too good with C++ or Lite-C. I am better with JavaScript, which it runs. (However I am also trying to learn Java)

Hope, nobody minds me asking for some comparing the coding.

In GameStudio you have to think with while-loops and waits, some time ago, I still thought that that is essential to game programming generally, now I see other engines don't need that.
But, how do you manage that, and the order of functions?