That walking through foliage is awesome but at a second thought I'd prefer a certain degree of DIY in an engine. So this is the difference between authoring and engine. On the other hand I wouldn't go make a game in pure C++. But I like A7 approach overall except for some flags settings which are cumbersome to match. I'm a beginner both in programming and 3D gaming and I'm currently looking for the right tool to make my own projects. Too bad there are ups and downs for each engine. So it's difficult to pick. But I'd like you to tell me from the speed (performance) point of view -- which one is the fastest from the above mentioned engines?
I've seen that the Unity default example (the one with nature, water and seagulls can't remember the name) looks very rich and it doesn't go below 60 FPS on my PC. Maybe it's because the trees and foliage (very dense) are not objects. Plus Unity has a great thing which A7 hasn't IMO: replacing 3D models with billboards at a distance. What I find unpleasant is the message system: create message, send it to a certain instance then go there and receive it. Haven't played with it much but I think it's a system for... handling events?
As for A7, the endless terrain with 9 views and thousands of visible instances outputting 30 FPS is a performance too. Not Unity's 60 FPS but so many simultaneous instances and views...
There is Torque 3D but in the default FPS example on a completely blank terrain only with the player it output like 60-70 FPS. So disappointing...
Now more to the topic: never tried UDK but I'm very interested in the FPS(frames per second)yield. It would've been perfect if someone could compare _the same_ game on all 3 engines -- same models, billboards, shaders etc. You might say that speed isn't everything. But I'd say that for me it is. And besides that if one engine is easy to work with but it's slow compared to an exactly opposite engine, I'd call they're of the same value.