Since we are already this far down the rabbit hole of off-topicness, please don't mind me asking this: Why do you think that?
When creating this post, the biggest real "fuck you" in direction of Gamestudio I could come up with was attaching the actual source used to create the example above. Granted, this is not a real world example, but comparing it with the trickery that both Felix's did before me... Do you really want to tell me that I came up with the hardcore programmer example? Because I, and that may very well be just my opinion, think that it was pretty straight forward. It's written in C++ and uses another API than gamestudio, granted, but so does Unity and it isn't a hardcore programmer engine either. I mean, you don't need to know what happens under the hood in the example: It doesn't matter how the instancing data is created internally, it doesn't matter how the resource loader works and what it does to deduplicate your data. The only real strange thing I can find is the used random number generator, which, honestly, you could've just replace with rand() % 200 and be done with it. Our rng generator just gives you some nice extra functions on top of that (used to generate random floats within a range) and the guarantee that the produced numbers are uniformly distributed. Given that rand() is considered harmful and usually implemented using a cheap LCG, this might not be the worst thing in the world.

So yeah, sorry for the rant, but I'm seriously curious why you think that's more hardcore programmer oriented than Gamestudio. Because for what it's worth, we put a lot of effort into designing the API and the default stuff so that it IS easy to use. Our shader framework may not be on par with Shade-C evo, but load a model with normal maps and/or spec maps and Rayne will automatically generate a shader for you at runtime that supports that. I'll give you the WYSIWYG editor, that is planned, but not there yet. One step at a time, we are just two people...

Besides, who in their right mind creates commercial games with an alpha engine anyways?


Edit: Throw in the following two lines and you got LOD and automatic removal of distant grass with the instancing:


Do that with Gamestudio in less lines of code, I dare you