Open Source vs Affordable Indie 3D Game Engines?

TBBScorpion asks: "Lately I have been investigating 3D game engines. I was mostly paying attention to open source engines like Ogre3d, Irrlicht, Crystal Space 3D, and the like. Then I found out about cheap Indie licenses for commercial game engines like Torque Game Engine ($150), Torque Game Engine Advanced ($295) and the C4 Engine ($200 + free upgrades). I found a list of top commercial and open source game engines at devmaster.net in case anyone is interested (I didn't want to take the time to list all the engines, but there are more good ones that I did not list on this page). Now for my questions. Now, here's my dilemma. Which of the engines are worth investing in? Should I buy an indie license or hold out for open source? Or should I start with an indie engine and switch later if open source catches up?" "Torque Game Engine 1.5 works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux but lacks modern shader support (except for something about a free modernization kit). I mostly do cross-platform software development so I like this feature.

However, there is Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA) which adds shader support, the Atlas terrain paging feature, and a few other nice features, but since is DirectX9 based it is no longer cross-platform. I have also heard rumors about support for the engine to be a little on the lacking side, yet the Torque community seems to be rather large compared to other commercial engines. Are the complaints just from people who don't really know how to program expecting to be able to edit the C++ of the game engine, or are capable people really having trouble? I've heard rumors about stability of TGEA compared to TGE? For those of you who have used TGE or TGEA, would you recommend it over other engines?

The C4 Engine looks nice as well, but seems to be under active development and less mature, but might it potentially be a more modern game engine? Also, it supports Windows XP and Mac OS X, which is better then just Windows.

Here are the features I am hoping for are: a cross-platform engine, if possible; modern shader support; a built-in terrain paging system; and model, material and animation import from Blender 3d.

When it comes to the open source engines like Ogre3D, the main thing that seems to be lacking is the built-in editors, and at least Ogre3D is currently mostly a graphics engine rather then a complete game engine (i.e. physics built-in; does provide wrappers for ODE and other physics engines). My assumption is that is just a matter of time before Ogre3D and other engines catch up with the top Indie commercial engines?

Lastly, I will be using the game engine for not only making games, but for some scientific applications as well. Also, I started using C++ 10 years ago and have been using Python since January 2002, so I'm ready to dive into the engine code."

Comments

Re:Wrong place to ask

[Dogtanian]

The fucktarded shitdot sheeple would naturally say the communist "Open Sores" solution would be the best. Of course they are a bunch of fucktards who should collectively slit their fucking wrists. Hmm.... I'm sure this wasn't what Microsoft wanted when they asked you to run an "aggressive" FUD campaign.

Avoid Torque - at least for now.

[Anonymous Coward]

To give you my background, I'm a TGE, TGEA licensee as well as a licensee of the RTS kit and many of their content packs. I imagine I'm going to get shot for this post, if even half the Torque fans from Gamedev.net visit here also then I'm expecting a -1 Troll moderation within around 30 seconds, but seeing as I can give an honest, first hand, from the trenches opinion of Torque, here goes:

It's probably one of the things I truly regret spending money on the most. Garagegames put a lot of money into marketing and hype but never pull through on their promises. TGEA arrived 2 years late and by the time it arrived had many major features cut from it such as the promised built in terrain editors, OpenGL support and so forth.

The RTS kit was another scam in this respect, it doesn't contain pathfinding, support for RTS AI or anything of the sort by default, Garagegames claim this is because "all games need different pathfinding/AI requirements" however this argument is extremely weak - let's face it, core AI is pretty standard and surely it's better to provide at least some AI to the demographic they sell the engine to on their "why make a mod when you can make a game" premise that provide nothing at all. Also, the RTS kit is about 3 versions out of date with the main Torque Game Engine - Garagegames don't keep it up to date with the main codebase, they simply tell you to do it yourself.

TorqueX is yet another example of Garagegame's cutting of features and delays, it was meant to be ready with 3D support included for XNA GSE's release in their original press release, now however it's still entirely unreleased and anything other than basic 3D has been cut from the initial release.

Do not trust Devmaster.net, it's sponsored by Garagegames and is heavily biased, in it's top 10 list of commercial game engines (http://www.devmaster.net/engines/) Torque is always listed first, even when the site's very own ratings system shows TGE as only have 3.5 stars when the likes of C4 has 4.5 and TV3D SDK 6 has 4!.

Other than that the issues with TGE and TGEA are that the engines have just turned into such messy hacked together swamps of code over the years they're really tough to use. Many features of the engine are also half-assed or extremely dated compared to other offerings on the market, some are even suffering from long running bugs that can even result in fatal crashes - physics and vehicle support for example really need a complete rewrite for anything other than the very simple games that you see in the Garagegames store. The other problem that plagues all GG's products other than TGB is a severe lack of decent documentation - this is really bad when the engine is such a nonsensical mess. The Torque code base is ancient and new features have been hacked in through the years - it's either time to write it off and start from scratch or a MASSIVE refactoring session to clean up and update the code base. The sad fact is, the learning curve for the combination of such a messy engine, non-intuitive scripting system, poor documentation, requirement to fix a lot of things yourself means that you're not far off writing your own engine from scratch over using TGE/TGEA.

So is all of Garagegames stuff bad? No not at all, Torque Game Builder is pretty good if it's 2D your after, that's one product that has a whole lot of polish, good documentation, a good toolset and so forth. Arcane FX is absolutely fantastic too, but this is a 3rd party addon to TGE and is hence unfortunately absolutely wasted on this engine.

I think the problem Garagegames has is bad management and a marketing department that doesn't seem to worry about outright lying to make sales (not that that's a rare thing in marketing of course!). The management problems I'm referring to is the fact they keep announcing new engines or product lines without completing their last projects! Torque Game Builder game along when they were claiming they were too busy to fix the RTS kit. TorqueX came along when not only was the RTS still neglecte