The v6 / v7 version of the Conitec A6 engine is awesome and has a light and easy scripting language. It's the engine which comes with Gamestudio. Gamestudio itself (the tool suite) is crappy, but the engine is great, fast and inexpensive. It's marketed as having a "Click together" type development deal, but that is absolutely absurd, and if you want to write something hardcore, you can.
I'm developing an indie action platformer which you can see in action here:
With a good art path, 3D programming skills, the right tools and sweat you can do something awesome with it. A game like Banjo Kazooie, Prince of Persia, Psychonauts, Animal Crossing, you name it--- the engine can do absolutely the same thing. Just takes the talent and programming skill. Plus its cheap and there's a strong, helpful community.
Torque's community is small and weird, you can't even ask questions on their forum or read the docs if you haven't got a license, and the engine doesn't do polygon collision nearly as well as the A6 engine.
Open Source engines are good to learn with but not very reliable.
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Don't forget UNITY, the game dev environment complete with 3D graphics and Mono/NET framework.
You can use Javascript with it! It's awesome, and supports iPhone and Wii now.
www.unity3d.com
(dev platform is currently Mac but a windows version will be out mid 2009)
The v6 / v7 version of the Conitec A6 engine is awesome and has a light and easy scripting language. It's the engine which comes with Gamestudio. Gamestudio itself (the tool suite) is crappy, but the engine is great, fast and inexpensive. It's marketed as having a "Click together" type development deal, but that is absolutely absurd, and if you want to write something hardcore, you can.
I'm developing an indie action platformer which you can see in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU9v30UDu2s
With a good art path, 3D programming skills, the right tools and sweat you can do something awesome with it. A game like Banjo Kazooie, Prince of Persia, Psychonauts, Animal Crossing, you name it--- the engine can do absolutely the same thing. Just takes the talent and programming skill. Plus its cheap and there's a strong, helpful community.
Torque's community is small and weird, you can't even ask questions on their forum or read the docs if you haven't got a license, and the engine doesn't do polygon collision nearly as well as the A6 engine.
Open Source engines are good to learn with but not very reliable.