Engines - What Type of Support Would You Like to See?

[united washcloth express]

The Lowdown

We have a fancy board here and not much covered in it. Over the course of many years, I have devoted what shell of a life I have to playing with multiple engines of various difficulties. Due to this, I have acquired enough experience to compile enough tutorials to get the general enthusiast started. Developing tutorials will take massive amounts of time one could use to do other things, so I would rather find out what the community wants to see and divide my time as such.

Below, you will find some details on each engine, along with a quick evaluation. (Though it will be opinion based.) Above, you will see that there is a fancy looking poll. Read the options listed below and vote for the two engines you would like to see tutorials about, or at least more information on.

Spoiler

Aurora

Summary:

The Aurora Engine was the 3D successor to BioWare's earlier, 2D game engine, called the Infinity Engine.[16] The engine allows for real-time lighting and shadows, as well as surround sound. The first game released using the Aurora Engine was Neverwinter Nights, and included an accompanying "Aurora toolset" for users to create their own content. The sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, features an updated version of BioWare's engine named the Electron engine. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (from Obsidian Entertainment) use an updated version of the Aurora Engine called the Odyssey Engine. Aurora was also used by CD Projekt Red in their game The Witcher, although the rendering engine was written from scratch. Aurora uses a tile based terrain system (Individual tile = 10x10 meters in size) that allows the user to mix and match tilesets as they please to create maps however they wish.

There are three types of tilesets:

Multi-Height Tilesets (includes height transitions, bodies of water, buildings, curtain walls, bridges, docks, impassables, and other set-specific features):

* Rural
* City Exterior

Single-Height Tilesets (includes a variety of passable and impassable tiles suitable to its theme):

* Forest
* Sewers
* Mines and Caverns
* Dungeon
* Crypt

Interior Tilesets (includes a variety of tile subsets based on different room types, some pre-defined mini-rooms, and corridor connectors to link them all together):

* Castle Interior
* City Interior

Types of Games That Can Be Made:

[*]Action RPG's
[*]Puzzle Games
[*]Interactive Stories


Pros:

[*]Relatively easy to use, powerful, stable
[*]The engine has an established community and following
[*]User created content is abundant, easy to create custom content and import
[*]The engine is cheap. You can pick up a copy of Neverwinter Nights Platinum Edition for $10-15 USD

Cons:

[*]Patch 1.69 was the final patch. No other official updates are coming
[*]Players *must* have the same build that the module was made in to play
[*]Updating during development requires one to remove all code and re-input code by hand

Screenshots:

--Coming Soon--

Spoiler

Unreal UDK

Summary:

Unreal® Development Kit is the free version of the award-winning Unreal® Engine 3, the software development framework used to create computer and video games, 3D simulations, TV shows, films and more. UDK ships demo content from Unreal Tournament 3 consisting of four maps; deathmatch, team deathmatch, and vehicle capture the flag gametypes; one robot character; three weapons; and four vehicles. In UT Demo, human opponents, blood and gore have been removed. Levels have been enhanced to showcase recent upgrades to UE3 technology. The UT3 editor is widely used for learning Unreal Engine 3, and now UDK provides all of UT3’s game creation tools in addition to high-level engine features developed since the game’s release. UT Demo is an excellent starting point for those looking to develop their own first-person shooter experience.

Types of Games That Can be Made:

[*]Any. Some examples can be seen here http://developer.nvidia.com/object/udk.html

Pros:

[*]Established Community, Custom content out for download
[*]Versatile engine
[*]Free and 3D

Cons:

[*]The learning curve can be viewed as steep.
[*]If a patch breaks a feature, one may have to wait until the next monthly update for a fix.

Screenshots:

--Coming Soon--

**More Information to be Added**

 

[bacon]

Unreal is honestly pretty tough going in. However, there are some amazing things that you can make overall and its a dream for the most part to developers who know what they are doing.

Aurora is also a pretty nifty engine and like you said before, it has a lot of user made content and is flexible to the user when it comes to those things.


War craft Editor is much like Aurora and has some similarities. They are no where near similar to eachother, but it is much easier to learn the other if you know one of those two. Importing things and whatnot can be a really big ass sometimes and it doesnt like to cooperate. There will many times where you things just dont work in your favor. However, you can make some really cool shit with it. :3

I have never of MUGEN and would love to hear more about that. :D

And the Oblivion and Morrowwind editors.


These are my experiences. I have never actually gone super deep with any of these programs and dabbled.

 

[Daxis]

I'd rather like to know more about torque. it's a very cool thing, actually, and is under constant development by the team. It also seems quite easy to use.

Unreal is sorta of a professional grade thing, so that's one thing i'm aiming, to be able to use it, so I'd like knowledge on that as well. The amount of shit you can do here is inspiring.

Stencyl hasn't come out yet(i think), but it's touting itself really big with consumer backup, so I'm hopeful for it.

I'm rather displeased with MUGEN. In school, a whole bunch of guys crowd around the computer playing a RETARDED AS FUCK mugen game, and say that it is fun. I mean, god damn, the Goku character has 10 times the hp as the golden sonic, which is doing these retarded as shit 360 combo attacks five times in a row and there's barely any damage.
And they ridicule me for playing the "galactica clone", touhou.

All the others, I haven't really heard of in detail or don't really care for.

 

[BlueScope]

While personally, I'd rather see the Ruby Gosu boards coming to life more (I'll work on that sooner or later), the only engine I've had any experience with of the above is MUGEN, which is quite fun and easy to work with. However, that was about 8 years ago, so if it significantly changed, it should prove interesting :D

On a side note, the listed engines seem rather random... I see WC3WE in there, but no other strategy game editor for whatever reason...

 

[Tdata]

^_^ FlatRedBall... I know it isn't really a game engine, but it is a nice GLI. ^_^

 

[bacon]

has anyone actually tried stencyl

 

[Ellie]

I've never even heard of stencyl