Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 are now free of charge!

[toneddu2000]

This is one good reason to not use them unless you are sure you can cope with a post-release engine bug tracker. Basically all risks are yours and yours alone.

This is one of the wisest statements I've heard about quake-based engines. You centered the point. I've never seen that way since now. I always thought (stupidly) that, being around since '96, quake engine technology (I think of the networking part, for example) was stable and tested enough to be used smoothly to create commercial games. I never thought that new features (skeletal animation, ODE physics, csqc) could create issues that (probably) could have never been solved. Great post, gb. You opened my eyes! Now it's time to understand if the job worthes the money to use an engine without paying royalties (but Unity 5 has changed this trend too. At least for desktop games) but living with the fear to publish a game with bugs that could remain bugs (because hire a C programmer that solves a game engine bug could be difficult to find and very expensive) or use a commercial engine (with very few or even no fees) and be (relatively) safe.

It's just reasonable to use the stable and well tested, well documented alternative with the huge community.

Well, even inside3d community is a great community (we're probably fewer, but maybe we're better)!

[motorsep]

The problem with DP / FTE that it's been only tested with Quake. And even then it has bugs. However, idTech 4 (or my engine based off Doom 3 BFG) was tested by years of playing Doom 3 / RoE and as polished for that gameplay as it could be. That includes better physics, skeletal anim, etc. With BFG engine, a lot of stuff was broken, but we fixed it. So now it's stable in the scope of Phaeton game. Sure, there might be a few small bugs, but nothing that is a show stopper so far (I keep my fingers crossed). I am certain if we wanted to make some Minecraft clone, we would fail and have bunch of new bugs resurfaced.

I think I am going to stick with my engine for now. UE4 is raw, and is quite complex engine. Blueprint isn't something I want to mess with to make a game. It has to be C++ gameplay framework with exposed events to Blueprint for designers to use. Writing gameplay with Blueprint is nuts. Check this out: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthr ... lay-in-4-7 Insane amount of mess for something that could be done in a few lines of script. But there is no script - either C++ or Blueprint.

I am sticking with Unity for mobile and small games, and once Phaeton is released, I'll see about UE4.

[motorsep]

and if you run into a lot of bugs after release, you might be caught between an angry crowd

Oh, let me tell you - you will, absolutely will, have that angry crowd regardless of the engine you use and number of bugs. This is the thing nowadays - people will bitch about anything and everything. Gaming world nowadays is a trollfest. Sometimes I think I should just trow in the towel and switch to animated films or movies.

[goldenboy]

I've had several different kinds of people shout at me already. But unfixable engine bugs just add to the problem. I'd rather not be responsible for those at least.

[Spiney]

Guess blueprints give new meaning to 'spagetti code'.
Seems there's some third party scriping things in the works for UE4.

C# and F#
https://mono-ue.github.io/

Skookum
http://skookumscript.com/blog/2014/07-2 ... d-unreal4/

There's probably more, believe someone was doing Lua also...

[motorsep]

Bow we need QuakeC for UE4 plugin and DoomScrip for UE4 plugins and I will be sold on it

[jitspoe]

Guess blueprints give new meaning to 'spagetti code'.

Haha, yeah. The amount you can do with it is pretty cool, but it gets out of hand very quickly (especially when it gets to replicating things).