quote:Original post by Elliott AGP

Politely I must correct you, marketing is still akey advantage held by the quake engine simply because it is still the asskicker. Until next week it will be the top engine in the world that supports both 32 bit texturing and curved surfaces, among other features, that fact alone is enough to hype any project, I would know, trust me.

Ok, Ill trust you. After all, you must know. Since you asked the question here, and dont see a difference between $50k base and $300k base, you must be a marketeer, and thus know marketing.

quote:Original post by Elliott AGP

just to correct you, again, I might add, the base I am reffering to is the market base, and not merely the engine base cost.

"Market base", as in what exactly?

The engine is a set of code which performs a function. The engine will have some form of documentation. The engine will have some form of support. The engine should assume to work, or allow fixes for current bugs when you purchase it.

Varying levels of support would be expected for improved prices. If you have a competent team you should only need a base level of support unless you are trying to do large changes to the engine, or work in an extremely high paced time scale.

If you are going to do large changes to the engine, you may in fact be better off not buying an engine as all engines are using well known industry techniques.

If you are working with a high paced time scale, then you will be doing no engine changes, and should purchase an engine that can be used with no modification and minimal input to make it work.

Otherwise its a bad project fit, and being purchased out of some other desire than to save time on the project. For instance, trying to make a project with inaddequate skills or experience.

quote: If you think I made a mistake, then call me a dumbass, but the 250,000 dollar fee is the only one comparable to quake III in technology and MCA at it''s base cost. I am comparing them as engines with similar features and support, not at their cost.

If you find these methods of comparison useful, more power to you. Other people will most likely not benefit from them as 200k is a pretty big deal for some ''higher support levels''. If an engine is so poorly documented or implemented that your programmers can not understand it with a few emails and the provided docs, then you either need a better engine (in all aspects) or more experienced programmers who can figure things out better.

For 200k, you can hire two extremely experienced programmers to write you an engine in less time than it would take to muck around needing 30 hours of support.

At least, if you know who to hire.

quote:You are right in saying that the technology can be afforded by the user at a majorly reduced cost, however then you lose the support that makes the engine a viable option. If you were to pay fifty grand for the quake III engine you would get the manuals.

This is a ridiculous statement. If you cant buy the engine at a price, you simply cant buy the engine. The manual to the quake engine, without the quake engine, is worth exactly $0.

I dunno Edward NOLF ran great on my Voodoo 5