Hi, like some others in this forum, I, too, seek assistance to find a suitable free 3D game engine. But I don't want to develop some shooter game, but a game where the aim is to find or discover special plants on the globe through some quests, and then to try to develop them to agriculturally usable plants through cross-breeding, and to operate some own farm. Like a chili pepper farm, ha ha ha!

Starting in ancient times and through invention and discoveries and research, and by espionage and torture of other farmers, more and more becomes possible on the farm. Trade and other interactions will become possible. Crazy, dangerous, mutated, intelligent plants, too, sometimes, after radioactive treatment.

Since I like graphics, i want to develop beautiful and realistic scenes for the environment, beautiful sunsets, and such.

Which free game engine can do the job for me? Suggestions?

If anyone wants to assist in the development, I welcome you aboard, too.

These are important questions to ask before starting:

1: Have you ever created a 3D model before ?

2: Have you ever animated anything 3D before ?

3: Have you ever created textures before ?

4: Have you ever programmed a game before ?

You will need quite some experience in 3D modeling to create realistic models. You will also need quite a lot of artistic experience to texturize those realistic models. Now you will need some experience to realistically animate those models.

To put everything together, you will know how to program a game, ( regardless if you are using an engine or not ).

The 2 most popular free 3D engines out there would be Unity 3D and Panda 3D .

The most popular free 3D modeling and animating tool out there is Blender. HERE is some more you can try.

Remember that all of these tools will require a HUGE investment of time to learn, and creating a realistic 3D game is not going to be an easy task for 1 person.

How is Tiled useful for the AAA realistic 3d game he wants to make?

Tiled is nothing more than a general tile map editor, which you can perfectly use for a 3D game. As a matter of fact, I used it myself to prototype an idea I had with Unity3D.

Anyway, to get back on topic. Basically any (proper) 3D engine out there can do what you want and some will come with some of the stuff you need/want out of the box, but the fact remains that you will still need to do plenty of stuff yourself.

As a pure beginner, the most obvious choice is the engine that is the most "newbie" friendly, which is likely Unity3D. It has a very active community, a lot of available resources in the form of pre-made scripts and/or models and other specific assets you will need. You can get something working relatively fast, and once you get the hang of it, you can do some pretty complex stuff with it as well.

My advice would be to take baby steps. Make some simulations that might benefit your grander scheme of things, but do some smaller stuff first and learn! :)

Good luck!

Thanks to everyone (without exception) for all these good and stimulating, and newbie-friendly answers. Your answers give me the direction to go.

Apologies for having introduced the idea to join, it was a "By the way" and not the main purpose of this thread. I am really posting here to get the engine selection off the ground. But I have posted already, a week earlier than posting here, inside the recruitment section, too, for another project where I even more need people to join.

I am experienced only in graphics, and I also know, what I want (game-look). I have only beginner experience with Blender, but created 3D scenes since over 20 years with POV-Ray (unfortunately not compatible to this project). And I do cross-breeding with plants, have some gardener's experience.

Attachment: my little POV-Ray-constructed carrier spacecraft: yes, I do 3D, but not in a compatible way yet.

Programming: since 1989, but only Pascal/Delphi. But because I wrote POV-Ray scene code, I should be able to handle C in a not too uneasy way, as the general structure and ways are known to me.

I admit, there will be huge obstacles to me in developing a game, but I really want to go into it, and learn. I have so many good ideas to come, but need to be able to develop games in order to make them coming true (or through?).

I will check out Panda and Unity as engines. I was reading already about Unity, that the free version has no feature to "glue" feet on the ground (and hands on rails of stairs), hmmmm.

The game I want to develop, is made primarily only for me and maybe a small group of other persons (the chili pepper community), and a freeware project.