Welcome back.. from the looks of that project, I'm sure you must be quite sleep deprived. It looks beautiful! Best of luck on this next part of your journey and keep promoting the hell out of your project. =)

Looking good! I'm not aware of an RTS/3rd person shooter combo, so It will be interesting to see how this plays!

Great to see you back around here Danny - good luck on the new project!

Welcome back Danny, the new website looks very slick, and I'm looking forward to seeing another of your awesome projects taking shape!

Welcome back Danny. I'm glad to see you continue your work and improving. Seeing small indie teams developing and publishing games is something that gives me hope too.

Do you think premade engine users have advantages like cross platform publishing and not spending time developing and debugging engines ? I mean - do you consider using something like Unity or UDK to speed up development and publish on many platforms ?

I'm interesting with other peoples opinions about this subject, because it concerns me..

Welcome back Danny. I'm glad to see you continue your work and improving. Seeing small indie teams developing and publishing games is something that gives me hope too.

Do you think premade engine users have advantages like cross platform publishing and not spending time developing and debugging engines ? I mean - do you consider using something like Unity or UDK to speed up development and publish on many platforms ?

I'm interesting with other peoples opinions about this subject, because it concerns me..

That's a good question - personally I think it's worth the investment into my own technology. Instead of spending 10 years working on the Unreal engine, and having nothing to show for it - except the bajillion dollar receipt for the engine license. I guess it's sort of like the difference between owning and renting a property - except construction materials are free in our situation :-)

For me personally - I didn't really have options like Unity back when I was starting - and Unreal engine was like $10 million for a site license, so working on my own engine sort of bubbled to the top as the most viable option. We're assuming full source-code access to do anything serious with the tech.

In hindsight, I think it was a great thing, because I have all kinds of knowledge I otherwise wouldn't have if I just used a turn-key game engine. Obviously the scopes and feature sets of turn-key engines are ever-expanding ( as is my own engine ) but if you're going to do any really unique features in a game [ absurd terrain sizes, unit counts, etc.for instance ] it really helps to have 100% knowledge about the engine to implement things like that, instead of combing through somebody else's architecture. I guess when it comes to integration of any new feature, the ease and speed of integration is much faster for me since I know every bit of my tech inside and out.

I should be close to being able to stop worrying about engine technology programming - and spend more time on game programming. This time around for the 3rd time I can already tell how much less time I'm spending on shaders or core engine functionality, compared to previous projects where I'm constantly re-writing, improving, or refactoring old systems in my engine.

The cross-platform thing is probably true though, it would be impossible for my engine to support that level of cross-platform support, like Unity, without a near total re-write [ I'll look into this when I port my engine to Direct3D 10 / Direct3D 11 ].

Short answer - I guess it depends on your situation :-p

- Dan

Thanks for your reply.

I guess I'm in a similar situation with Direct3D 9.0, except I did not publish any game yet, and my engine is much more modest and less advanced than yours. I started porting it to OpenGL as a first step to porting parts of it to platforms as WebGL, Android, Linux, Mac etc.