In general the engine doesn't affect artists much at all, The main advantage of expensive commercial engines is support, stability and performance. (Stability and performance might be just as good in a cheap engine, but most expensive commercial engines have gone through insane amounts of testing and have been used in successful products allready thus they're fairly safe bets)), there are also big differences when it comes to how easy an engine is to work with (This mostly affects programmers though) but cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad here either.

The engine can have some impact on graphic quality (mainly special effects and procedurally generated animations (water, particle systems, hdr, dynamic light and shadows, etc) but bad art will look bad no matter what and with good art you can make things look good with pretty much any engine.

The time saved by using an engine is primarily in the programming area (If you didn't use an engine you'd have to write alot more code). Its not the special situations you save time on , its the generic groundwork.

Lets take a simple example like a 2 player networked pong game,

With some engines you basically only need to write code to create one paddle for each player, position them appropriatly, assign a box model to them, write a bit of code to make them move when the player presses the buttons, create a ball and 2 walls in the same way, give the ball a velocity towards one side as the game starts and tell the engine that the ball bounces against paddles and walls and then you're set. (you'd have to write code to check if the ball goes past a paddle, increase scores , etc aswell i guess). (Exactly how much you have to do yourself depends on the engine you choose)

Without an engine or libraries you'd have to write code to parse the model file and much more. (simply getting a 3ds model from a file on the harddrive to RAM in a format that is suitable for rendering requires far more code than you'd need for that pong game with a decent engine, and having a model loaded in ram is still a long way from having it drawn on screen or moving around responding to player input). (In general this means that a good engine can save several millions in labour costs for an AAA project)

Basically, let the programmers choose the engine, they are the ones who will be working with it anyway, a cheap or free engine is still a huge help even if you have to do a bit more work yourself. (With expensive engines you'll generally also pay for alot of features that you won't even use)

Expensive engines generally come with more tools, or more fully-complete/tested content pipelines. Writing engines is easy, writing good tools is hard (so this is what you're paying for).

This decision has a huge impact on the workflow of content producers (mostly artists) so they should be involved in the evaluation of the different options before making a choice.

In my eyes the best games (and the games that have the best ROI on a tight budget) are ones that don't concentrate on physics engines and graphics so much as a FUN concept and good, tight gameplay. Analogy: movies that are all about special effects but have no plot never do as well as ones that have a great plot and acting but no effects.

[Edited by - Beverly Mcadoo on September 8, 2010 8:46:21 AM]

Would game creator tools not ease development, instead of engines + programming?
They r becoming more and more versatile, usable.